Always Read Free Page A

doubted that’s what he meant. I shook my head.
    He drank off his kamikaze, sighed with pleasure while he refilled his glass from the cocktail shaker, and nodded over at the debating couple. “Did you ever argue philosophy with a girl in a bar?”
    “There are easier ways.”
    He nodded. “Buying her a drink always worked for me. So have you tried any interesting approaches lately?”
    I looked at him.
    “You could at least reassure me that since, ah, well . . .” He hated to mention Julia’s death. “I just don’t think it’s natural to be so—Look, I know how you are, what you’re like. You shouldn’t deprive yourself . . .”
    “I haven’t.”
    He sat back and looked expectant.
    “Her name was Reece.”
    His expectant look didn’t waver. Ever since I had let him help with the cabin in North Carolina last year he seemed to believe he deserved a window into my life. I had not yet worked out how to shut him out, or whether I wanted to.
    “When I went back to the cabin last month Tammy had a party. She introduced me to Reece. We had a conversation that ended up in bed. She’s a very pleasant woman. It was a very pleasant evening. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”
    I had needed the animal warmth of the sex, had welcomed the familiar building heat of skin on skin, the harsh breath, the shudder that starts in your bones. The terrible urge afterwards to weep until I howled had been new.
    “That Tammy. Isn’t she something?” It had been three months since she’d returned his ring, but his voice still throbbed with pride.
    “She is.” She was a piece of work. He was better off without her.
    SOMEONE HAD turned on the fire in the corner of my room. The dime was undisturbed. I turned off the fire, put the dime in my pocket, and opened the window.
    I read the faxes. Details from Laurence about how my Seattle real estate revenues had fallen against local benchmarks, the addresses of my local real estate manager and my cross-shipping warehouse, and a list of leaseholders of that property in the last eighteen months—far too many. Bette’s fax was a detailed, itemized list of OSHA and EPA complaints leveled by person or persons unknown against either me, as the property owner, or various lessees, along with pages of definitions of various regulations, and the names of relevant people at both regulatory offices to deal with the complaints.
    I turned to my laptop. The fan hummed and the hard drive chuckled as it ran its anonymizer software and automatically cleaned itself of anything but the most basic programs: no documents, no cookies, no automatic updates downloaded from the Web, no e-mails, no address book, nothing. Just an operating system unencumbered by experience or past history, lean and sure, memory constantly scoured and reset for instant, optimum efficiency. Stupid, to be jealous of a computer.
    I set every firewall I could, then hunted for and matched the hotel network. I logged in to my e-mail account. Nothing.
    I logged out, wiped all the cookies again, just in case, and checked my antivirus software. All my personal data was safe on the flash drive on my key ring.
    It was late, according to my body clock. Nearly four in the morning.
    I tapped the faxes into a neat pile and put them next to the phone on the cherry-veneered desk by the window. I’d study them carefully in the morning. On top of the pile I put my maps and two books about Seattle. Tomorrow I’d start learning this city the way I liked best, by moving through it.
    I undressed and carefully laid my clothes over the back of the desk chair, easily to hand in case of emergency.
    I stood naked by the open window. The water was black. Kuroshio, the Black Current, the vast ocean stream that poured past Japan and arced north, keeping the inlets of the Pacific Northwest from freezing. I could lower myself into the lightless water and slide beneath the surface, leave it all behind. Give it all away and never look back. I wish my father had