"Look, Heather," he asked, "have you considered all the angles on this?"

"Of course I have."

"No, really, have you?"

"Reg, you're implying something, but I don't know what."

"Heather, you're the only person I can talk to anymore. Everyone else is either gone or they've crossed me off their list."

"That's not true. Barb still talks to - "

"Yes, I know, Barb still talks to me, but only out of duty and, I'm guessing, loyalty to you."

"What are you telling me?"

"I'm telling you that I don't believe in psychics. I'm telling you that I don't think the dead can talk to us in any way. Once you're there, you're there. I doubt Jason's been kidnapped and is being held hostage, but at the same time I can't help but wonder what some other genuine reason for this might be."

"How could Allison have known such intimate - ?"

"The point is, Allison - or Cecilia or whatever her name is - doesn't speak with the dead. There is a link between her and Jason."

I was speechless.

"I'm not saying they had an affair. Or anything like that."

"The daughter."

"What?"

"The daughter. That's who I saw coming in the garage."

"How do you know it's her daughter? Heather?"

It made perfect sense. Heather, you freaking idiot. "Allison has never had a signal in her life. It's her daughter -Jason was using our characters with someone else. Her."

"That's jumping to conclusions."

"Is it?"

"I think it is. Jason loved you. He'd never have . . ."

I jumped up and told Reg I had to go. He said, "Heather, don't go. Not now. You're crazy right now. Oh dear God, stop where you are."

But Reg couldn't change my mind, and I went right out the door and drove, slightly drunk, to Allison's house. And that's where I am now, parked, typing into my laptop, waiting, waiting, waiting for the lights to go on inside, watching those two cars in the carport. I can wait here all night. I can wait here forever.

It's getting so hard to remember who Jason was, that he had a voice, that he had his own way of speaking and of seeing the world. He's like a character in a book, trying to make sense of the world as it played out for him. My own book is just one more tossed onto the heap. How did he speak? How did he smile? I have photos. I have videos of barbecues with him at Barb's, and a few risque tapes of us together, which I had the wit not to throw away. But I'm too frightened to watch because they're the end. After them there's nothing. His smells are in the little bags, decaying.

What am I to do? Jason was an accident. No - Jason was God coming down and tampering with the laws of nature to effect a miracle in my life. People are hung up on miracles, but miracles are called miracles because they pretty much never happen. So then, who put that dorky little giraffe wearing the suspiciously manly sheepskin jacket on the counter at Toys R Us that afternoon? I was his witness. I made him real, and he made me real. I remember being single for so very long - I remember making mental lists of compromises I was willing to make in order to get me to 76.5 years without snapping. If I only go to see two movies a week, one by myself, one with a friend, that'll make two nights of the week pass without quaking. Don't phone my friends in relationships too often or I'll look too desperate. Don't become godmother to too many of my friends' children or else I'll become a maiden-aunt punch line. Don't drink more than three drinks a night ever because I like drinking, and it could easily plaster over all of my cracks.

When I was eleven I broke my arm investigating a new house being built in our family's subdivision. It spent the summer in a cast, like an itching, tormenting worm burning with pink fiberglass strands, and I thought the weeks would never pass - but then they did, and I remember forgetting about that cast not even six hours after having it removed (Oh, the cool air!) And so it was with Jason.

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

A few times my old single friends came over to eat with Jason and me at our dumpy but happy little place, and I could tell that they were planning to politely remove themselves from my life. All those great women who went with me to Mel Gibson movies and two-for-one Caesar night at the Keg - I trashed them out of my life. And I could see the fear in their eyes as they realized that they were, each of them, just one more notch alone in the world. Sometimes my lonely single friends would wait until Jason was out and then they'd come visit me, sitting and ranting for hours about how brilliant they were, and yet the world was screwing them over, and the core of their being was hollowing as a result. I was prideful - I was glad I wasn't lonely. I wanted to insulate myself from lonely people and, to be honest, so many other forms of human suffering.

Heather, you bitch, betraying your friends for some man.

Jason! You're not just some man. You're my only guy, but you're fading on me, like a waning crescent moon going behind Bowen Island around sunset. The next day you may well be there, but I won't be seeing you.

Monday (four days later)

And so here I am at work in court. I'll be quitting this afternoon. I told Larry I'd fill in just this one shift and then I'm gone. God only knows who'll ever read these words. Here's what happened:

I was in the car outside Allison's, nodding off around 8:30 in the morning, when I saw the daughter pull out of the driveway in a red Ford Escort like every other car on earth. In a spasm of efficiency I got my car revved and I trailed her down Mountain Highway, then over the Second Narrows Bridge, where she pulled onto Commissioner Street, which follows the canning factories and docks as they approach downtown: wheat-choked CN trains covered in graffiti, with haloes of pigeons; plastic tubs full of fish offal, scuffed and bloody; forklifts; concrete mixers. Mount Baker was like the Paramount logo in the south toward the U.S., and the gulls and geese were seemingly dancing in the flawless blue sky for my enjoyment. It was a cold, clear October day. I don't think I ever remember feeling quite so alert as I did following Allison's daughter.

The harbor was flat as a cookie sheet, and I had a déjà vu that went on for almost half an hour. Usually a déjà vu, like happiness, vanishes the moment you recognize it, but not during that particular drive. And I didn't feel alone. Someone was in my car with me - a ghost? Who knows? Funny, but whoever it was, it wasn't Jason. It was - oh, hooey. I don't go in for that stuff anymore. Not after what happened.

Okay then, what did happen?

I followed the daughter's car into the small parking lot behind a company that sold marine equipment - a chandlery, to use the correct word - in a 1970s cinder-block structure. The store was in a minor industrial part of town, doomed to be gentrified in a few years; already the artists are starting to invade. Allison's daughter turned off the ignition, got out, stood up, and looked at me from behind her car. I was in the alley, and I turned off my engine and sat there and looked back at her, making eye contact across the cars and asphalt. Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have - forget sex - because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain. Having said that: if I had had a gun - I don't know -maybe I'd have popped her.

So the moment had arrived. She kept staring at me, and then she closed her car door and came over. "She's been lying to you," she said.