Seconds crawled by before she seemed aware that he had spoken to her. She looked down at the duffel bag by her feet as though it had appeared there by magic.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded.

Clearly, she was not all right. He detected the signs of shock in her eyes, which had gone to soft focus, staring inward and not liking what she saw there. He hunkered down before her and gently turned her face to his.

“Would you like me to call Henrietta Ramsharan?”

“I don’t need a shrink.” Her words were slow to come out.

“But Henrietta is also an M.D., you know. She could give you something to help you sleep.”

“I don’t need her.”

She turned away from him to say that she didn’t need him, either. But when he took hold of her arm and guided her body up to a standing position, she allowed it. He carried her duffel to the back room and opened the door for her. Every stick of cherrywood and oaken furniture and even the patchwork quilt and the heavy velvet drapes could be dated to the early 1800s. The bedding of the antique four-poster was turned down, awaiting this child of the late twentieth century.

She looked so tired and worn. Without her energy and easy confidence, she seemed to have lost some of her size, and he worried over this.

Well, perhaps with rest, she would grow.

On the Upper East Side, a priest was turning in his bed, periodically rising to lean on one elbow and stare at the phone by his bed, wondering where she was and how she was. Finally, he tired of willing the telephone to ring, and Father Brenner burrowed deep into his blankets. Then came the misstep at the border of sleep, the foot kicking out into air, prelude to the long dark free fall into dreams.

In the first gray light of an indecent hour, the telephone did ring, awakening him. He knew it was her. It had to be. No one else would do this to an elderly priest. His first feeling was relief, and then he prepared himself to be disgruntled and short with her. Eyes stuck fast with sleep glue, he reached out one blind hand to grasp the receiver and hold it to his pillowed head.

“All right, what is it now?”

The only response was a stutter of breath brushing up against his ear, soft as moth wings. In the strange twilight state between waking and sleeping, only half shaken from dreams, he truly believed he detected the sound of rolling tears.

Now a small voice whispered that ancient complaint of the lost child, “I want to go home.”

It was Henrietta Ramsharan’s day off from the psychiatric clinic. Today the doctor wore a pink sweatshirt, faded jeans and bare feet. Waves of dark hair, salted with white strands, hung down her back as she sat across the kitchen table from her landlord and friend. Charles Butler was not wearing a tie with his suit this morning, and she recognized this as his idea of casual dress.

Henrietta poured herself another cup of coffee and wondered why she had ever bothered to decorate her living room. All the important conversations of life took place in kitchens. “You should have called me right away.”

“Mallory told me she didn’t want a doctor-she didn’t want anybody. And it was very late.” Charles had the sad, distracted look of loss, as though his own house had burned and not Mallory’s.

“Charles, we’re friends, aren’t we? The next time you have a problem, call me. And I don’t care how late it is. Where is Mallory now?”

“I made her coffee this morning. She’s gone now,” he said, as though Mallory had been vaporized. “She acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But I know how important that house was to her, especially after her father died. How much can she internalize before she breaks apart? She’s taken entirely too many blows to the heart.”

Henrietta wondered if it might not be Charles who had been taking all the blows lately. Mallory would probably be just fine. Charles sometimes forgot that Mallory didn’t have a heart, and perhaps it was that which made her more resilient than the rest of them.

“Henrietta, do you think she might become more reckless now, take more chances? She really should be relieved of duty for a while.”

“Charles, I wouldn’t even suggest it to her. She’d only take it as a criticism, and you know she never takes that well.”

Henrietta leaned back in her chair and regarded his gentle face. He stared down at his plate of untouched scrambled eggs while his coffee cooled in the cup. Charles was a classic study in misery, a man in love. She had seen his counterpart in her own reflection.

“More coffee, Charles? No?” Oh, and did I ever mention that I love you?

Because he had been so straightforward, so forthcoming, she had learned a great deal about this man in the first moments of meeting him a little more than a year ago. He had left the safe, elegant aerie of an uptown high-rise to live among buildings more to human scale in SoHo. He was a warm man who genuinely liked people.

“Here,” she said, pulling a slice of bread from the toaster on the table between them. “You have to eat something.” And I’ll love you till I die.

When she had met Mallory for the first time, Henrietta understood him better. Charles loved Mallory, and Mallory loved no one. Henrietta held out no hope for any of them.

Oh, Christ! It’s in bed with me! Andrew Bliss sat bolt upright, eyes wide and frightened. As he fought with his quilts, his panicked heart pounded on the inside wall of his chest. The brown rat slithered out from under the bedding and scurried across the roof.

Andrew fell back on his pillow, exhausted and sweating, until his breathing was normal again. His hand fluttered over his head to chase the bugs out of his hair.

Perhaps the rat had taken him for dead, and thus, fair leavings. Well, was he not? He hadn’t bathed or brushed his teeth in nearly a week. Would road kill smell as sweet?

Oh, sweeter, surely.

And while he was in the revulsion mode, he had one particularly vile act to perform, and he might as well get it over with. He walked to the most distant corner of the roof, squatted down and dumped his bowels with the shame of a fanatically housebroken dog, unable to hold back anymore. This shame was the cost of the loaves of bread which dropped from the sky.

And now, of all the hours of the day, now the damn traffic-watch helicopter flew overhead. As it hovered above the roof, the wind of the whirling blades sent every loose thing flying, and stirred up funnel clouds of dust. The distressed canopy of Armani raincoats swung back and forth on its armature of ropes and wildly waved its sleeves.

Andrew pulled his robe closed and stood up as the woman in the helicopter addressed him from a bullhorn.

“How are you this morning, Mr. Bliss?”

Andrew was moving slowly as he crossed the roof against the stiff wind of the helicopter blades. He picked up his own bullhorn and turned it skyward. The woman had put away her loudspeaker to shoot him with a video camera, to take his portrait with matted hair and a scraggle of beard. He made the appropriate obscene hand gesture, and then released a golden arch of piss.

She lowered the camera.

“That blue jumpsuit is more pathetic than the last one, my love!” yelled Andrew, sinking down to a tired cross-legged sit. “Were you raised in a discount store? Do you want God to strike your helicopter down? Get a long-line girdle from Intimate Apparel on the fourth floor! And now, would you like to discuss that brassy, bimbo-blond hair while there’s still time to repent?”

Apparently not, for the helicopter was veering off. The bullhorn fell from his hand and rolled off to one side as his head sank to his chest. His chin lifted slightly as he tracked a quirky movement across the roof out of the corner of one eye.