“I’ll have a talk with him,” I say. There’s not going to be a romantic evening ahead. I’ve resigned myself to that.

“Talk? You’re gonna talk to him? I don’t want you to talk to him.”

“I thought you did.”

“I want him out of here, that’s what I want. He packs his bags and goes. That’s final. Tell him that.”

“I’m not gonna tell him that,” I say. “The boy pays his rent – ”

“You mean his daddy does.”

“Sure. Whoever. I’ll have a talk with him and tell him to tone it down. No parties, no loud music, nobody coming and going.”

“Roland, that girl could have been raped. I mean, she was really disoriented, like she’d been drugged or something. We can’t do nothing.”

The drug reference gets me thinking, but not about Rohypnol. I remember the sleeping pill prescription on Charlotte’s nightstand. I wish she’d get rid of them, but it’s a sensitive topic. Last night I was out past three trying to catch up with known associates of Octavio Morales. By the time I got home, the driveway was empty apart from Tommy’s Audi coupe, and Charlotte was fast asleep. Could he really have thrown a party in the backyard without her knowing until the next morning? Even a couple of friends swilling beer in the moonlight?

“Those pills you’ve been taking – ”

“I don’t want to talk about that again.” She jumps down from the counter, starts walking in her bouncy, equine way. Hair streaming in tendrils. Leaving me behind in disgust.

“Maybe we need to,” I say, going after her. “Because if there really was a party” – she turns, shocked at my doubt – “and you slept through it, then I’m wondering if the pills are such a good idea.”

“Why shouldn’t I sleep?” She jabs her finger at my chest. “What would I have to be awake for in the first place? You weren’t here. You never are. We’re barely even a part of each other’s lives anymore. And I ask you to do one little thing, just one thing, and you blow up on me like I’m some kind of drug addict.”

“That’s not what I said, baby.”

“You think there’s something wrong with me?” she says. “That I’m not right in the head?”

I start to reply, but we can’t go there. We really can’t. Not with our history. Not in September.

She’s breathing heavily, nostrils flared, waiting for me to punch back, but when I don’t she decides to keep going. “Don’t you think you’re missing the point? That girl this morning, she could have been a victim of sexual assault. Here. On our property. And all you care about is lecturing me about my pills? Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why I need pills to sleep at night? I bet you haven’t, Roland, because there are some places you just don’t want to go – you’d have to admit some things to yourself that wouldn’t be too flattering.”

She’s right.

“What was her name, this girl?” I ask.

“I don’t remember… I don’t think she said.”

“Did you take her to the hospital, Charlotte? Did you report the incident? Get a rape kit done? Anything?”

“Why are you being like this?”

“Why am I being like this? Baby, listen to yourself. You think there are things I don’t want to admit to myself? Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

We’re not yelling at each other. Not quite. But it’s a hissing little knife fight of a conversation, no dodging or parrying, just attack, attack, attack. The kind of fight that makes her sick of the sight of me. The kind that leaves me baffled, wondering how we ended up like this. She’s talking, saying something nasty, and I start watching the way her hands move, the way her eyes widen and narrow, the fine lines that bracket her mouth.

In a movie, I would take her in my arms, press my lips to hers, and after struggling a second she’d give in, flinging her limbs around me, running her fingers through my hair. And maybe I’d carry her upstairs and throw her onto the bed, and she’d pull at my tie and my shirt buttons like the whole argument was nothing but foreplay.

But that’s not how it happens in the March household. She goes upstairs all right, but nobody carries her. I want to hit rewind, do the evening over, say all the right things. I want things to be easy between us again, open and natural, the way I remember us being. But I don’t know how to get there, so I end up on the living room couch, basking in the light of the flat-screen television she’s tastefully concealed in an antiqued armoire. Flipping channels, defiant, settling on the station most likely to irritate if she hears the sound through the ceiling.

Cable news. Charlotte watches Fox. I flip over to CNN.

Tommy needs dealing with, I know that. This is just the latest in a string of stunts. He seems to gravitate toward offenses I’ll take lightly but Charlotte won’t, though I doubt there’s any calculation behind it. Just instinct.

But this is September so it’s not about him anyway. It was that girl, whatever her name was. One of Charlotte’s triggers. About the right age, too. Her protective instincts must have kicked in, and without any outlet she’d just stewed all day in her rage.

On the television screen, after a look at what the Gulf Coast is doing to gear up for hurricane season, there’s a piece about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. Already there’s an underlying anxiety, a need to play up the never forget angle, but unlike the Holocaust, which gets similar treatment even though its absurd to think the deniers will ever get the upper hand, here the shrill solemnity seems almost necessary. As if we just might forget, or at least might stop talking about the tragedy for fear of being accused of using or politicizing it. Still, I don’t want to watch. My finger trails to the channel selector.

But then a new segment begins, and a familiar face looks back at me.

She’s cut her white hair short, and the camera flashes accentuate the pruning around her lips, but otherwise Lieutenant Wanda Mosser is unchanged since the days I worked Missing Persons under her tutelage. It was a brief stint, not my kind of thing, but I always respected the lady. She was straight out of the Ann Richards school of toughness, rising through the ranks at a time when, to hold her own, a woman had to be able to convince everyone she was the best man in the room.

“We’re taking the case very seriously,” she’s saying to a press conference audience, obviously prerecorded. “We are following a number of leads at this time, and we encourage members of the public with any information that might help to please get in touch.”

Boilerplate stuff, but Wanda delivers the lines with conviction. Curious, I watch a couple of former prosecutors-turned-commentators long enough to figure out why my old boss is on the tube. A teenage girl named Hannah Mayhew disappeared in northwest Houston. She left classes midday yesterday at Klein High and no one has seen her since. Early this morning her abandoned car was discovered in the Willow-brook Mall parking lot, and now a major search is under way.

But why is this national news? The girl’s only been gone a day and a half. Last week’s big headline, the vanishing financial advisor Chad Macneil, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who’d gone out on his own after the Enron debacle, had consumed the local outlets without getting even a hint of national traction. The man absconded to Cancun and points southward, supposedly with a suitcase full of his clients’ money. Macneil, one of those guys who sits on everybody’s board, has a finger in everybody’s pie, put a dent in some prominent bank accounts, but outside the Loop, nobody cared.

Now a missing Houston teen is big news? Kids run away all the time in this town. Finding the car might put a sinister spin on things, but as far as I can tell from the commentary, no one saw her being abducted or anything.

Then they flash a headshot of Hannah Mayhew on the screen. Everything becomes clear.

She’s a beauty, haloed in golden hair with a dimpled smile that’s gotten plenty of use. Her eyes are that crystalline ice-blue that catches light like a prism. The picture looks professional, the background tastefully blurred, like it came straight out of a modeling portfolio. Which is no surprise. She has the kind of face that gets photographed a lot.