“You get one chance, and this is it. Do you understand? Stop what you are doing. Destroy the videos.”

I tried to dig my fingernails in, but he only squeezed harder. I felt the tips of his thumb and his fingers almost meeting at the nape of my neck. I felt his palm, dry as sandpaper, against the concavity of my throat. He eased off again.

“This is the end of the message.”

The pressure resumed, and I felt myself drifting. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing, and everything turned black.

I woke up in the dark, the side of my face mashed against a pillow. I rolled onto my back, reached for my throat, and stared up at the ceiling. For the longest time, the only messages that got through to my congealed brain were those telling me how many parts of my body were in pain. My hip and my side just below my armpit. My wrists and my ankle and the back of my head. I reached back and touched it, felt the scar from another time, another mishap. Everything in my throat felt improperly arranged for swallowing, so that hurt, too.

Eventually, other stuff started to seep in. I was on a bed. I pushed up against the headboard until I was sitting. I squeezed my eyes shut and held still, both hands cradling my head. In time and with great effort, I remembered that I was in a hotel room and had been attacked. What I couldn’t remember was climbing onto the bed. I didn’t like having whole swaths of memory deleted from my consciousness.

I moved to the side and dropped my legs over. The floor seemed like a long way away, so I sat with my legs dangling, thinking about standing up. A glass of water sat on the nightstand. Everything else that had been on either nightstand was scattered on the floor, knocked there during the fracas. But there sat a glass of water, and why was my bed made? I vividly remembered dragging the linens onto the floor.

I tried to stand, but the room slanted and slid across the surface of the earth, so I went down on my hands and knees and crawled into the bathroom. After a short rest leaning against the bathtub, I stood up and checked the mirror. Lint from the carpet had collected on my face in streams made damp by my tears. My eyes were bloodshot. My pale face made the pools of bright red around my throat burn that much hotter. I leaned in to take a closer look at the violated area. The splotches were red fingerprints in the configuration of his hand on my throat. Remembering the pressure and what it had done to my body almost made me vomit.

The water when I turned it on was cold. I leaned over the sink and started with a few slow splashes to the face that would have made me shiver if I wasn’t already racked with violent spasms. As the water turned warm, I unwrapped a bar of soap and used it to wash, scrubbing every inch of my face with the pads of my fingers, trying to massage the pain out. I wobbled to the shower and started it running. The double bolt on the door did not seem formidable enough, so I pulled the dresser across the carpet to block myself in. It was so heavy it took me almost twenty minutes. By then, the whole room was humid from the shower. I went to the windows and checked those locks, then back to the bathroom, where I peeled off the little black dress, the same one I’d worn to visit the reverend, and disappeared into the steam. A long time later, I was on the floor of the tub, legs pulled up and gathered in by arms that couldn’t hold them tight enough, rocking back and forth and trying to stop shaking.

HARVEY STOOD NEXT TO ME, LAYING THE crime-scene photos of Robin Sevitch on his desk one at a time, pausing after each one for emphasis. It was his subtle way of saying “I told you so.”

They were hard to look at. In the wider angles, you could see the position of the body, the way it slumped against the wall of what the police described as a concrete drainage canal. Her left hand was caught behind her back, but the other lay on the concrete at her side, palm up, with fingers curled in. She looked as if she were beckoning for help. Or showing her nails-torn, split, and painted with the brownish tint of her own dried blood.

When he got to the close-ups of her face, I reached up and touched the bruises on my throat. Her nose was broken, and she had a gash that looked as if she’d bitten through her lower lip. One eye was pinched shut by the cauliflowered mass around it, but the other gazed out from behind dark and bruised tissue.

“ Harvey…”

“She died of a broken neck.” He continued with the parade of grotesque images.

That her spine had been snapped at its most vulnerable point was obvious from the awkward way her head hung from her shoulders. An unbroken arc of pale skin pressed against the smooth curve of muscles and tendons that ran from the base of her left ear to the hollow of her throat. Absent blood and bruises, it gleamed under the camera’s flash, obscenely undamaged to be hiding such a catastrophic rupture beneath. My heart shuddered against its vulnerability, this last part of her that still looked like her, offered up by the exaggerated tilt of her head, undefended by arms that lay still at her sides.

I reached over and stopped him from putting any more down. “ Harvey, enough.”

He stared down at me, looking more vigorous than I had ever seen him. His strength was fueled by his anger. I had waited until I had flown back to Boston from Chicago to give him the news of my attack, thinking it might go better in person. I might have been wrong about that.

“How could you not tell me? How could you keep this from me? Why did you not call me right away?”

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

“A large man attacked you in your hotel room in a strange city and tried to kill you. Why would that upset me? I told you your plan was too risky.”

I wanted to pull my feet up in the chair and curl myself around my legs. This day had already been difficult enough. I had worked my trip home as scheduled, moving through a world of strangers like a big, raw nerve, wondering which of them might, without warning, raise a hand or a weapon and try to hurt me. It had taken a lot of energy. I wasn’t sure I had enough in reserve to properly defend my incautious and possibly stupid behavior.

“You told me the fake date was too risky. This was something different. Besides, he wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“Alex, please.” He took a step back to lean against his desk. “Even you cannot be this obtuse.”

“There was something odd about this whole thing. He left me on the bed, Harvey. After I passed out-”

“After he choked you to unconsciousness.”

“-he put me on my bed with my head on a pillow, and he left a glass of water for me on the nightstand.”

“How gracious. A turndown service to go with the strangling.”

“He was there to deliver a message, one that made no sense to me. He said he wanted me to leave someone alone, a guy named Arthur Margolies, and to destroy the videos. I looked up Arthur Margolies. He’s a big frequent flier on OrangeAir out of Chicago.”

“So?”

“I think he was after Monica and not me.”

“What? Why?”

“I think he’s a client of the hooker ring-of Monica’s, specifically-and I think she’s trying to extort him using videos. Probably sex videos.” I looked up at him. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“None of this makes sense.”

“Maybe not, but I have to try to make sense of it so I can continue to function. I don’t think this guy was after me, which means I don’t think he will come after me. That’s important.”

He crossed his arms and hunched his shoulders. He didn’t look to be in the mood for new theories. He liked the one where we all stayed locked in our houses afraid for our lives, because that was more or less what he did every day anyway. “You believe the last-minute switch confused your attacker?”