He got up and walked into the house. I followed.

“Give me my key back,” he shouted.

“No way.”

“I don’t want to be with you anymore, Irene. It’s not working. Go on, get out.”

“You are a lousy liar, Harriman. And I don’t take orders from you.”

“Goddamn it, get out of my house.”

“Like I said, I don’t take orders.”

He drew his hand back and took a step toward me, but the action seemed to startle even Frank. He backed down immediately and sank to the couch, as if defeated. I sat next to him.

I lowered my voice, trying to ease things down a notch. “Wednesday morning, when I saw Mrs. Fremont, I told her you had invited me to Thanksgiving.”

He put his head back and looked up at the ceiling. His jaw flexed with tension. I hated seeing him feeling like this, but not enough to let things stay as they were.

“I was worried about meeting your mother, feeling afraid that she wouldn’t like me. Mrs. Fremont asked me if we loved each other.”

He swallowed, but didn’t say anything.

“You know, even though we’ve never said it to one another, I told her yes. Maybe I presumed something. Anyway, she said that if we did, then we had everything we needed in life, with or without your mother’s approval.”

I took his hand. He didn’t pull back, but he let it lie lifelessly in my own, not responding.

“Was I wrong, Frank?”

He looked at me then, and after a moment he whispered, “No.”

“Then let me hold you.”

He did. I held his head against my shoulder, stroking his hair, not talking. He seemed to relax, and after a while I wondered if he was falling asleep.

“If I had listened to you, she wouldn’t be dead,” he said in a low voice.

“What?”

“You wanted to come here that night. I insisted on going out.”

“And you think she wouldn’t have been killed anyway?”

“I would have been here. I would have heard her.”

“Frank, three other neighbors were home, they didn’t hear a thing. And if we had been here, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until the next morning. Because we went out, you were able to get an investigation started within a couple of hours of the murder.”

“Lot of good it did her to live next to a cop.”

“You’re not God, Frank. You can’t be everywhere, watching over everybody. And besides, it did do her a lot of good to live next to you. She was crazy about you. Bragged on you all the time. I saw her earlier that same day, and she showed me what you did for the shelter. She told me you were a ‘keeper.’”

“A what?”

“A keeper, you know, a fish you don’t want to throw back.”

Unbelievably, a small, fleeting grin crossed his face. But in the next moment, his eyes clouded up. “She was one of a kind.”

I laughed. “I’ll never forget the first day she asked me to go running with her. Here I am expecting to jog-walk, and I end up winded before she’s even warmed up.”

In spite of himself, he laughed, too. We sat quietly for a while, remembering Mrs. Fremont.

“God, I’m tired,” Frank said. Maybe he was commenting on his life in general.

“Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

That earned another small smile. He washed his face, then met me in the bedroom. I undressed him and pulled back the covers. He crawled in, then turned and reached up, taking the nape of my neck in his hand and pulling me to him gently. He kissed me, then said, “What, no bedtime story?”

What the hell. My ass was in a sling at work anyway. I undressed and lay down beside him.

Like Mrs. Fremont said, we had everything we needed in life.

“WELL, WELL, WELL – I can guess what kind of emergency you had at home.” Lydia’s comment made me blush to my roots.

She laughed and said, “The gods must be watching over you, Irene. No one noticed you were gone. John’s been tied up in meetings about the Montgomery fiasco all morning, and Brady Scott called to say there would be a press conference this afternoon. Otherwise, all’s quiet.”

I allowed myself a sigh of relief. “I was sure this was going to be the day City Hall caught on fire.”

We talked for a moment and then I walked back over to my desk. I looked over some notes that Stacee had left for me. I didn’t like admitting that she was doing a good job, but she was. I wondered why someone with her brains and abilities would ever get next to Wrigley. She had talent, why use her skirts? I grinned to myself, thinking maybe that was a talent in itself.

I never have been much of a flirter. I don’t consider myself an ugly duckling, but I’m not Miss America, either. I’m not the kind of woman who gets her way by batting her eyelashes. If I did bat my eyelashes, someone would probably hand me a bottle of eyewash. For a moment, I wondered if I might be jealous of the Stacees of this world.

Another moment’s thought, and I knew I didn’t envy her. She was going to have to put up with the attentions of the likes of Wrigley. When I had talked to her a few days ago, she had said something about Wrigley making a fool out of her. She would have to live not only with his whims, but with the kind of lack of respect from her coworkers that had made her run from the newsroom that day.

I sat back in my chair and looked up at the holes in the ceiling, imagining a self-help group called “Flirters Anonymous.” “Hi, my name’s Buffy and I’m a flirter. I once whored my way to the top of a large corporation, and woke up in the gutter.” Murmurs of sympathy in the group. Flirters are featured on afternoon talk shows. Pretty soon, offshoot groups start – Adult Children of Flirters.

“What’s so funny?”

I sat up so suddenly, I nearly rolled the chair out from under me.

Stacee was standing next to me, puzzled by my suddenly crimson cheeks.

“Nothing, nothing. How’s it going?”

“Fine. I got some of those quotes you wanted on various people’s predictions of the election outcome. Did everything go okay at home?”

Her obvious concern further shamed me. “Things are much better. I appreciate your taking over for me. Want to go to the Montgomery press conference with me?”

“Sure.”

As further penance for my daydream, I asked her to join me for lunch as well. We drove down to the Galley and ordered a couple of sandwiches.

“This sure is better than the deli downtown,” she said, delicately biting into a chicken salad sandwich.

“Yeah, Frank turned me on to this place. Someday you’ll have to try the pastrami. Out of this world.”

“Is Frank your boyfriend?”

I cringed. I’ve never liked the term “boyfriend.”

“He’s the man I’m seeing now, yes,” I answered coolly.

She was unfazed. “He’s a cop?”

“He’s a homicide detective.” Don’t ask me why I felt like I had to keep refining her vocabulary on the matter.

Her eyes grew wider. “Homicide?”

“Yes.”

“That must be exciting!”

Good grief, she was starting to squeal. I was regretting my decision to bring her along. But you can’t go back on your penance. Against Catholic Hoyle.

“I suppose sometimes it is exciting,” I replied. “But it can also be pretty hard on a person. They see the handiwork of some very cruel people. Frank just finished working on the Gillespie case.”

Her face fell, all the silliness of a moment ago leaving her. She swallowed hard and said, “The little girl?”

I nodded, and somehow, my appetite was gone. I pushed a dollop of potato salad around on my plate for a while, then gave up.

“I’m sorry. I’ve upset you, haven’t I?”

“No, no – I just feel badly for the family. Crazy, really – I never met them, just read about them. And I could tell that this case really bothered Frank.”

“I can see why. It must be awful, having to investigate something like that.”

I didn’t answer, just thought about Frank, how lost he seemed lately.