“Okay,” Paul said. “But we’re going to need some cash.”

I dug a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to Angie, who was closer. She examined the bill in my hand. “Is this some sort of a joke?” she asked. She had that wry look in her eye, the one that said You know I’m kidding, right? I dug out another ten and handed it over. “I suppose we’ll be able to get something with this,” she said.

“Jeez,” Paul said to his sister as they walked away. “I thought twenty was good. Nice going.”

There’s an Italian place down around the corner where Sarah and I sometimes go for a sit-down dinner. But they do a bit of takeout and delivery on the side, so I ordered two veal et limone with sides of pasta and arranged to have them delivered at seven.

I put on some Errol Garner (the Lawrence Jones influence), set the table with a cloth and napkins and everything, turned down the lights, lit some candles, and awaited Sarah’s arrival.

Her car pulled into the drive at six-thirty, and I met her at the door with a glass of wine.

Her eyes darted about, caught the candles, the elegantly set table in the dining room off the kitchen.

“Well,” she said, dropping her purse and taking the glass of chilled wine from my hand.

“I love you, Sarah,” I said. “I’m a dipshit, a pain in the neck, a busybody, an asshole of the first order. Ask anybody. I can supply references. I’m sorry for the things I’ve put you through. God knows how I do it. Up until three years ago, I’d barely had a parking ticket, and then, it’s like, I don’t know, I got cursed with catastrophe. And the only thing that’s gotten me through all this has been you. I love you more than anything in the world, Sarah.”

She studied my face, took a sip of her wine. “Is this whole speech just designed to get me into the sack?”

“Not specifically, but if it works out that way, I won’t pretend that I’m sorry.” I set my wine down and took a step toward her, put my hands on the sides of her shoulders. “I want to start over. This is the night where my life, where our life together, takes a new turn. No more troubles. No more craziness. From here on, we’re going to lead the most boring lives in the world. Want an adventure? I’ll take you to Home Depot. That’s as wild as it’s going to get around here from now on.”

Sarah put her wineglass next to mine and slipped her arms around me. “I love you.”

And we just stood there for a couple of minutes, until Sarah whispered, “Let’s go upstairs.”

“But,” I said, “the food’s going to arrive in twenty minutes.”

She moved back, smiled at me. “How much time do you think you’re going to need, really?”

I nodded, took her hand, and turned her in the direction of the stairs. “You’ve got a point,” I said.

She reached up and lightly touched my forehead. “What happened to your eyebrows? There’s, like, half of them missing.”

“I’ll tell you all about it over dinner,” I said, and took her upstairs.

And over veal and pasta, I did. She said very little, stopped me only a couple of times to ask questions.

“Jesus,” she said when I finished.

I had left a couple of parts out. I did not give Sarah the details of Trixie’s confession. I hadn’t decided what to do yet with that bit of information.

And I also left out the part where Trixie opened up about her fondness for me. There was no need to get into all that, either.

Later, sitting with Sarah on the couch, I said, “I think I may quit the paper.”

Sarah turned and looked at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, I don’t even know if Magnuson’ll take me back, take me off suspension, but if he does, I don’t know whether it’s right for me. And my being there, it’s not working for you, either. You’re going places. I mean, you lost the foreign editor thing this time, because of me, but there’ll be other opportunities. You’ve got more of a future there than I do.”

“That’s not true.”

“The thing is, Sarah, I don’t know whether I have what it takes.” I paused. “I don’t know whether I can tell the whole story.”

“What do you mean? About what?”

“About…anything. To be a half-decent journalist, you have to be willing to let all the secrets out, to tell everything. I haven’t been doing that. Not with some of the stories I’ve already done, not with the one about what happened up at my father’s place, and not with what’s happened this past week.”

“You’re just too close to these things. They’ve all been too personal. It’s different.”

I shrugged, looked down. “It’ll all sort itself out. As long as I’ve got you, it doesn’t matter to me what I’m doing.”

We hadn’t planned to make a dramatic entrance, but when Sarah and I walked into the kitchen, my arm hanging lightly around her nightshirted shoulder, her arm loose around my waist, thumb tucked into the waistband of my pajamas, I guess we made quite a picture for the kids, who were sitting at the table, eating toast and drinking coffee.

“Ooohhh, check it out,” Angie said.

“I’m gonna be sick,” Paul said. “Guys, get a room.”

“Where do you think we just came from?” I said.

Paul grimaced. I poured coffee for Sarah and me, opened the cupboard looking for cereal.

“How about eggs?” Sarah asked. Sarah makes great eggs.

“Won’t you be late to Home!?” I asked. She was the one heading off to work, not me.

“Fuck Frieda,” she said.

“But my heart belongs to you,” I said. Paul and Angie exchanged glances.

Sarah was leaning into the open fridge. “You want eggs or not?”

“Yes,” I said. “I want eggs.”

And so she made eggs. With cheese, and Canadian bacon, and toast and jam.

“I won’t be around for dinner,” Angie said. “Late lecture, then I’m hanging out with some friends.”

“Me neither,” said Paul. “After school, a bunch of us are going to this thing, and then we’re getting something to eat, and then we’re doing this other thing. So like, I could use a bit of cash. ’Cause I don’t have a job anymore, you know.”

The kids vanished. Sarah and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table, ate our breakfast, drank our coffee, glanced at the headlines in the Metropolitan. I didn’t even read Dick Colby’s story about me and Trixie and her arrest in Martin Benson’s death. Instead, I went to the comics page and read Sherman’s Lagoon.

We were alone, together, and things just seemed so right. That morning seemed like the dawn of something much more than another day. It had the aura of a new beginning. Handcuffed in a basement with a corpse, duct-taped in a barn in Kelton, tossed about by cops in a dead-of-night raid-all these things seemed like distant memories.

Things were good.

I should have savored the moment even more. It wasn’t going to last.

ONCE I’D SEEN SARAH off to work and was dressed, I hopped into Trixie’s car (I had to sort out this business of getting my car back from Kelton, maybe on the weekend) and drove to Bayside Park. I pulled into the same spot I’d been in three days earlier. I didn’t feel the need, this time, to put Lawrence on alert. The first time, I didn’t quite know what to expect from Brian Sandler, but felt confident now that he posed no personal risk to me.

I looked out over the lake, switched on the radio. It was a phone-in show, where everyday nincompoops got to sound off on important political matters because it was considerably cheaper to produce a radio show that relied on nincompoops rather than people who actually knew what they were talking about.

We’d agreed to meet at nine, and I’d arrived five minutes early. I’d brought along a notebook to take down more information from him, as well as the scrap of paper on which I’d jotted down his various phone numbers.