“Ah,” he said, reading the letter inside. “He did.” Astonished, pleased, uncertain how he felt, he tossed the check onto Suzanne’s desk.

“Yahoo!” Suzanne said sourly.

Martin followed him back toward his office. “We have to meet,” Martin said. “You have time right now?”

“In twenty minutes,” Ray said. He had nothing particular planned for those twenty minutes except perhaps to read his mail. He just couldn’t give Martin immediate satisfaction. Every time he saw Martin these days, he kept envisioning that stocky, freckled body squirming upon Leigh’s, saw her hips rising to meet that compact body.

“Look,” Martin said, ignoring him and closing the door. “Let’s be civilized. We have a firm to run. People depend on us. Put it aside for this project, what do you say, Ray?”

“Go away.”

“Come on. Let’s give this occasion its proper due. Here’s our biggest residential project in years for our most potentially notable client. Let’s ride down to the site together before the meeting with Antoniou, okay?”

“Why?”

“Talk about where to put his goddamn columns,” Martin said.

“So you already knew he signed this contract on the basis that I’d redo the design?”

“He mentioned he wasn’t happy. I told him to talk to you again. That you were quite reasonable. I know you’ve been doing some sketching this morning. I’d like to see what you’re coming up with while we’re sitting on the hill. Helps me visualize and wax poetic for the client.”

“Okay. Two o’clock? I’ll meet you there. I have a few things to do before then.”

After lunch, late for reaching Laguna Beach in good time, Ray hit gridlock and frustration. Still, in his car alone he could listen to music, zone out, stay calm. Sitting next to Martin for the nearly two-hour drive would have driven him nuts.

He had been there before so had no trouble finding the site, a steep, forbidding-looking scrub-covered hillside with an earthshaking view of the ocean on Sleepy Hollow Lane, a half-mile up the hill from the beach. He parked on the street, then hiked down, avoiding the ubiquitous poison oak.

Martin sat in the shade of a eucalyptus tree, legs propped on a granite boulder, putting his feet between himself and Ray.

Ray clambered down the dusty hill, then sat on a small rock opposite, not saying a word. He did not want to give his partner easy satisfaction.

“You hate that I’m Antoniou’s man,” Martin said.

Ray shook his head. “You’re personally invested in this project. It’s natural. You’re his buddy. Hope he doesn’t know how little weight you give that word.”

“You want to know more about me and Leigh? Because I have the urge to tell you a few things.”

“Let’s not get distracted.” Ray swept sweat from his forehead with his hand, eyes roaming over the vista, the huge, churning ocean below, the unstable land beneath both of them.

Martin took a deep breath. “You know, I used to admire your relationship. You seemed perfect together.”

“Oh?” Well, what else could he say, with this womanizing jackass asserting such an intensely personal connection. Ray loved Leigh, whatever she had done, and he now loathed his former friend Martin down to dust, down to their most insignificant moments eating suspiciously brown cold-cut sandwiches from crummy neighborhood grocery stores together. They used to confide in each other, he remembered, and the thought made his skin hot, like a bad sunburn.

“You’ve changed a lot,” Martin said.

Ray adjusted himself, moving one leg over the other, pulling his sunglasses over his eyes. In the afternoon, the breeze off the ocean could be redefined as wind. No need to shiver. This wind blew hot, like the deadly Santa Anas that had wiped out much of this town in 1993.

“I’m not saying she didn’t love you,” Martin continued. “But your detachment made her vulnerable, buddy.”

“Shut up, Martin, or I’ll have to kill you.”

“We’ve been friends for a long time.”

“Martin, working with you at all right now is a strain. Now let’s get down to the issues about this project and leave Leigh out of it.”

“I was interviewed by a police detective yesterday. I didn’t say anything that would hurt you. I mean, I don’t know anything about Leigh, really, or your personal affairs. Actually, he was looking at me and asking me questions that I didn’t like at all. As if I might somehow be responsible for Leigh’s disappearance, because we-you know, broke up.”

The words hung heavily in the air, while Ray thought to himself, It can’t be. He examined his partner, sitting in the pressed tan slacks that his wife picked up from the cleaners for him, the three-hundred-dollar sunglasses that Martin insisted were the cheapest way to look like a mover for the clients, by concealing his eyes.

“Maybe they know something I ought to know,” Ray said to Martin.

Who spread his hands and said shakily, “I swear to you, I have not seen her since last Wednesday.”

“You could swear from now until the end of the world and nobody would believe you at this point, Martin.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the one who did it, if anyone did anything.”

“Maybe it was your wife.”

“My wife?”

“I heard,” he lied meanly, “somebody called her about Suzanne. Maybe someone called her about Leigh.”

Martin looked stricken. “No. They wouldn’t dare.”

“But as you say,” Ray said, “we have a home to design. Shall we get back on topic?”

Martin’s face blackened. He walked out to the bluff and his pants whipped in the wind as he took out a cigar and tried to light it. Ray followed him with the plans and set them on a flat rock with a stone to keep them down. “I need to get back,” he said. “Say what you want to say.”

“Have you talked to Antoniou about these ideas you sketched out and threw at me this morning?”

“No.”

“Did you even consider what he wanted before you spent hours spinning these webs?”

“I heard what you both had to say about what he wants. Denise and I came up with these preliminary ideas. About what he needs.”

“There isn’t a fucking white column in sight on those sketches,” Martin said. “I would describe this, Ray, as Tokyo postindustrial crossed with Italian Futuristic. What makes you dream, or suspect, or imagine in your most outrageous fantasy, you might convince this client to build this crazy shit? Because, Ray, he’s an old, conservative Greek dude with strong opinions.”

“He signed. He paid. He’ll love it. I’m the architect.”

Martin’s fingers drummed the rock that held Ray’s plans. A breeze picked them up. His hand came down to hold them in place momentarily, then released them to the wind. They blew away, toward the edge. Ray went after them.

“He signed because I talked him into it, Ray, and we’re giving the man what he wants. Might as well toss that dreamy crap you’ve drawn here because these look to me like plans for someone else’s dream house. Oh, it’ll make a lovely spread in some magazine. I know that means something to you. Unfortunately, your design bears no resemblance whatsoever to a home for a family.”

Ray plunked down a few rocks to weight his plans down, then peered at them, putting his hands in his pockets. The new sketches were changed very little from the old sketches. In his mind, fully realized, sat a fabulous, innovative three-story building that traveled beyond Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan. Featuring a tower encased in steel mesh, it made boxiness sexy, and was a unique home ideally suited to this client and his family. “I wouldn’t expect you to recognize-”

“What? Your genius?” Martin laughed, then shook his head. “We meet, we discuss, then you go do whatever the hell you want.” He pulled out a folder full of cuttings from architectural and travel magazines from a briefcase he had propped behind him. “Antoniou specifically mentioned Santorini, correct? Where his parents had a villa. Where he grew up.”