“I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it,” Beth adds, speaking of her mother’s wedding ring, a mostly sentimental piece of jewelry that was part of the ever-dwindling residue of their marriage. It had sat in a box at Republic Bank at Severance since the divorce.

“This week,” Paris repeats.

“Thanks.” Beth smiles a smile that reaches Paris’s knees, the one that won his heart. She kisses him on the cheek. “I’ll be back by one.”

A little late for an office Christmas party, isn’t it? Paris thinks. But he says nothing about it. “They’ll all be asleep by then, right?”

Beth laughs. “Sure, Jack.”

“How old are your friends, Missy?” They are in the kitchen, making what has to be their fifth pitcher of iced tea. The noise in the living room has abated for a while, save for the occasional barrage of laughter. Somehow, for Paris, as the father of a near-teenager, the silence was worse.

“My age,” Melissa says. “Jennifer’s twelve, Jessica’s eleven, Mindy’s twelve.”

Twelve, Paris thinks, retrieving a not-quite-frozen tray of ice cubes from the freezer. One of them looked at least sixteen. Was this how teenage boys saw his daughter? “They’re all in your class at school?”

“Yep,” Melissa replies.

“Some of them look so . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Mature?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s what I mean. Mature.”

“I know,” Melissa says. “Jessica’s getting boobs.”

The word hangs in the air for a moment, immobilizing Jack Paris, freezing all ability to function, to think. Boobs. His daughter said boobs. What the hell was next? Paris attempts speech. “I hadn’t . . . I mean . . . I didn’t . . . y’know—”

“Can we get pizza?” Melissa asks, sparing him. “Mom says the new guy who delivers for Domino’s is really cute. Everybody wants to see him.”

My God, Paris thinks. Cute. Boobs. Guys. One conversation. He feels as if the floor beneath him has suddenly spit out a few nails. He looks at his daughter, at her long mahogany hair, her bright eyes, her still-girlish figure, and wonders how the hell he is going to survive the next ten years of her life.

Luckily, at that moment, somebody’s favorite song comes on the radio in the living room, and Jessica/Jennifer/Mindy turns it up. It is one of the reasons Paris does not hear the phone ring.

The other reason is that the call is coming in on Beth’s second line, the one in the spare bedroom, the one dedicated to the computer’s DSL modem.

As Paris brings the pitcher of iced tea into the living room and looks up the number for Domino’s Pizza, the computer in the bedroom makes a noise, then settles back into a stillness marred only by the occasional skrit-skrit-skrit of the hard drive as it downloads a file: silent, dutiful, discreet.

Start video.

Paris looks at the two words on the computer monitor’s screen, written in bold red letters drop-shadowed in gray. They are centered on a black background and seem to float in space.

He is in the spare bedroom, standing in front of the computer. He knows he is prying, of course, and he hates himself for it. But that doesn’t stop him. Beth is due any minute and still he can’t resist the temptation. Was it the detective in him? Or just the asshole?

Paris votes for the asshole.

Start video.

Next to the words, just to the right, is the mouse cursor—a small white arrow angling inward, to the left. He sits in the office chair, distributes his weight, takes the mouse in hand. After circling Start video a few times, he manages to hover the white arrow over the second c in Click.

He presses the left mouse button.

And although he wasn’t sure what he expected to see when he clicked on the word (perhaps a spreadsheet of some sort, perhaps a database of Beth’s realty clients), what he actually sees confuses the hell out of him.

It is a chair.

A velvet wing chair.

The image is a little fuzzy, fading in and out a bit like bad TV reception. It is also black and white. But for some reason Paris can tell it is not a still photograph he is looking at, but rather a live shot of some sort. A live shot of a chair.

He squints, trying to see if there is an impression on the chair, trying to determine if someone had just recently been sitting there, but the angle is too head-on.

The image reverts back to its Start video screen.

Paris feels safe that he has not violated any trust here, although he knows he doesn’t have the right to start anything in Beth’s life anymore. It wasn’t his business what she had on her computer. What was he expecting to find? Love letters? Beth isn’t the kind of woman who would type a love letter anyway. Beth is the kind of woman who would find just the right stationery, just the right ink, just the right sentiment. In fact, Beth is—

Standing in the bedroom doorway.

Watching him.

Somehow she had entered the apartment, no doubt checked on Melissa and her friends, and made it all the way up the hallway without making a sound.

What a cop I am, Paris thinks. Ever vigilant.

“I, uh . . .” Paris manages, rising to his feet. “I was just . . .”

She has seen him at the computer, of course. Paris looks at the floor, waits for the lecture that will surely include the f-word and end with something about him never being left alone in any dwelling of hers for the rest of everyone’s life.

But that doesn’t happen. Beth greets him instead with a huge, eggnog-sodden smile. And a hug. “Merry Christmas, Jack,” she says.

Paris can smell the booze. He hugs back, instantly aroused at her soft, perfumed nearness. “Merry Christmas. How was the party?”

“Same as always,” Beth says, flopping onto the bed. “But drunker. A little more obnoxious than usual.”

Seeing as she wasn’t going to yell at him, Paris decides to push his luck. Like always. “What is this?” He sits back down at the desk and positions the mouse cursor over the big red Start video. He clicks. After a few turns of the hard drive, the image appears.

“What is what?” Beth asks, sitting up.

“This.” Paris turns and points to the velvet wing chair on the screen. Except the chair is gone. It has been replaced by a picture of the space shuttle making a perfect three-point landing at Andrews Air Force Base.

“Uh . . .” Paris says. He looks at the top of the screen.

CNN.com

“That’s called the news, Jack,” Beth says, unzipping the back of her dress, as if they were still married and about to hit the sack. “The national news. Stuff that doesn’t happen in Cleveland. You may have heard of it.”

“But there was just some kind of, I don’t know, performance-art thing on for a minute or so. Nothing but a chair. The all-chair channel or something.”

“Right,” Beth says, rising from the bed, a little unsteadily, then kicking off her shoes. “Master Bedroom Theater.” She laughs at her joke, leans in front of Paris, grabs the mouse, and clicks on an icon. The iChat icon. “No peeking.”

It is a familiar, sexy taunt. An early marriage-game for the two of them that began on their wedding night. Paris, tipsy outside the window. Beth, a terry-cloth blur inside their motel room.

In a few seconds, the room behind Paris appears on the screen, courtesy of the small digital camera suction-cupped to the top of the monitor. The woman on the screen lets her velvet cocktail dress slip to the floor as she moves, in a series of still shots, to the closet.

At that moment, to Jack Paris, the woman on the screen is somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s girlfriend, somebody else’s mistress. A movie-sexy total stranger within his reach.

But . . . should he reach? Was Beth actually trying to seduce him? Was the moment he had longed for and dreamed about for years finally happening?