He opened the fridge. Leftover takeout cartons and containers of juice and soft drinks. The freezer had some diet and no-fat desserts. He heard her coming down the stairs and decided not to close the freezer door. If he was going to prowl through her house, he wasn't going to pretend that he hadn't done it. "I'm in here."

"Can't keep a man out of the kitchen," she said.

He closed the freezer and reopened the fridge. "Restaurant doggy bags for breakfast?"

"Always tastes better the next day."

"Have I met a woman as lonely as me?"

"Solitary isn't necessarily lonely, Sherlock." She began an elaborate ritual of making coffee, starting with the beans. She had changed out of her business suit into a summery frock, which made her look younger at first glance, but then older, as he couldn't help but notice a little looseness and sagging in the arms, the wrinkles in the neck. He considered these features analytically and discovered that he didn't find them at all off-putting. He came up behind her and ran his hands down her bare arms, then back up to her shoulders as he leaned down and kissed her neck.

"Do you want coffee or not?" she asked sternly.

"Don't much care about coffee," he said.

She turned around and kissed him and he held her, body to body. She was soft and yielding, and his hands discovered that there were no straps or elastics underneath the frock she wore. Her own hands were pulling his shirt out of his trousers, and then they were cool as they glided over the skin of his back, up to his shoulders. They parted, but only by an inch or two. "Screw the coffee," she said. "It's too much like cooking, anyway."

Where does this lead? thought Don. What next? He'd only slept with one woman in his life, and there had never been a love scene in the kitchen. Maybe if there had been... but that wasn't a line of thought he wanted to explore. He took her hand and led her through a swinging door into the dining room, then around into the living room. "Where are we going?" she asked. In reply, he sat down on the untouchable couch, tossed the pillows onto the floor, and pulled her down beside him.

"Here?" she asked. He could see that she was a little annoyed.

"Who were you saving this room for?" he asked.

"For me," she said. "To come in and see it perfect and not have to do anything to clean it up." The annoyance was in her voice now. He tried to kiss her. She turned her face away.

"Sorry," he said. "I just thought—"

"You just couldn't leave a perfect room undisturbed," she said.

"It wasn't perfect until you were in it," he said. "This couch wasn't perfect until you were sitting there." He took the hem of her frock and spread it out across the fabric of the couch, showing more of her tanned thighs, making her look as posed as a model. "The only thing wrong with the picture is me," he said. "I should be standing over there, in the entry, looking at you with longing. The unattainable beauty of Cindy Claybourne."

She laughed, but she had to turn her face away from him. Embarrassed? He got up from the couch, walked to the entry, and stood there leaning against the front door. She really did look sweet and young and lovely. Heartbreakingly so. "Cindy, are you as sad as I am?"

"Are you sad?" she said. "Right now?"

"The picture's too perfect. I don't want to spoil it."

She reached out her arms to him. "I want you to."

He knew he should walk into the room, sit down beside her again, take that frock off her, make love to her. That's what she wanted. That's what he wanted, too. Yet he stood there, trying to make sense of the woman, of the room. How she fit with the house. Why this room had to be so perfect. Why she barely lived in her own house, cooking nothing, touching nothing. Of course that probably wasn't true upstairs. For all he knew, clothes were strewn around her bedroom and her sink was covered in half-empty bottles and tubes. And besides, what business was it of his?

Yet for some reason he had to ask a question, one whose answer he didn't even care about, and still he had to ask. "Have you ever been married, Cindy?"

She looked at him for a moment, then lowered her arms. "Yes."

"Kids?" he asked.

"Does it look like it?" she asked, sounding a little defiant.

"Does what look like it? Your body? No."

"What, then?"

"This room looks like a place of refuge for someone who's sick of cleaning up after other people."

Why had he said that? It was a stupid thing to say, precisely because he was almost certainly right. She looked away from him, her eyes filling with tears. She swung her legs up onto the couch and hugged her knees. The skirt of her frock draped away so he could see the entire curve of her naked thigh and buttocks, and he was filled with longing to hold her, to please her, to take pleasure from her. But when she lifted her face from her knees, her eyes were brimming over with tears. So when he strode to the couch and sat beside her and put his arm around her and gathered her against his shoulder, it was not to make love to her, but to comfort her. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to cause you pain."

"You didn't cause it," she said.

"I meant to love you," he said. "I wanted to try to love you."

"That was your mistake. You should have settled for making love to me."

"You do have children," he said.

"Three." She clung tightly to him, and he could feel her convulsive sob as she began to cry in earnest.

"What happened?" he asked, dreading the story, because he knew it would only make him think of his own loss.

"I left them," she said. "My shrink said it was because I was a caretaker child. My father ran off with his secretary when I was eleven and from then on I was the mom of the house while my mother worked. I cooked every meal, I cleaned, I did laundry till I hated my mother for being a lazy bitch even though I knew she was working her brains out to make ends meet and I hated my sisters and my brother because they wore clothes that had to be washed and left things lying around and complained whenever I asked them to help in any way and finally I couldn't stand it anymore. If I didn't get out I'd kill somebody or maybe myself, so I married my poor husband Ray and we had three babies, pop pop pop, and there I was again, cooking and cleaning up. I realized I had only traded one house for another and I thought I'd go crazy. I loved my kids but I found myself one day holding a pillow and wanting to press it down on my baby's face so she'd just stop screaming for a half-hour so I could get some rest. Only I wasn't even tired. It wasn't sleep I needed. I took the pillow and put it in the garbage and then I took the garbage bag out to the garage and jammed it into the trashcan because I had actually thought of smothering my own baby, that's how crazy I was."

Don was sick at heart. He still held her, still felt her breath warm through his shirt, but all desire for her was gone. He knew it wasn't fair. She had stopped herself, hadn't she? She had faced a terrible moment of madness and had triumphed over it, but he knew he would never be able to get rid of the imagined picture of Cindy with a pillow approaching a baby's crib, and the baby crying, only it wasn't an infant he imagined, it was his own daughter when he last saw her, almost two years old, and it wasn't Cindy, it was his ex-wife. Just one more nightmare for him to remember when he woke up in the middle of the night.

Yet he still held her.

"Do you hate me?" she whispered.

"No," he said.

"I knew I had to get out," she said. "I loved my children, I could never hurt them, but for their sake and my husband's sake and my own sake I had to get out before I got carted off to the loony bin or I killed myself or whatever desperate thing happened that should never happen. So I left. And I went to a shrink. And I got my real estate license and worked hard to get enough money to buy a house that has a room for each of my children even though I know they'll never come to see me, I'll never have them living here with me, but I have a room for each of them upstairs, and a bed that's never had a man in it but it's made for a husband. You're a husband, Don. That's what you are. I wanted you in that bed with me."