“That was me touching you,” he said. “That’s not the same thing. Does it disturb you that I’m paralyzed?”

“I’m married,” I said.

“I see,” Cicero said quietly. “You wear no wedding ring and are free to stay out until two in the morning, but when I make an overture to you, suddenly you’re married.”

“My husband is in prison,” I said.

He didn’t believe me; I could see that.

“He got sent up for auto theft,” I said. “He’s in prison in Wisconsin.”

Cicero ’s expression didn’t change, but at last he said, “Then I suppose you should go.”

“It’s not because you’re paralyzed,” I said. I don’t know why it was important to me to establish that. I leaned forward and laid a hand on his thigh. It was stupid, a chickenshit half measure.

“I can’t feel that, Sarah,” Cicero said. “You don’t have to do anything to prove to me that you’re open-minded. But if you’re going to touch me, do it somewhere I can feel it.” He reached over and took my hand. “Let me show you something,” he said.

With his other hand, he pulled up his shirt. “A lot of people think a paraplegic’s body has one sharp line between sensation and no sensation, like the line that divides light and dark on the moon,” he said. “But it’s more like the way twilight falls on the earth.”

He placed my hand high on his rib cage. “Here, I can feel everything.” He slid his hand and mine, underneath it, a little lower. “Down here, only temperature, but not pressure. Down here,” a little lower still, “full dark.”

Keeping eye contact, I laid my left hand on the other side of his rib cage, and Cicero put his hands on my hips, pulling me toward him. There was nowhere to go but onto the wheelchair, and cautiously I put my knees on each side of his thighs, on the edges of the seat, so I was kneeling in front of him.

He had no insecurity about having to tip his face upward to kiss a woman, and when he did it, he went deep almost immediately, probing with his tongue. It shocked me; that kind of deep, invasive kiss from a virtual stranger was disturbing and exciting and I felt something roll over deep in my stomach, like nerves, except warmer.

Our dim reflection in the mirrored closet doors showed man, woman, and chair; a sexual tableau I’d never expected to be a part of. Men had taken me into their homes before, and into their beds. But in climbing onto Cicero ’s wheelchair, I was being taken into the very center of his life, almost his body. It made me wonder if Cicero Ruiz had a special insight into how it felt to be penetrated.

The third time I woke up, the flames of the candles were almost completely recessed in deep pits of wax. It no longer mattered; the sky was lightening to predawn blue beyond the window, just starting to illuminate the bedroom. Cicero slept so close to me that I could feel the warmth of his skin. It was reassuring until I saw Shiloh’s old shirt hanging off the back of Cicero ’s wheelchair, and I felt something cold in my stomach, like I was looking at a map and nothing was familiar.

I slipped out of bed and put my clothes on as quietly as possible, picked up the prescription, and turned the knob of the bedroom door in that time-honored, half-speed way people do when they are sneaking into, or out of, bedrooms.

Cicero didn’t even open his eyes when he spoke, and his voice was rusty with sleep.

“It’s just a little sympathy between humans, Sarah,” he said. “Don’t let it ruin your week.”

After eight uninterrupted hours of sleep at home, I woke up in my warm, stifling bedroom wanting several things all at once: ice water; a hot, hot shower; and some kind of food I couldn’t quite identify. I satisfied the first two needs first, lingering in the shower. It was amazing how much better my ear felt already. It wasn’t even sore. It just had that pleasant, empty heaviness that sometimes replaces pain, the way your head feels after a particularly nasty headache rolls out, letting you free of its grip at last.

Dressed in a pair of cutoffs and a tank shirt against the hot weather, I went into the kitchen and looked over the lightly stocked refrigerator and cupboards. Nothing appealed to me. Whatever this odd craving was, it wasn’t the usual impulse-eating suspects: caffeine, sugar, salt, or red meat. I went out the back entryway, into the yard.

Last night’s storm had left the skies clean, with just a few white clouds left over in the west. The sun was high in the sky, but the overhanging elms filtered out all but a few of its rays. My neighbor’s underfed Siamese cat prowled through the overgrown grass of our narrow, untended backyard, stopped, assessed me as no threat, and went on. I, also, went on, to the basement door and down into the cobwebbed dimness.

Down here was what Shiloh called the “Armageddon food,” canned things only to be eaten in case of natural disaster, riot, martial law, or nuclear attack. I’d always thought the kind of food that kept well in emergencies- ready-to-eat, low-sodium soups and powdered milk and fruit in syrup- was too depressing to be eaten as the world fell apart. “We need liquor down here,” I’d said. “A few bottles of whiskey and some jars of chocolate sauce.”

Shiloh, sitting on his heels in the dimness, surveying the shelves, had dryly agreed. Oh, sure, he’d said. Maybe we should put a bed down here, too. As the world goes up in flames outside, we can give ourselves over to every kind of perversion. And then he’d given me that look, the one that reminded me that few people have as deep a pleasure in wickedness as the once devout, like Shiloh, a preacher’s son.

Goddammit. While it was impossible to forget that I was living alone, that my husband was in prison in another state, every once in a while it hit me afresh that, hey, it’s Shiloh who isn’t here anymore. And today of all days I did not want to be thinking those kinds of thoughts.

Fortunately, I was almost immediately distracted. As I moved for the stairs with a jar of applesauce and a can of pears in my hands, I tripped in the poorly lit surroundings. The culprit, on the floor, was an old and battered toolbox that I knew held tools we didn’t use on a weekly or even monthly basis, unlike the wrench and pliers. But I knew without opening it that it held something else, too: an unregistered.25 with cheap silver plating.

Genevieve’s sister, Deb, had given it to me, what seemed like a hundred years ago. She’d come by it innocently enough; it was a relic from her days of living in a bad East St. Louis neighborhood. She was overdue to get rid of it, and I’d promised her I’d take care of that. But immediately after that, Shiloh ’s disappearance and our subsequent troubles had wiped my promise from my mind. I’d stashed the cheap little gun in the basement, and here it had remained. Given the suspicion I’d been under in the Royce Stewart case, I’d felt I couldn’t simply take it to work and give it to our evidence techs for disposal. That was truer than ever now, with Gray Diaz in town.

I nudged the toolbox away from the base of the stairs with my foot, deciding I’d deal with the.25 soon, but not today.

Upstairs again, I ate the whole can of pears with a little grated cheddar cheese on top of it, and was a quarter of the way into the jar of applesauce when I heard a knock at my door.

The curtains on the windowed top half of the door were sheer, and through them I could see a full, broad masculine form. I pulled back the curtain and saw Detective Van Noord, to whom I’d made my apologies yesterday before fleeing work.

I opened the door. “What’s going on?”

“Prewitt sent me,” he said. “To see if you were here. We couldn’t get ahold of you.”