“And don’t you?” He couldn’t suppress a grin.

“No, I do not!” She wasn’t amused, she was angry. “I work my bloody ass off, as a matter of fact. I take every decent article I can get, and I have a good name in my field. You don’t get that by sleeping till three.”

“And that doesn’t fit with all the ‘right’ people? Writing isn’t ‘right’ either?”

“Of course not. It’s not respectable. Not for me. I’m supposed to be looking for a husband and having my hair done, not snooping around prisons in Mississippi.”

“Or ex-cons in Chicago.” There was a hint of sadness in his eyes. She had made it all so clear now.

“Their objection would not be to whom I write about, it would be the fact that I’m betraying my heritage.”

“That again. Jesus, Kezia, isn’t that notion a little out-of-date? A lot of your kind of people work.”

“Yes, but not like this. Not for real. And … there’s more.”

“I figured that much.” He lit another cigarette and waited, and was surprised when she smiled.

“Aside from everything else, I’m a traitor. Have you ever read the Martin Hallam column? It’s syndicated so you might have seen it.”

He nodded.

“Well, I write that. I started it as a kind of a fun thing, but it worked, and …” She shrugged and threw up her hands as he started to laugh.

“You mean you write that crazy goddamn column?”

She nodded, grinning sheepishly.

“And you rat on all your fancy friends like that?”

She nodded again. “They lap it up. They just don’t know that I’m the one who writes it. And to tell you the truth, in the last couple of years it’s gotten to be a drag.”

“Talk about being a traitor! And no one suspects it’s you?”

“Nope. No one ever has. They don’t even know it’s written by a woman. They just accept it. Even my editor doesn’t know who writes it. Everything goes through my agent, and of course I’m listed as K. S. Miller on the agency roster.”

“Lady, you amaze me.” Now he looked stunned.

“Sometimes I even amaze myself.” It was a moment of light-hearted laughter after the painful start of the conversation.

“I’ll say one thing, you certainly keep yourself busy. The K. S. Miller articles, the Hallam column, and your ‘fancy life.’ And no one even suspects?” He seemed dubious.

“No. And that part hasn’t been easy. That’s why I panicked at the idea of interviewing you. I thought you might have seen my photograph somewhere, and would recognize me, as me, not as ‘Kate Miller’ obviously. All it would take to blow my whole trip would be one person seeing me at the wrong place at the wrong time, and zap, the whole house of cards would go down. And the truth of it is that the writing part of my life, the serious work, is the only part I respect. I won’t jeopardize that for anyone, or anything.”

“But you did. You interviewed me. Why?”

“I told you. I had to. And I was curious, too. I liked your book. And my agent pressured me. He was right, of course. I can’t go on hiding forever if I want a serious literary career. There are times when I’ll have to take chances.”

“You took a big one.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Are you sorry?” He wanted an honest answer.

“No. I’m glad.” They smiled at each other again, and she sighed.

“Kezia, what if you told the world, that world, to go screw, and just openly did what you want for a change? Couldn’t you at least be K. S. Miller out front?”

“How? Look at the stink it would make, what they’d say in the papers. Besides, it would muddy the waters. People would be requesting articles not because of K. S. Miller, but because of Kezia Saint Martin. I’d be back where I was eight years ago, as a gofer on the Times. And my aunt would have fits, and my trustee would be heartbroken, and I’d feel as though I had betrayed everyone who came before me.”

“For chrissake, Kezia. All those people are dead, or as good as.”

“The traditions aren’t. They live on.”

“And all on your shoulders, is that it? You have the sole responsibility of holding up the world? Don’t you realize how insane that is? This isn’t Victorian England, and Jesus, that’s your life you’re hiding in the closet. Yours, one shot at it and it’s s gone. If you respect what you’re doing, why not take your chances, drag it out of the closet and live it with pride? Or is it that you’re too fucking scared?” His eyes burned holes in hers.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never felt I had the choice.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. You always have a choice. About anything you do. Maybe you don’t want a choice. Maybe you’d rather hide like a neurotic and live ten different screwed-up lives. It doesn’t look worth a damn to me though, lady, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Maybe it isn’t It doesn’t look like much to me either right now. But what you don’t understand is the matter of duty, obligation, tradition.”

“Duty to whom? What about yourself, dammit? Didn’t you ever think of that? Do you want to sit around alone here for the rest of your life, writing in secret, and then going out to those asinine parties with that faggoty asshole?” He stopped suddenly and she frowned.

“What faggoty asshole?”

“The one I saw you with in the paper.”

“You mean you knew?”

He eyed her squarely and nodded. “I knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Her eyes blazed for a moment. She had let him so far into the inner sanctum of her life, a traitor already?

“How could I tell you? ‘Hey, lady, before you do the next interview I’d like to tell you that I know your real name because I read about you in the paper’? So what? And I figured that you’d tell me when you were ready to, or maybe never. But if I slapped you in the face with it, you’d have run like the devil and I didn’t want that.”

“Why? Afraid I might not write the article? Don’t worry, they’d have sent someone else out to do it. You wouldn’t have lost your story.” She almost sneered at him, and he grabbed her arm so suddenly it stunned her.

“No, but I might have lost you.”

She waited a long moment before speaking, and he still held her arm. “Would it have mattered?”

“Very much. And what you have to decide now is whether or not you want to live lies for the rest of your days. Seems like a bummer to me … terrified about who’s going to see you when and where and with whom and doing what. Who gives a shit? Let them see you! Show them who you really are, or don’t you even know, Kezia? I think that’s the crux of it. Maybe K. S. Miller is as big a phony as Martin Hallam or Kezia Saint Martin.”

“Oh to hell with you, dammit!” she shouted, wresting her arm free. “It’s so goddamn easy for you to sit there and make speeches. You have absolutely nothing to lose. No one expects a damn thing of you, so how can you know what it’s like? You can do anything you bloody well please.”

“Really?” His voice was quiet again and the texture of satin. “Well, let me tell you something, Miss Saint Martin. I know about duty one hell of a lot more than you do. Only mine isn’t to a bunch of upper-class mummies. My duty is to real people, guys I served my time with who have no one to speak out for them, no families to hire lawyers or remember them or give a damn. I know who they are, I remember them, sitting on their ass waiting for freedom, locked up in the hole, forgotten after years in the joint, some of them for as long as you’ve been alive, Kezia. And if I don’t have the fucking balls to go out and do something for them, then maybe no one else will. They’re my ‘duty.’ But at least they’re real, and I guess I’m lucky, because I care about them. I don’t just do it because I have to, or because I’m scared not to. I do it because I want to. I gamble my own ass for theirs, because every time I shoot my mouth off, I run the risk of winding up right back in there with them. So tell me about duty, and having something to lose. But I’ll tell you one more thing before you do. And that’s that if I didn’t give a shit about them, if I didn’t like them, or even love them, I’d say ‘Goodbye, Charlie’ and tell them all to go fuck themselves. I’d get married again, have a bunch of kids, and go live in the country.

“Kezia, if you don’t believe in the life you’re leading, don’t live it. It’s as simple as that. Because the price you’re trying to avoid paying, you’re going to wind up paying anyway. You’re going to wind up fucking hating yourself for wasting the years and playing games you should have outgrown years ago. If you dug that life, that would be fine. But you don’t, so what are you still doing there?”

“I don’t really know. Except I don’t think I’m as ballsy as you are.”

“You’re as ballsy as you want to be. That’s bullshit. You’re just waiting for an easy way out. A petition that gives you your freedom, a man to come and take you by the hand and lead you away. Well, maybe it’ll happen like that, but it probably won’t. You’ll probably have to do it all yourself, just like everyone else.”

She was silent in answer, and he found himself wanting to hold her. He had given her a lot to swallow in one dose, but he couldn’t help himself. Now that she had opened the doors, he had to tell her what he saw. For both their sakes. But mainly for hers.

“I didn’t mean to trample all over you, babe.”

“It needed to be said.”

“You could probably level some things at me that need to be said too. I see what you’re going through, and you’re right in a sense, it is a lot easier for me. I have an army of people waiting in the wings all the time to tell me how terrific I am. Not the parole board, mind you, but people, friends. That makes a big difference, it makes it kind of an ego trip. What you’re trying to do is a lot harder. Causes carry a lot of glory, breaking away from home never does … until later. Much later. But you’ll get there. You’re already more than halfway there, you just don’t know it yet.”