“Kezia, you don’t look well. You don’t look well at all.”

“Edward, my darling, you’re driving me mad.”

“I want to know what you’re up to.” The waiters swished past them and poured more Louis Roederer champagne.

“You’re prying.”

“YES, I am.” He looked sour, and old. She looked tired, and far older than she had so briefly before.

“All right. I’m in love.”

“I assumed that much. And he’s married?”

“Why do you always assume that the men I go out with are married? Because I’m discreet? Hell, I have a right to be that, I’ve learned that much over the years.”

“Yes, but you don’t have a right to indulge in sheer folly.”

No, just a right to misery, darling, and shitty rotten luck. Right, Edward? Of course. Or is it just a right to duty and pain? “Folly, in this case, dear Edward, is a beautiful man whom I adore. We have more or less lived and traveled together for more than two months now. And just before Thanksgiving, we found out … that …” Her voice caught and her heart trembled as she wondered what she was doing … “We found out that he’s sick. Terribly sick.”

Edward’s face suddenly looked pinched. “What sort of sick?”

“We’re not sure.” She was into it now. She almost believed it herself. It was easier than the truth, and it would get him off her back for a while. “They’re attempting treatment, and at this point he has about a fifty-fifty chance of living. Which is why I don’t ‘look well.’ Satisfied?” Her voice was ripe with bitterness, her eyes dulled with tears.

“Kezia, I’m so sorry. Is he … is he … anyone I know?”

Not on your ass, sweetheart. She almost wanted to laugh. “No, he isn’t. We met in Chicago.”

“I wondered about that. Is he young?”

“Young enough, but he’s older than I am.” She was quiet now. In a way she had told him the truth. Sending Lucas back to prison would be like condemning him to death. Too many men hated or loved him, he was too well known, had stirred up too much. San Quentin would kill him. Someone would. If not an inmate, a guard.

“I don’t know what to say.” But his face said what his words couldn’t. There was a ghost in his eyes. The ghost of Liane Saint Martin. “This man … is he … would … does he come to New York?” He was groping for a criterion that Kezia wouldn’t leap at in fury but there were none. Where did he go to school? What does he do? Where does he live? Who is he? Kezia would have exploded at any of those questions. But he wanted to know. Had to. He owed it to her … to himself.

“Yes, he comes to New York. He’s been here with me.”

“He stays in your apartment?” He suddenly remembered her saying that they had lived together. My God, how could she?

“Yes, Edward. In my apartment.”

“Kezia … is he … is he …” He wanted to know if this was someone decent, respectable, not some fortune hunter, or … or “tutor,” but he simply couldn’t ask, and she wouldn’t have let him. Edward felt as though he was on the verge of losing her forever. “Kezia….”

She looked at him then with tears on her cheeks and quietly shook her head. “Edward … I … I can’t do this today. I’m sorry.” She kissed him gently on the cheek then, picked up her handbag, and slid to her feet. He didn’t stop her. He couldn’t. He merely watched her retreat toward the door and clenched his hands very tightly for a moment before signaling for the check.

In the bitter cold of the winter afternoon, she rode the subway to Harlem. Alejandro was the only one who could help. She was beginning to panic. She had to see him.

She walked quickly from the subway to the center, oblivious of how she looked in the long red Paris coat and the full white mink hat. She didn’t give a damn how she looked. On the streets where she slalomed between garbage cans and scampering children, they looked at her as if she were a strange apparition, but the wind was bitingly cold and there was snow in the air. No one had time to be bothered. They left her alone.

There was a girl in Alejandro’s office when Kezia arrived, and they were laughing. Kezia paused in the doorway. She had knocked, but their laughter had muffled the sound.

“Al, are you busy?” It was rare that she called him by the nickname Luke used.

“I … no … Pilar, will you excuse me?” The girl bounced from the chair and scraped past Kezia with a look of wonderment in her eyes. Kezia looked like a vision fresh out of Vogue, or someone in a movie.

“I’m sorry to break in on you like this.” Her eyes looked agonized beneath the white fur.

“It’s all right. I was … Kezia?”

She had crumbled into tears in front of his eyes, and now she stood there, broken, holding out both arms, her handbag askew on the floor, the last of her control dissolved.

“Kezia … pobrecita … babe … take it easy …”

“Oh Christ, Alejandro…. I can’t stand it!” She let herself fall into his arms and buried her face on his shoulder. “What can we do? They’re going to take him back. I know it.” She sniffed and pulled away to see his eyes. “They will, won’t they?”

“They might.”

“You think they will too, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do, godammit. Tell me! Somebody tell me the truth!”

“I don’t know the truth, damn you!”

She was shouting and he was shouting still louder. The walls seemed to echo with what they had both penned up—fear and anger and frustration.

“Yeah, maybe they will take him back. But for chrissake, lady, don’t give up till they say it. What are you going to do? Let yourself die now? Give him up? Destroy yourself? Wait till you hear, for chrissake, then figure it out.” The room had been full of his voice and she could hear tears creeping up on him too, but she was quiet. He had brought her back to her senses, to a point of control.

“Maybe you’re right. I’m just so fucking scared, Alejandro. I don’t know what to do to hang on anymore…. I get this rising panic like bile in my guts.”

“There’s nothing you can do, except try to be reasonable and hang in. Try not to panic.”

“What if we run away? Do you think that they’d find him?”

“Yes, eventually, and then they’d kill him on sight. Besides, he’d never do that.”

“I know.” He came close to her again and held her in his arms. She was still wearing the coat and fur hat and her face was streaked with mascara and tears. “The worst of it is that I don’t know what to do to help him, how to make it easier for him. He’s under so damn much strain.”

“You can’t change that. All you can do is stand by him. And take care of yourself. It’s not going to help anyone if you fall apart. Remember that. You can’t give up your whole life for him, or your sanity. And Kezia … don’t give up yet Not till they say the word, if they do, and not even then.”

“Yeah.” She nodded tiredly at him and leaned back against the desk. “Sure.”

“I didn’t know you were a quitter.”

“I’m not.”

“Then don’t act like one. Get your shit together, woman. You’ve got a rough road ahead, but nobody said it was the end of the road. It isn’t to Luke.”

“Okay, mister big mouth, I get your point.” She tried to muster a smile.

“Then start acting like you ain’t going to quit. That big dude loves you one hell of a lot.” And then he walked back to her and hugged her again. “And I love you too, little one … I do too.” Tears started to squeeze from her eyes again and she shook her head at him.

“Don’t be nice to me, or I’ll cry again.” She laughed through her tears and he rumpled her hair.

“You’re looking mighty fancy, lady, Where’ve you been? Shopping?” He had just noticed.

“No. To lunch with a friend.”

“It couldn’t have been heroes and Cokes from the look of it.”

“Alejandro, you’re nuts.” But they shared the moment of honest laughter, and he reached for his coat on the back of the door.

“I’ll take you home.”

“All the way downtown? Don’t be silly!” But she was touched at the thought.

“I’ve done enough here for one day. Want to play hooky with me?” He looked young as he made the offer, his eyes dancing, his smile that of a playful boy.

“As a matter of fact, that sounds just fine.”

They walked away from the center arm in arm, her red coat linked with his drab army surplus jacket and hood. He gave her a squeeze and she laughed into the warm eyes. She was glad she had come up to see him. She needed him, differently but almost as much as she needed Luke.

They got off the subway at Eighty-sixth Street and stopped in one of the German coffeehouses for a cup of hot chocolate “mit schlag”: great clouds of whipped cream. An oom-pah-pah band was doing its best, and outside, Christmas lights were already blinking hopefully. They said nothing of the revocation, but talked of other times. Christmas, California, his family, her father. It was funny; she had thought about her father a lot lately, and wanted to share it with someone. It was so hard to talk to Luke now; every conversational path led them back to the tangled emotional maze of the revocation.

“Something tells me you’re a lot like your father, Kezia. He doesn’t sound all that much of a conformist either, if you scratch the surface a little.”

She smiled at the melting whipped cream on her hot chocolate. “He wasn’t. But he had a nice way of pulling it all off, judging from what I’ve been told and what I remember. I suspect he wasn’t as compelled to make choices.”

“Those were different times. He didn’t have the same choices. That might have had something to do with it. What’s your trustee like?”

“Edward? He’s lovely. And solidly to the bone everything he was brought up to be. And I think he’s lonely as hell.”

“And in love with you?”

“I don’t know. I never gave it much thought. I don’t think he is.”