"And that's all right with you?" she said. Now she sounded angry. "You're going to let him kill you?"

I didn't answer. I let my eyes drift shut. The thing I'd tried not to see was in the front of my head now, and I was Rose Mae and Rose Mae was me, and neither of us wanted to unthink it.

An hour-long blink later, and Thom was there, holding a huge bright spray of wildflowers. His nose was swollen, and I felt instantly, savagely pleased. He looked at me with sorry, bad-dog eyes, ready to pet his Ro, as if she was still spread thick as putty over Rose Mae. He should have known better. We'd been married five years. I wondered how he could look at me, limp in my hospital bed, and not see he'd beaten his girl clean off me. I was Rose Mae Lolley, almost alone in a hospital bed, waiting to be released.

"Hey, baby," he said.

"Hey back," I said, and my voice came out rusty and weak. It didn't sound like the me I heard in my head. Thom heard my weakness as permission. He set the flowers down and came to sit in the chair by my hospital bed.

I'll never unlove you, Jim Beverly had said to me, once, twice, a thousand times. I saw my whole plan now, out loud in my head, and I accepted it, as easily as I accepted Thom picking up my limp hand and holding it.

Thom looked at me and I looked at the white pebbled ceiling until he asked, "Want me to put the game on?"

"Okay," I said. He let go of my hand to get the remote, and I slid it under the covers to hold its mate. He kept the sound down low. I lay in the bed, feeling how slowly time unfolded around us, feeling how little time mattered.

It hadn't even been ten years since Jim had last said those words to me. I'll never unlove you. I'll never unlove you. I found I still believed him. Thom turned and smiled at me, hesitant. I smiled, too, a glowing thing that made Thom's empty hands flex. I found I still believed him. Thom turned and smiled at me, hesitant. I smiled, too, a glowing thing that made Thom's empty hands flex.

"They got you on the morphine, huh?" he asked.

I didn't answer. I was smiling at Jim Beverly. I would track him down. I would remind him.

Thom said, "So we go ahead. With the plan." He still looked hesitant, almost timid.

"Oh, yes," I said, absent and smiling, not sure what plan he was talking about. I had my own. Jim Beverly had promised me long ago that he'd kill before he'd let anyone hurt me again.

"We'll talk about it when you're off the morphine," Thom said, turning back to the TV.

Nothing to talk about. Him or me, and I had chosen. I would find Jim Beverly, and I would see if his offer still stood.

PART II:

THE GIRL LEFT IN THE TOWER.

Amarillo, Texas, 1997

CHAPTER 7.

I WAS FLAT ON MY back in a hospital bed for three days, pressing the b.u.t.ton to flood my veins with morphine every time the machine counted down to zero and let me. The drug was pumped into my bloodstream through a tube, but after I pressed, it was as if I could see it coming down from the ceiling in icy chips of soothing white. They built up and blanketed me. I lay still and cool underneath, like a creature with no heartbeat, healing and waiting to reanimate. WAS FLAT ON MY back in a hospital bed for three days, pressing the b.u.t.ton to flood my veins with morphine every time the machine counted down to zero and let me. The drug was pumped into my bloodstream through a tube, but after I pressed, it was as if I could see it coming down from the ceiling in icy chips of soothing white. They built up and blanketed me. I lay still and cool underneath, like a creature with no heartbeat, healing and waiting to reanimate.

Long before the timer worked its way down to zero and allowed me a fresh dose, the pain would sharpen, and I would sharpen with it. It took all my concentration in those clear and aching moments to hold my wounded body still. I wanted to rise up, to smite the gla.s.s that covered the fire ax in the hall and take it up by the wooden handle. I would use it to lay waste to Thom's hale body and then hack my way through the wall of my hospital room and leap away into the blue like some teeny, slighted pagan G.o.ddess. I longed for the lovely echoes of the thunk that ax would make when it met flesh, for the feel of something rendable between my teeth.

I had to make my body rest, because right then, breathing in and out was painful. Leaping and smashing, h.e.l.l, even standing up straight was beyond me. I hunched and crept my way to the bathroom and back. I would fail, not out of sentiment and weakness, as I had when I was laying for him in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff, but simply because I didn't have the juice. Even wholly healed, my five-foot frame could not move so openly against him. So I waited and pressed the b.u.t.ton for more morphine to hold myself at bay.

While the drugs force-rested me, my mind wandered in an endless loop around and around one subject: How would I find Jim Beverly?

I didn't think about the why. I knew the why with a lovely, black clarity that was chafing hard at poor old Ro Grandee. She was in shreds and strings around me, a web of desperate tenderness for her Thom, trying to rebind me and hamper all the ways I was going to move. It was Ro who had given him a final out on my second day in the hospital.

I was quieted by drugs, blankly watching Thom's broad back as he walked away after his lunchtime visit. He was heading back to work. Ro's remains were sorrowing after him with every speck of energy she still possessed.

I heard myself say, "We should call it quits, Thom." The words fell out in Ro's soft tones, deliberately pitched to let him decide to hear or not, as he chose.

In less than a second he was back, bent over me with one huge hand on either side of my head, flattening the crackly hospital pillow, pushing into the mattress so my head tilted back to stare directly into his face. Half his mouth was pulled down, like he was stroking out, and the surface of his eyes looked so flat that I couldn't see myself reflected in them.

"You will not start this s.h.i.t again," he said. One hand moved to encircle my throat and he leaned in even closer, so I could smell coffee and sweet milk on his breath. "We're married. I will f.u.c.king end you."

He shoved himself up and away, using the pillow and my throat as launch pads. I watched him cross the room in long, loping steps. My mother's cards had told me plain that it would come to this. Him or me. One day soon, his rage would break its chain and come to kill me. If I slipped back inside the skin that was Ro Grandee, I would stay and waffle and find excuses for both of us until I was dead.

I listened to the stomping footprints as they moved down the hall and died away, and then I said, "I'm gonna choose you, baby." It came out loud and clear, a declaration to myself and what was left of her.

Then I watched the numbers on the machine count down, time leaking away. When they said zero, I pressed the b.u.t.ton. For a few hours, morphine boxed up the whole mess of my marriage and put it away like a never-to-be-finished jigsaw puzzle. It pressed me lower and lower, into my loop of endless longing. How to find Jim Beverly? I didn't think beyond that, not even to what Jim would be like now and what methods would best win him to my cause and what harm he might actually inflict on Thom, who had four inches and forty pounds on the boy Jim had been the last time I had seen him.

I didn't even think about where I might go after, and whether Jim would be there with me. I did not imagine us holding hands and skipping into the muddy sunrise of a rainy morning. This was choosing, not romance. Jim was a tool, much like my Pawpy's gun, and I'd find a way to aim him when the time came. Guns and men had always been the things I worked best. Guns had already failed me.

I concentrated solely on looking for a way to track a boy who had disappeared himself so thoroughly that his own overdevoted mother and the state cops had failed to find him. He'd left me near the end of our senior year, during a week when we'd been technically broken up. Ever since the night Jim and I had shared stolen whiskey, trying to understand what fueled my father's love affair with drinking, I'd refused to be with him if he had even a sip of something alcoholic. It wasn't only that I wouldn't be his girlfriend. I wouldn't be in a room with him.

He used the days when we separated to catch up on the benders that were his right and privilege as a star quarterback in Alabama. I suspected he got caught up on his rightful share of tail, too, but I never asked. Jim drinking was not the Jim I wanted, and those days did not belong to me.

His last night in Fruiton, he got crazy wasted at a party. I was at home, trying to be small and good and quiet, a mouse in the house, so as not to rile my daddy. In two days or three, I fully expected Jim to show up at my house with his head set to a c.o.c.ky angle. He'd say, "Hey, Rose-Pop," like nothing had happened. I'd say, "Hey yourself," and look mad until he scuffed one foot in the dirt, sheepish, and said, "Aw, h.e.l.l, Rose, I got out of hand. Come on down off the porch, and let me buy you a cherry c.o.ke? A root beer float? Hot cocoa? Nothing says I'm sorry like a beverage with a lot of sugar in it." I'd shake my head with fond exasperation, come down, and take his hand. We would be us again, and that would be that.

Instead, sometime after midnight, Jim crashed his Jeep into a pole. He walked away from the accident, leaving a trail of beer foam and angry footprints stamped deep into the dirt as he made his way back to the highway. A couple of pa.s.sing drivers saw him hitchhiking, his thumb pointing away from town. He disappeared himself, a brilliant magic trick, emphasis on trick, and it had been played on me.

I couldn't make sense of it. I wandered Fruiton High blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending. Then it had come out that Jim was failing his senior year and would lose his scholarship to UNA. He'd lost almost everything, and he'd walked away from me, the one thing he should have been certain of, the one thing that was still his. Not forgivable. The day after I turned eighteen, I had done the Greyhound bus version of Jim's. .h.i.tchhike out. I'd disappeared, too, never to be found.

In the lovely, morphine-covered landscape where I lay, looking for a path to him, it dawned on me that I hadn't disappeared, after all. I'd tried, but I had been found. My mother had found me.

Her presence at the airport was not merely a hideous coincidence. She had come to Amarillo specifically because I lived here; she'd come to put her eyes on me. She'd sat low in the coffee shop across the parking lot to watch me pimp Joe Grandee's guns, or crouched down in a rented car on my street, watching me bend and dig in my garden. She could have been making Amarillo pilgrimages for years now. No way to tell. The only certainty was that she knew I was there long before I caught her at that airport. The proof was at Cadillac Ranch. She had left a message on the cars a day before our eyes had met.

I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!

She'd left it to soothe her conscience and invoke her favorite saint in a place where she could be 99 percent certain I would never find it. But in coming to my city, she'd left a speck of working room for whatever minor saint was in charge of chance meetings and graffiti. He was on my side, no doubt t.i.ttering on my shoulder as he brought me to the airport in perfect time to catch her leaving me again.

The only question that mattered now was, how had she found me? Because if I could be found, then so could Jim Beverly.

The hole my own slivered rib had stabbed into my lung resealed itself. The hospital pulled my pretty morphine tube, and I started a new, less intense romance with Percocet. I was still bad off, but I could breathe, so they released me.

Thom drove me back to the house, bracing me in the seat with pillows and taking it easy on the curves. Once we got home, he put one arm close to his own side and bent it at the elbow, so his forearm was a ballet bar I could cling to as we made our way from the car back to our bedroom. I creaked my way down the hall like a granny, trying to walk in a way that favored my hurt places. There weren't enough working pieces of myself to take up the slack, so I had to favor Thom.

He helped me lower myself into the bed, plumping up a ridge of pillows behind me so I could see the TV if I wanted. He gave me the remote, the book I'd been reading, and another pill to wash down with a cool cup of water from the bathroom. He reached to smooth my long hair away from my face, but something in my gaze paused him. He took his hand back. Wise move.

"I'll tell my dad you're still under the weather this week. He can get Kelsey to cover your shifts," he said, sweet as sugar cereal. He was treating me like something breakable, which is different from how you treat something you yourself have broken.

I let my body lie in our bed like it was a hole-covered log, waiting for squirrels and spiders to find it and nest. Only Gretel came, flopping down with her spine a solid line of warming comfort against my calf, my faithful napping partner. Thom brought me hot cereal and scrambled eggs in the morning, Cup-a-Soups with crackers and sliced cantaloupe at night. Invalid food, with Percocet for afters. I ate it without tasting, mending through the tick of each long second, and my mind spun in a circle like a lazy Susan with a single idea on it: How did my mother find me, a thing that deliberately went and got itself lost?

When Thom came to bed, we lay on our own sides, both flat on our backs. My cold will was a ridge of Puritan pillows running in between us. But the fourth night, my body had healed enough to turn and shift without pain waking me. I fell asleep, and Ro Grandee crept over, seeking her husband's heat. He came to her as he always had. We woke up face-to-face, our pieces tangled and tucked around each other. I unwound my limbs and took them back without looking at him. He let me go.

Thom posed little threat in these days. He was ashamed and yet so sated that it was like a bloat, making him sweet as he tended to my body, his favorite toy. He worked to heal it, same as I was, readying it for rough play. I was safe with Thom; right now, Ro Grandee was the danger.

I was back in her house, with the pretty ocean blue coverlet and sheers she'd picked, her willow-patterned china in the kitchen, the remnants of her light perfume tainting the air of the bathroom. I'd lived inside her familiar, comfortable skin for years, until it was me, until I had no choice in it. But to let myself be Ro again now was suicide, the only irrevocable sin. The drugs that held me back in the hospital were holding me too still in her territory. I felt her as a creep, growing on back over me like fungus. It could not be allowed.

When Thom brought my breakfast on a tray, I handed him back the Percocet and said, "Could you bring me a couple, three Motrin, please? And a great big cup of coffee?"

I downed the coffee and ate every bite of my cheese eggs. Thom left for work, and I could feel myself waking up, truly waking, as last night's pill spent itself in my bloodstream and was replaced by the caffeine. The first thing I realized was that I was filthy, covered in a waxy coat of my own mank. My hair was limp and greasy. I creaked to my feet and took a long shower, scrubbing myself so hard that it was like being peeled. I made the water scalding hot. When I got out, I was pink under my fading bruises.

I opened the closet and got an eyeful of Ro's swirly skirts in springtime colors. Sweet flats with bows and buckles and embroidered daisies. Clingy lightweight sweaters, all long-sleeved. I slammed the closet door, as repulsed by these things as if they had been hand-sewn from human skin. I went to my dresser instead and dug out a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of the old Levi's that I wore on heavy cleaning days.

The jeans were pale blue and baby soft from a thousand washings, and they sat easy against my bruises. My rib cage pinged as I shifted, and I could tell by how the jeans fit that I'd gone barn-cat scrawny. Still, I felt whole and ready for movement, but only from the neck down. My wet hair was a heavy reminder, pulling at my sore scalp. I dried it on cool, then I bundled it away into a low ponytail and braided it. It still felt like the braid had a barbell tied to the end. I pulled it over my shoulder, where it hung past my breast, heavy and hers.

I didn't want it touching me. I wanted none of Ro's things touching me, and the long hair my husband loved felt like a most offensive bit of Ro-ness. I strode to the kitchen and yanked my meat shears out of the butcher-block knife rack on the counter. I thought I could lop that braid off in one fell swoop, but it was too thick. I had to squeeze the handles open and shut and saw at it with the blades to get it off of me. Finally the last connecting hairs yielded, and the braid slithered down my back to the floor. My head felt so suddenly light that it was like being dizzy.

The braided cable of hair looked like a long, glossy pet that had coiled up at my feet. It was sleek and dark, more than a foot long, so thick that I doubted I could get my finger and thumb wrapped all the way around it. I looked down at it and felt no remorse. I felt no connection to it at all. It was nothing more than a brown black rope that Thom could d.a.m.n well never hang me from again.

I picked up the braid and walked back to the bathroom. I think I meant to put it in the trash, but I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stopped. I was ten pounds too thin and two shades paler than paper. My shorn hair hung around my face in a ragged tangle, longer on the right side than the left. I had kaleidoscope eyes, spinning with a hundred different colors of pure, naked crazy. For the first time in years, I was face-to-face with Rose Mae Lolley. Even my clothes were hers, faded and ill used enough to have been found in a church box. I was cold all over, predatory, and it showed in my face. Every line of my body said, Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good. Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good.

I'd been Rose Mae in accidental flashes over the years, most recently in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff. This was the face Jim Beverly had seen, I felt certain, that night we got drunk and ran through the woods, and the rustle of ferns and branches was the crack and snap of tiny bones. Thom knew this face, too. It had been reflected in the mirror of his gaze the first night I met him, back when I was slinging eggs and corned-beef hash at Duff's Diner. Stirring spit into his date's drink had been a stopgap measure to keep me from boiling half her face off with a pot of scalding coffee. He'd known what he was getting, same as I had. But those were forays, a creature taking peeks and darts out of its pretty, placid home.

In the mirror I was as ugly and iridescent as a de-sh.e.l.led hermit crab, fleshy and exposed. I hadn't been this nakedly myself since the morning I left Fruiton, Alabama.

When Jim left me, it was as if he'd ripped my skin off and toted it down the highway with him. The very air stung me. I wandered the halls of my school drugged with loss and rage. I stopped turning in my work. Tests were pa.s.sed out, and I sat through them, not even lifting my pencil. It was all I could do to hold myself still with the air and sunshine touching the raw and blinking object that I was. Graduation came, and I sat home through it, knowing I had flunked and not caring. I sat through summer like it was a prison sentence.

I thought I might hear from Jim on my birthday. I held myself afloat with the idea: He would call. He would tell me-and only me-where he was. He would say he'd only been waiting for me to turn eighteen, so that no one could come looking for us.

The day came, and the phone stayed silent. Then my father clocked me a good one for the high crime of walking to the kitchen, my back to him, when he was thinking he might speak to me. Kidney shot. I lay on the floor where he had put me, and I understood that Jim would not rescue me. If I stayed in Fruiton, this was my life. This was all I could be. No dear and worthy girl could be rebuilt under my father's fists.

I packed a canvas duffel bag and slept a fitful few hours until the Greyhound station opened. Daddy was pa.s.sed out on the sofa, dreaming like a dog with his bare feet hanging off the edge and twitching as he chased down rabbits or naughty daughters. I had a little money of my own, but I decided that final punch would cost him the nine dollars in his wallet as well as the sacred "whiskey twenty" he kept in his bedside table for emergencies.

There was leftover Tuna Helper in the fridge and half a pan of mac 'n' cheese, too. It could be days before he ran out of things to microwave and realized I was gone. I wanted him to realize sooner.

There was a big print of ships in a harbor hanging above the sofa, over Daddy. It had been my mother's. As a girl, I used to pretend she'd stepped into it and gotten on a ship and gone someplace that I could follow, the way Lucy and Edmund had floated across a painted ocean back to Narnia. I was grown up now, and I understood she left on purpose, through the front door. I was about to follow her lead.

I looked at the print, all that deep blue water hanging over Daddy's head. I thought about the gas can in the carport, how it would slosh, unwieldy, if I lifted it and carried it back here. It was more than half-full because Daddy never fed the mower. It was cool inside our small brick house in the hour before dawn. A fire sounded nice.

Instead I turned myself, went to his room, and I stole his pistols. I took Pawpy's both for protection and as a punishment; it was just about the only thing of Pawpy's Daddy had. I took both his newer ones to hock, as if they were my rightful dowry. I'd have taken his deer gun, too, but it didn't fit down in my duffel.

My last act was to dig a shedding Crayola paintbrush out of my childhood toy box. I took a coffee mug to the neighbor's yard and scooped up a generous cupful of the dog c.r.a.p that had leaked out from their dyspeptic standard poodle. I took these tools back to the sofa and used them to write, "Later, Gater," onto the hanging print of ships at harbor. The ships and the docks were brown, and the sea was a storm dark blue. The words were hard to see, and I wondered how long he would stagger around the house, hung over and gagging, checking his shoes and sniffing and cussing, before he found my billet-doodoo.

Considering he was pa.s.sed out helpless, considering that I had a swollen kidney and two loaded guns, considering how raw I was, he was d.a.m.n lucky that was all I did. If he had stirred, if he had so much as cracked an eye, he would have seen the face that I was seeing in the mirror now. If he'd said the wrong word to me in that moment, then as sure as G.o.d made all the pretty fishes, I'd have put a hole in him.

I reached out and touched the mirror, disbelieving. The girl inside the gla.s.s reached at the exact same time, raising her hand on her side to meet mine, fingertip to fingertip. The gla.s.s was showing me an accurate reflection, showing me that she-I-was way too easy to read. I had to camouflage myself.

I rummaged through Ro's flowered handbag to find the keys to my hand-me-down Buick. I drove downtown, still clutching the coil of my hair, to a place called Artisan Salon and Day Spa. I knew Charlotte Grandee paid this place a small fortune to keep her hooves sanded down and her gray covered. I had never so much as stepped inside. Thrifty Ro got her split ends trimmed at a place called Mister Clips for eight meager dollars. I did my pedicures at home. Artisan wasn't a place we could afford, but that one glimpse in the mirror had told me a faked smile and some Maybelline blusher wouldn't cover half my sins. d.a.m.n the cost; Thom owed me this, and more. h.e.l.l, all the Grandees owed me. I circled Amarillo's small blocks until I found a parking s.p.a.ce that would hold my ancient tank of a car.

I walked into the ultramod reception room, and the lone blonde waiting to have her frosty tips refreshed gasped at the sight of me and looked away fast. One manicured hand raised itself involuntarily to touch her own thick curls, like she was scared whatever had happened to me might be catching.

I looked past her to the young man behind the apple green check-in station and said, "Do you take walk-ins?"

He looked up, his mouth already shaping the word no no, but when he saw me, his lips froze into a kissing shape around the unsaid word. I had the long rope of my former hair coiled around one wrist, and I lifted it and let it unfurl and dangle.

The air came out of him so fast that it made a woofing noise, and he said, "What did you do?" He sounded slightly awed.

"I had a bad idea," I said.

"I'll say," he agreed, fervent.

I was used to men looking at me, but not like this. I felt my eyebrows come together, and I blinked hard. "I'm not getting out of the house much, these days. I haven't..." I swallowed so loud that it sounded like gulping, and then I felt my mouth opening up again. "My husband died. Quite recently." Instantly I had to fight to keep an inappropriate grin from spreading across my face.

I had not spent my week on bed rest making up drug-induced, cheerful Disney-rip-off songs about a world with no Thom Grandee in it. My only thought had been how to find Jim. Test-driving widowhood with the salon's tanned G.o.dlet-style receptionist as my witness was my way of saying exactly and out loud why I was looking for my lost love. The boldness of it, the truth of it, moved through my body like a wave of black pleasure. It was the confirmation of a thing that had already been decided, a long time ago, in an airport. Maybe even by someone else.

The receptionist said, "This is clearly an emergency." He had big hazel eyes, shaped very round, with a down tilt to them that made them seem sadder for me than he probably was. "Let me see what I can do."

The blonde said, "Rexy, I am in a hurry today...," giving me a sidelong glance. It was the look a well-fed person who was enjoying an excellent cold lamb sandwich might give a homeless fellow or a hungry dog.

"Faye will be ready for you in five," Rexy told her. "Maybe four." He turned back to me and said, mostly for her benefit, "You, my dear, you are past what Faye can do. Miles past. I suspect you've crossed the border and left Faye-country altogether. You require Peter."

The blonde's eyebrows lifted and she looked me up and down, clearly wondering what made Rexy think I rated. I looked back, bottom lip atremble, and I made my eyes go big and soulful, like those single-teared orphans that get painted onto black velvet. Her gaze broke first. She picked up a glossy magazine and put it up in front of her face, a wall I couldn't climb over. It was Architectural Digest Architectural Digest, and Charlotte Grandee got that chichi rag every month. I realized this blond thing probably knew Charlotte. They certainly looked of a set, and this was Charlotte's spa.

I wasn't worried, though. I currently looked nothing like the pretty Ro Grandee in the wedding photo at Charlotte's house, and the G.o.dlet hadn't asked my name. If I so much as whispered the word Grandee Grandee, though, I had no doubt this blond creature would be on the phone with Charlotte before the door had closed entirely behind me. She'd be delighted to reveal that Charlotte's low-rent Alabama daughter-in-law had been seen poor meing her way into Artisan via the fictional death of her eldest boy. I might enjoy that, actually. But it would be tempting fate to let Thom's mother hear this fiction right before I made it fact.

Rexy came back and said to me, "Follow me now, hon." The blonde made a huffy throat noise, and Rexy gave her a s.h.i.t-eating grin, his teeth as white and square as peppermint Chiclets. "Faye will come for you in bare seconds, Sheila. She has sworn."

I followed him through the archway down a long moss green hallway lit by wall sconces. There were doorways on both sides, some closed with signs on them that said things like "Shhh... Ma.s.sage in process!" and "Aromatherapy Room."

I whispered, "I'm sorry about..."

"Pish, Sheila? Bottle blondes on the wrong side of forty need us more than we need them, believe it. She's about sixty percent s.p.a.ckle as it stands."

I chuckled, but now I was thinking about how much folks like to bond over a bit of gossip, how nasty good it could feel to talk ugly about outsiders with your own kind. That must be how my mother had found me. She'd asked her own kind.

Fruiton was a small town, and if a single person had seen me toting my gun-stuffed duffel bag to the Greyhound station at dawn, stomping away from the remains of my life, then the whole town as good as knew. The right people, if asked, would have been happy to relay this information to her.

I followed Rexy all the way to the back, to a more brightly lit, deeper green room with a gleaming sink and a sleek black stylist's chair. He presented me to a short, slim man beside it who looked way too young to be cutting hair.

"This is Peter. I leave you in his capable hands," Rexy said.

Peter's hair was an artful tousle of multishaded gold. Up close, I could see fine lines mapped around his eyes and two deep creases framing his full lips, so he had to be at least into his thirties.

He looked at me and tsked, then said to Rexy's back, "You weren't exaggerating." He walked forward and circled me, then reached down and grabbed the braid I was still holding in the middle. He lifted it without taking it out of my hand, feeling the weight. Then he let the hair go and touched the ragged ends where I'd cut it off, his soft fingers brushing my cheek. I found myself leaning into the touch like a petting-hungry stray cat.