I have completely forgotten about his bizarre text messages from earlier in the afternoon. I turn and stare at him. "What is wrong with you? What are you talking about?"

"For the bedding," he says. His eyes are dancing. "It was the nurse's idea-sort of a fresh start."

I continue to look at him like he is crazy, and then I open my mouth to ask again what he means.

"Shh," he whispers, placing a finger gently over my mouth. "Just enjoy the sunset."

I turn in silence back to the ocean view but find myself distracted. White or pink? My mother's favorite colors. And, like me, she loves flowers. What nurse?

The sun drops below the horizon, and Jeff takes the empty wine glass from my hand. He sets it down on the terrace with his own. "Come with me," he says and leads me back into the bedroom.

On the wall to our right is a large bay window, presently covered with an ugly beige contractor's sheet. I had not noticed the opaque fabric earlier, but now I realize that it obstructs the view to the house next door, the one with the "PENDING" sign in the front yard.

My mind begins to race, and I feel a chill run down my spine. White or pink. For the bedding. The nurse's idea. Once we move in, we can bring her to a closer place. PENDING. I glance at Jeff and he chuckles. I glance back toward the covered window.

"You didn't!" I say, racing to the window. I tear down the contractor's sheet and stare blankly in disbelief. Jeff casually steps up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, gently locking his fingers around my stomach.

Across a lovely strip of our backyard garden, I can see over our fence into the side yard beyond it. A middle-aged woman in hospital scrubs is relaxing in a cozy sitting area that graces the yard. She is reading a magazine.

Sitting next to the woman is my elderly mother.

The woman looks up at us and then takes my mom's hand and points up to our window, waving my mother's hand for her as someone would do with a small child. My mom smiles with recognition and says something to her companion, and Jeff waves back. He then mimics the motion of my mother's new nurse by taking my hand and moving it to wave.

"Hi, Mom," he says quietly into my ear.

"I don't believe it," I say, still stunned. "You bought the house next door. And you put my mom up in it with a private nurse."

"I know they were big decisions for me to make by myself, but I wanted it all to be a surprise. The nurse came highly recommended by John and several of his colleagues. I hope you don't mind."

"Mind?" There are tears welling up in my eyes. "This is the most considerate and generous thing anyone has ever done for me."

As it turns out, it is also the first instance of The Game in our relationship.

It was like hearing a voice from beyond the grave. Except that Jeff was not in a grave and the message was not a voice. It was a simple strip of text in a white bubble on a handheld device.

The text read: Trust nobody. Her 2.

I thought I was being so careful. I was not. Already, I had been too trusting. I had invited a stranger to Herculaneum and then to Pompeii. Dante Giordano saw what I was investigating. I told him Jeff had cancer. I told him details.

I vowed not to make the same mistake a second time.

So I climbed out the bathroom window.

"White," "Maybe pink," and "With flowers."

These words eventually lead me to discover my husband's grand gesture of purchasing the house next door, allowing my mother to live in perfect comfort with a nurse and allowing me finally to see her every day.

The confusing texts, sent to me completely out of context, initiate The Game for the first time.

I quickly learn that when Jeff talks to me like he has lost his mind, the apparent nonsense he is speaking is actually a punch line. It is up to me to deduce the story that led to it.

As our relationship grows, The Game becomes our favorite intellectual pastime. It becomes increasingly elaborate over the next four years as we each concoct new ways to one-up the other.

The Game is like a private variation of Jeopardy, with carefully selected answers given to provoke a question, and it is like a treasure hunt in reverse. The first clue provides the very end of the mystery. The goal is to drive the puzzle back to the beginning. At the beginning, there will be a surprise.

I knew Jeff's habits as well as I knew my own. Jeff would never have written anything as grammatically incorrect as "Trust nobody. Her too." Jeff would freely type "LOL," "ROFL," "WTF," or any of the acronyms that digital-age text conversation dictated. But had he meant what this particular text message implied, he would have abbreviated his thought "Trust nobody. Her either."

This discrepancy in semantics was precisely how I knew the message was from him. He was referring to something else entirely.

HER2 is the name of a protein associated with breast cancer. In recent months, Jeff and I had started up a program to develop a drug against HER2. We trusted nobody with it.

Targeting HER2 is a double-edged sword. While current therapies against the protein show promise and can powerfully combat breast cancer in many patients, the drugs also carry FDA-mandated warnings for toxicity.

In addition to its role in cancer, the HER2 protein is essential to the normal function of heart cells, and treatment of cancer patients with HER2-targeted therapies can lead to severe cardiac toxicity. Thus, in choosing to take a HER2-targeted drug, a breast cancer patient must decide whether to risk a potentially fatal heart malfunction in order to combat the cancer. Without treatment, however, the cancer patient is likely to die.

When Jeff and I began the program, the risks and potential benefits of targeting the HER2 protein were well established. Our idea was not. We hoped to engineer a new superheavy isotope that would act only in the breast cancer niche, thus targeting the cancer cells while leaving the cardiac cells untouched. We knew the risks we were taking in advancing our program, which was radically different from others already underway and thus completely without precedent.

So we kept our fledgling project under wraps, not even involving our colleagues or employees. The HER2 work was a private effort, solely between Jeff and me.

The reference to HER2 was clear proof to me that the text message had indeed come from Jeff himself and that it was intended for me. It was a brilliant way for him to send a private message to me while also providing the messenger with a red herring.

Trust nobody. Her 2.

Trust nobody.

Dante Giordano waited for nearly twenty minutes before finally stopping a woman coming out of the restroom. He spoke to her, and she shook her head. When she walked away, he stepped inside the women's restroom himself.

I watched from a shop across the mall. On my head was a new hat, over my eyes a pair of sunglasses, and wrapped around my shoulders a new shawl-all hastily purchased following my covert re-entry into the mall.

When Dante came back out of the restroom, he did not appear to notice me. I waited a moment and then followed him.

He stared mostly at the ground, shaking his head mildly as he exited the main doors of the crystalline mall. I followed him for what seemed like nearly a mile.

When Dante finally left the streets behind, it was to ascend a stone staircase into an old building. I watched him go through the heavy iron doors, and I waited for them to close before approaching. I looked up at the building. I was at the University of Naples.

He had been telling the truth. He was a student.

I tore my eyes away from the faade of the university building and reviewed the text message once again.

Trust nobody. Her 2.

Why didn't you send me a message I could use? Why didn't you write me a letter?

The questions answered themselves. Because Jeff knew that the cancer was not the only threat to his life. Because he could not hide a message in a place where he was sure I would be the one to find it. And because nobody could be trusted to deliver it to me.

But he did trust somebody to deliver it to me.

The man at Castel dell'Ovo was absolutely unfamiliar to me. I was certain I had never met him. Yet, he followed me. He called me by name as I stumbled backward on the castle terrace. He told me he had a message from Jeff. He was reaching for something as I threw myself into the water. I had assumed it was a gun.

It now occurred to me that it might have been a cell phone.

I withdrew Jeff's iPhone from my purse and clicked into the mysterious text message again. I replied: Who are you?

The response came through almost immediately: Is he dead?

A chill crawled over me. I had no idea how to respond. As it turned out, I did not have to. While I paused to gather my wits and compose a response, a second message came through: Katrina meet me at Stazione Circumvesuviana now.

Fifteen minutes later, I entered the train station where I had first noticed the man looking at me. I saw him immediately. He was easy to spot because he was wearing the same touristy shorts and T-shirt that he had been wearing the previous evening.

"Who are you?" I demanded again as I approached him. "Why did you ask me if he was dead?"

The man's bearded face revealed neither malice nor sympathy. In fact, the total lack of emotion was unnerving.

In broad daylight and at close range, I could see how lined his face was. He was probably close to my age, but life had not been kind to him.

When he spoke, his voice was heavily accented, but all too clear. "Because when he dies, I get a lot of money."

The mysterious bearded Italian turned and charged briskly out of the train station without speaking again. With no choice, I followed, almost running to keep up.

The crowd from the train station thinned as he led me down a small side street and into an alley. The crowd thinned even more, and I wondered where he was taking me. Rickety balconies strewn with laundry overhung the alley. The air was stale from the piles of garbage outside of the meager homes. The occasional stray dog looked up with mild interest as we passed, but there were no longer any other humans in sight.

We reached the end of the alley and turned left, only to follow another narrow alley. This man could be leading me anywhere, I thought. The warning from the text message echoed once again through my mind, but then, to my relief, I began to hear the sounds of people. As we came upon a group of parked cars, the welcomed sounds of civilization intensified. Finally, we came to a cross street wide enough to support moving traffic, and the chaos of Naples resumed in full.

The street opened up into a large piazza. The tall bell tower of a church rose above the other buildings in the square. This was where he was leading me.

"Santa Maria del Carmine," the man announced abrasively as I followed him into the church. We passed through its dilapidated walls and out into a monastic central cloister, and my initial confusion began to fade as I came to realize why he was showing me this place.

The central cloister was serving as a makeshift homeless shelter. Several ragged men and women occupied sleeping bags lined up along its walls. Stolen carts from the Galleria Umberto I were filled with sparse, miscellaneous belongings ranging from blankets to board games held together with frayed bungee cords. When we entered the area, I felt like an intruder, like I had just barged into a stranger's apartment without knocking. But my mysterious companion seemed, literally, at home.

"I live here," he said with his heavy accent, confirming what I had just begun to suspect. "I sleep over there." He pointed to an empty mattress topped with a crumpled blanket.

Aghast, I looked at him again. This was the man with whom Jeff had entrusted a final message for his wife?

The man's shorts and T-shirt were faded, but not noticeably dirty. Regardless, they were clearly secondhand. While this man was not a tourist, he may have been wearing a tourist's former attire-clothing that had been discarded by a traveler who decided it was not worth carrying on the remainder of his trip. Or perhaps it was donated by a local. I realized now why he was wearing them again, why he had not changed his clothes since the previous day.

The man's thick beard was not groomed. It appeared disheveled in a somewhat natural way, but not obviously unkempt. I could now see that his hands were dirty, but not so much as to call attention to himself. Only the lines around his eyes and across his forehead gave away the hard years behind him. So when he asked me again if Jeff was dead, the quiet optimism that shone in his eyes seemed out of place.

"How do you know my husband?" I asked.

"I don't. I just met him a few weeks ago."

"How?"

"He just showed up here. He came in and asked if anyone spoke English. Only a few of us did. He talked to each of us separately for a few minutes. I guess I got the job."

"What job? Why you?"

"I didn't ask why," he said. "I guess because I spoke good English and I'm not crazy like some of the others. I could talk to him. I could understand what he wanted, and I was capable of doing it."

"What did he want you to do?"

"He gave me a hundred euros to get my attention. Then he gave me your picture. He told me to watch for you at the Circumvesuviana train station. He told me, if I ever saw you, to give you a message. He gave me a cell phone and texted the message to it, to make sure I got it exactly right and also so I could contact him if I needed to. He told me that if you came to Naples and if I told you everything you needed to know, there would be fifty thousand more euros in his will for me."

"And you agreed to this? Why did you believe him?" I asked.

"It's not like I have very many things to do. I'm usually at the train station anyway. Besides, if there is one skill I have, it is reading people. I was sure he was telling the truth."

"But my husband was very young. Why would he leave money for you in his will instead of paying you in a timely manner for a job done?"

"Again"-and this time there was a hint of malice in his eyes-"I can read people. Your husband was rich. He was American. He walked into a church in Naples and begged a homeless man to help him. I agreed because he was desperate. He never told me how desperate, but I could see that I would not be waiting very long for the money. Your husband knew he was going to die."

"Is that the entire message?" I asked.

"That's it," he said. "I had no idea you had received the message until you texted me today from your husband's phone. Texting it back to him was an accident. But I was to show you the exact text message and then tell you how I met him and about our financial arrangement."

"Why didn't you just tell me the message? Why didn't you approach me at the train station when I first saw you looking at me? You scared the shit out of me when you followed me into the castle."

"Your husband was specific that you had to see it typed and that nobody else could know about it, so I had to speak to you absolutely alone. No privacy, no money. He made it clear that specification would be in the will.

"But by the time I got you alone," he said, "you were running from me. When we got to the terrace of the castle, away from those two kids you were following, I was planning to show you the message as he instructed. I had no idea you would jump over the wall.

"I have done everything your husband asked me to do. Now all I care about is my fifty thousand euros. Your husband said that everything would be taken care of, and I believed him. But if I were you, I would confirm that his will is in order according to our deal. If it is not, you should get out of Naples and not come back because Naples will no longer be safe for you if your husband did not live up to his word."

I felt my eyes flash at the matter-of-fact threat, and I could see from his stern expression that he meant it.

This time, I did not take the bus. Instead, I began walking. I followed the bus route I had now memorized, the one leading from Stazione Circumvesuviana toward my hotel. I knew it would be a long walk, but I needed to think.

Jeff solicited a complete stranger's help. He solicited a complete stranger who could not possibly be involved in whatever Jeff was running from. He solicited a stranger in Italy. He gave that man a message for me. He told him to watch the train station, the one from which trains leave for Pompeii. He knew that, if I came to Italy, I would follow him there.

Smart.

He knew that, if I came to Italy, I would be facing the same danger he was. And he knew that he would not be able to help me himself.

He solicited a stranger to help me.

Because he knew that if I came to Italy he would already be dead.

I snapped out of my thoughts and glanced up to get my bearings. Before me was an AT&T store. On a whim, I stepped inside and asked if there was any way to retrieve lost data from an iPhone.

The attendant laughed. "Of course there is!" he said in perfect English.

"What do you mean?"

"Madam," he said, his eyes twinkling with amusement, "every time you receive a phone bill, your recent activities are on it! All we need to do is pull your last bill, and you will see all of the numbers you have recently called or sent messages to and all of the numbers that have called you or sent you messages. This should provide a great deal of information. If you want more, we can go back into previous months. I can also provide you with unbilled activities, which will, of course, be the most recent."

It was so obvious that I felt stupid.

On one hand, I was relieved. But I was also mortified. Why hadn't the Apple store reminded me of this?