MIRROR, MIRROR

Kevin Sharp was twenty-seven when he fulfilled the fairly commonplace, and generally calculating ambition of many by marrying the boss’s daughter.

Despite the manifest advantages of such an alliance, this particular coupling was in fact precipitated by an element not all that often found in marriage and almost unheard of in one so ostensibly expedient. Simply, this deviation from the norm consisted of a remarkably high degree of instant rapport between them, a promise of rare compatibility that was mutually detected at the moment of introduction. They were in tune at once, counterpointing each other with the effortless smoothness of a well-rehearsed musical duo, his laconic, slightly wry humour matched by hers. Apart from her more obvious attractions she was, Kevin was delighted to find, the first woman he had met capable of producing remarks which he would have been quite happy to have had credited to himself.

Physically, too, they were beautifully paired. She was fair; near-blonde, slender, and four inches shorter than his raven-haired five feet, eleven inches. Standing in a corner of the main studio, ignoring the innocuous drone of office party talk around them but always conscious of her father’s benevolently cautious eye aimed in their direction from the other side of the room, Kevin traded admiring stares and lightly bantering conversation with Moira Langley and amusedly wondered if falling in love could really be as painlessly simple as this.

Apparently it could. A fortnight after meeting they slept together, a relaxing, soothing liaison where they meshed, like two meticulously engineered components of the same machine. The following day they became engaged, two months later they were married.

Kevin had joined Langley, Labone & Partners as studio manager. They returned from their honeymoon to find George Langley sufficiently reconciled to the situation to elevate him to the level of a junior partnership, a step-up that was accompanied by the hint of even greater advancement in the future. Within eighteen months the company’s masthead had been amended to Langley, Labone, Sharp & Partners, a development that Kevin and Moira celebrated with a month in the Bahamas, pleasurably anticipating the further jaundiced scrutiny of their less solidly based contemporaries.

They were, understandably, the envy of their friends. Despite the fact that she was the boss’s daughter, their evenly floating relationship was so plainly genuine, so patently unforced, that it automatically became the focal point for the collectively wistful glances of those whose own marriages existed—or had already foundered—on rather more traditionally rocky terrain. Kevin and Moira knew it, were entertained by it, and mutually delighted in the lack of effort required to maintain this equilibrium.

They had been married for a little over three years when it suddenly dawned on Kevin that he was becoming unutterably bored by their relationship.

Dismayed and painful consideration soon told him why. Living with Moira was like living with his own reflection; endless posturing in front of a mirror that distorted the surface details of its resultant image while simultaneously preserving the true nature of its source. Predictable, Kevin thought dully, that was the word. It was as though his shadow danced in constant attendance, arriving at the same whim, the same conclusion, the same decision at exactly the same point in time. It was, in fact, a genuinely uncanny alliance that had been doomed to failure precisely because of their enviously observed similarities; a narcissistic, bruiseless existence that now appalled him with its promise of well-oiled infinity.

He could have tried arguing with her, employing deliberate provocation, but he shrank from that. Apart from the fact that it would be a kind of self-flagellation, there was always his position in the firm to be considered. He was a fully-fledged partner, but there was never any question that George Langley held the reins firmly in both hands and was perfectly capable of employing them in his direction should he have reason to suspect that he was in any way giving Moira a hard time.

The company was opening a branch in Los Angeles shortly after this stunning realisation hit him. To his relief, George Langley asked him to direct the operation during its initial stages, a task that was likely to keep him occupied for several months at least.

He and Moira had just purchased a new house in Bridgeport but hadn’t yet given a great deal of thought to the question of decorations and additional furniture. He persuaded her to stay behind and handle these herself, coupled with the promise that he would make it back each weekend.

It was a sensible arrangement, with no hint of anything other than a genuine desire to see that their new home was completed as soon as possible. It might even help in the long term, he told himself. Maybe the break will have a recuperative effect; absence makes the heart grow fonder, that kind of thing. The thought had an insubstantial feel to it, its hollow fragility mocking him as he kissed her goodbye and boarded the plane.

An hour after arriving, in Los Angeles, he met Lynne Craddock.

She had been hired by Langley during one of his preliminary scouting expeditions of the new territory, and he hadn’t known what to expect. Langley had described her as an ideal secretary for use at executive level, Kevin found a dark, faintly Spanish woman, with an apparently disciplined smouldering quality that he immediately found rather irritating. She was attractive, and her file of employment told him that she was a year older than him. Bitter, explosive type, Kevin decided sourly, and wondered why Langley had hired her instead of some cool, detached woman who would surely have been more suitable.

Maybe he had a secret taste for that kind of prickly exotica, Kevin shrugged, and got on with the multi-detailed business of organisation.

He found that working with her only increased his irritation. She seemed efficient, but she emanated an air of resentment in his presence, as though he was guilty of some undetectable—to him, at least—social failing that her own good manners forbade her from pointing out. Kevin bit back the sarcasm that he found regularly on the tip of his tongue, and maintained a curt impartiality that seemed the best way of handling such additional burdens to his already overloaded plate.

Late on the Friday, they were the last two in the office. They were checking estimates for equipment, another aggravating chore that should have been completed earlier in the week. Her excuses had been reasonable, but he had a plane to catch in little over an hour and was both exasperated and tired.

“Hell,” he said. He threw his stylus on the desk, from where it bounced out of sight to the floor. They had just compared figures for the third time, once more finding them differing by several hundred seemingly unaccountable dollars. He glared at the sprawl of papers in front of him, hating their impassive refusal to give up their secrets. “Look, this is getting just plain ridiculous, and I have to get to the airport. I’m going to have to ask you to work on these over the weekend and get them tied up by Monday morning”.

He sensed her stiffen.

He said, carefully, “I don’t like asking you to do this, you understand, but when all’s said and done they are your responsibility. If you’d only raised it in the middle of the week when we had—”

“You know as well as I do that it hasn’t been possible to get to them before this,” Lynne Craddock said, angrily. The smouldering quality was very near the surface now, could almost literally be felt. Kevin found himself loathing her with a tight-jawed, sinewy intensity. “And you damned well know the hours I’ve had to work to get things this far. In any case, why should it be my figures that are wrong? I know my own mathematical ability, but I certainly don’t know yours”.

She reached out a hand to pick up the sheet that held his own calculations. Furious, Kevin grabbed at her wrist.

It was like an explosion, the slamming together of two ingredients that remained only potentially dangerous as long as they were kept from direct physical contact with each other. He found that their eyes were locked, and that he was shaking, almost palsied.

“God”, he said, thickly. He stood and pulled her around the desk to him, feeling her reciprocal clawing the moment she was against him.

It was a ferocious, bruising encounter, one that was later continued at her apartment where he spent the night. There was none of the placidly pleasant, almost mathematically balanced activity that habitually took place between himself and Moira. This was urgent, hungry business, unlike anything that he had known before and seemingly insatiable.

The following morning he managed to get a cancelled booking on the New York flight. He left Lynne crying in a taxi outside the airport—a still-rational precautionary corner of his mind told him that such a place, even in a relatively strange city, was not an ideal site at which to be seen with an attractive and obviously distressed woman—and it was only when he and his fellow-passengers were somewhere over Kansas that the full implications of the situation hit him like a blow from a fist composed of solid ice.

He was married to the boss’s daughter, and now he had become inextricably involved with a member of the staff; a passionate, soul-wrenching relationship that he already knew would flatly refuse to be denied. During the past fourteen hours he had discovered depths of longing inside himself that he had never dreamed were there, coupled with an ability to stir emotions that was like a blinding revelation.

It was a hopeless situation. The ways open to them were grimly apparent, none of them offering an even half-satisfactory answer. He could, presumably, set up house with Lynne, sustaining the empty mockery that his marriage had become by sticking painfully to the already promised routine of returning home at the weekends, but it would be risky. And what about when the branch was established and he was required to return to New York to resume his duties there? She could give up her job and follow him, he supposed—he never doubted for a moment that she would be willing to follow such a course of action—but apart from the fact that it might possibly arouse suspicions among the L.A. staff, it just wouldn’t work.

He wanted her permanently, as his wife. He knew this with unswerving certainty, as surely as he knew that the sun rose daily in the east. He wanted to live with her, to watch the endless unfolding of points of contrast with himself, to share the daily miracle of being with her, his blood and imagination stirred by her presence. He thought, painfully, about his marriage, the dream that had only been a dream, now sliding smoothly down to drown in its own interminably boring lack of conflict.

There was divorce, of course, he thought about what this would mean, both from the business and social points of view. It would be death, on both counts. No outsider, seeing the sleek surface of his marriage, would accept that he was doing anything other than discarding the perfect, loyal partner to satisfy some lunatic passion, the act of an inherently unstable personality who would logically be a bad bet for really responsible employment.

Because he would have to look for a job, naturally. The moment divorce was mentioned, he’d be out on his ear, partner or no partner. And this might eventually destroy them.

He knew that it was possible for relationships to stay constant and even blossom in the face of such difficulties, but he was still enough of’ a pragmatist to seriously doubt that theirs would survive if subjected to too much in the way of deprivation. In itself it was a miracle, but it was an earth-bound miracle, composed of heat and flesh and emotional collision. It required, cushioning, conditions where it could rest and recuperate between the bouts of violence, both verbal and physical, that would surely be the endless stimulating pattern.

He was still warring with himself when the plane landed, Moira was there to meet him, cool, affectionate, pleased to see him in the way that one accepted a foregone conclusion. She made only a passing reference to the call that he had somehow remembered to make on the previous evening. He winced as he recalled it, desperately hoping that the guilt in his voice had been neutralised by distance and a thankfully indifferent line. As he kissed her smiling mouth, he wondered what his own face showed.

He struggled through what was left of the weekend somehow. Moira was initially talkative, producing fragments of fabric and details of colour schemes that she abandoned as soon as she sensed his out-of-kilter mood. He pleaded overwork, a reasonable explanation that she plainly accepted and which gave him the excuse to spend much of the time ostensibly dozing. He tried to hide his relief and mounting excitement as he kissed her goodbye and boarded the plane on the Monday morning.

He saw as little of Lynne as possible—during office hours, but as soon as they were finished, even before they left the building, it resumed, ravenous and compelling. His last reluctant hope for a return to unruffled normality vanished, and he knew that this was final, a binding contract that only an accident or death could destroy.

A routine was established, an uneasy, fretful compromise that he temporarily accepted. During office hours their initial reaction to each other continued, something that in itself was not difficult to maintain. Every evening that contained no business appointment he spent at her apartment.

These times of privacy only confirmed his belief in the permanency of their passion. He was alive at last, roused to a pitch of response and awareness that made his previous existence appear as a series of pale, detached shadows, insubstantially based on self-love and self-admiration. This was tangible by comparison, warm and solid, an environment from which he could look at the world and its wonders with freshly un-blinkered eyes.

They talked about Moira often, Lynne with bitter resentment and sometimes despair. Kevin with questing hopelessness. Despite the quality of their relationship he was essentially a non-violent person, and the restrictions that this automatically placed on his search for a solution meant that he baulked utterly at the idea of murder. It was something that happened every day something that a great many people got away with, but it was not for him. Oddly, he could imagine circumstances where he would kill Lynne, but not Moira. Moira was his mirror-image, essentially without passion in the way that he had come to understand it, but still a part of him. Lynne was an individual, emotional quicksilver with the violence never far below the surface and readily capable of igniting his own previously low-keyed responses.

The weekend trips back to Moira were purgatory, but he preserved what seemed to be an acceptable façade, most of the time managing to simulate something resembling nonchalant affection, Moira seemed much the same as ever; light, gay, full of plans for the house. There were periods when an unaccustomed touch, of timidity seemed to shadow her behaviour, but he found this an understandable reaction to his own occasional lapses into introspection. At such times he hated himself for what he was doing, but he was committed, the thought of Lynne clouding his mind and eyes so that he was virtually blind to his surroundings and the people in them, impatient only for the moment when he could be with her again.

He assumed on the evidence that Moira suspected nothing. He wondered what she would have done about it if she had hired a private investigator; he was sickened by the thought, picturing how such a course of action would inevitably distort its findings, reducing the relationship to something which could be made to look dirty and shameful if nothing but the cold facts were catalogued on paper.

It wasn’t a possibility that he took very seriously, but at one point in his thinking he did take it to the extent of mentally putting himself in Moira’s shoes. The answer was reassuring. If the reverse had been the case, if he’d had reason to suspect that Moira had established a similar relationship, the answer was that he would have done nothing about it. He would have waited, shaken, but confident that she would return after recognising her affair for what it must surely have been, a dalliance that could only temporarily ruffle the smooth surface of their marriage.

Poor Moira, he thought wryly, poor kid. If only she knew what had happened to him, the strength of the emotional upheaval that had turned him head-over-heels and which still had him spinning like some irrational perpetual motion machine.

Two and-a-half months after their initial physical encounter, Lynne told him that she was pregnant.

He received the news with something vary like calm acceptance. Although he and Moira had never produced children, something that neither of them had greatly cared about, the ultimate confirmation of his love for Lynne had been when he realised that this was an essential part of his feelings for her, the desire to father her child. If the will, he thought, was all too appropriately the parent to the deed, then this was another rock-solid certainty that all the precautions in the world would not have been able to prevent.

He also knew, regretfully, that he would have to kill Moira.

It was now the only way. If this conception had not taken place, it was at least on the cards that the present arrangement would have blundered fitfully along until the time of his permanent return to New York, when they might have worked something out. It had been a slim chance, but marginally possible.

But now his child was going to be born, a situation that changed everything. There could be no back-street upbringing, no fatherless infant whose mother was maintained by cheques from some shadowy benefactor. The alternatives offered by the adoption authorities and the abortionist never entered his mind. The child would grow up in a home with both a mother and father present, its own natural parents tending it through its vulnerable formative years.

He said, nothing to Lynne about his decision, but he was sure she knew and also that she didn’t care. The primitive part of her make-up, always present, was magnified to a degree where only the protection of her child and her feelings for him mattered, an instinctive withdrawal to essentials that he sensed were prepared to ignore the rules of law and society/

And it must be now, he told himself, while the resolve is strong. If he waited, too much thinking about it could undermine his nerve. No, he mustn’t hesitate. He and Lynne nodded a final goodbye to each other as he left for the airport that Friday afternoon, twin signal of decision that told him she understood and that she would be waiting for him.

He had only a casual interest in the daily quota of violence reported by the media, and crime fiction something that he read only occasionally. He was, in a sense, completely unfitted for such a venture, but this in itself was a kind of advantage. His normal attitude to such things was known to his acquaintance which meant that it was extremely unlikely that suspicion of any sort would be directed towards him on the social level.

There would be no reason why it should. The timing would have all the external appearances of an accident, one of those day-to-day fatalities that struck with sudden meaningless cruelty, with nothing but innocent grief to show for its passage.

There must, of course, be no hint that it could be anything other than this. If only the slightest untoward thing was noticed by some sharp-eyed observer it could all too easily become a matter for police investigation, and he knew what that meant. In such instances the husband immediately and quite understandably became the principal suspect, his private activities thoroughly investigated.

He must run no risk of any kind. However it was done, it would have to be uncomplicated; a safe, simple routine that required no careful memorising of a detailed plan or timetable. He remembered reading somewhere that cleverness of this kind often resulted in the cases that were the easiest to break down; the often brilliantly conceived webs of apparent accident or suicide and unshakeable alibi, that ultimately trapped their creators in the strands of their own ingenuity.

He had no intention of being snared in this way. When he did it, it would be direct, uncomplicated and final. And it would succeed, because it had to, ensuring that the chain of subsequent events betrayed no detectable connection.

It was impossible for Lynne and himself to be married when their child was born, but the circumstances of her own birth and situation had already inspired his draft scenario as to how this would eventually come about. Her mother, unmarried and alone, had died when she was only months old, and she herself had moved to Los Angeles from Tampico shortly before being employed by Langley, so had no real local intimates. Even with this promising foundation on which to build, what happened after Moira’s death would inevitably be more complex than the event itself. But, he told himself doggedly, it would work, handled with cunning and care. There would be Lynne’s nervous breakdown, followed by her departure for several months to another part of the country, ostensibly to recuperate with helpful friends, the careful choosing of discreet foster-parents before the birth, her return to L.A., their chance meeting at the office at the time of her social call on old colleagues and his contrived visit there if one should be necessary, their publicly displayed mutual commiseration on their respective misfortunes, and, at last, marriage, and the adoption of a fictional unmarried sister’s child, following her accidental death.

It would be tricky and it would take time, perhaps even a year or two, but it could be done, he was sure. Thank God, he thought, for their initial public clash of personalities. Despite the intensity of their passion, they had been discreet about their meetings, and he was more convinced than ever that, if Moira had suspicions she would have kept them to herself, her vanity refusing to accept the danger to their marriage was anything other than temporary.

So he had nothing to fear from that source. The only real danger visible at this point was from himself, if he should fall into the ever-waiting trap of attempted cleverness.

Direct, he thought again, uncomplicated, final.

He rang for a drink, and began to plan.

* * * *

He took a cab from the airport and a train from the city. Moira no longer met him off the plane, the mutually agreed reason for this being that she too had her hands full and that it really was rather too far to come when it was a comparatively simple business for him to make his own way home.

At Bridgeport he took another cab, cautiously relieved to note that the driver was one who had taken him home before and who clearly recognised him. He settled back against the cushions, studying the back of his head and considering what sort of witness he was likely to make if called on.

He was tense, but not overly so. The drinks that he’d had on the plane had taken the edge off his nervousness, and he was sure that externally at least the impression that he gave was one of normality. It was possible that this might be important at this stage. In any investigation, this stranger’s testimony could easily tip the balance, decide the police whether or not his behaviour immediately preceding the accident warranted further enquiries being made.

On an impulse, he said, “What’s the weather going to be doing over the weekend? Any idea?”

“Dry”, the driver said. “Light winds, I think they said,” he eased the cab around a corner with nonchalant expertise. “Golf?”

Kevin laughed. “I was thinking about it, but we’ve still got a lot to sort out in our new place. I’d sure like to get out and shake the rust off, though.”

For the remainder of the journey they discussed the current form of Tiger Woods, the driver critically, Kevin with concealed delight.

Minutes later they stopped at the end of the freshly asphalted road. As the cab drove off and he walked up the path, he saw that there was a light visible through the front door, another behind the drawn curtains of the living room. He took out his key, unlocked the door, and went in. As he was closing it, Moira’s voice said, “Kev?”

He turned, startled. It was not the fact of this almost instantaneous greeting in itself that had caught him by surprise, but the direction from which it appeared to have come. He raised his head, his heart running a shade faster, and stared at Moira where she stood at the top of the stairs.

When he had been making his plans, the location, of the accident had suggested itself more or less automatically. It had to be indoors, concealed from possible witnesses, which meant that there was only one place in the house where it could happen without in any way appearing to have been contrived.

It had been his intention to go upstairs directly on entering the house, and once there call her. The inference would have been that he had brought her a present of some kind, possibly something for utilization in the bedroom. He would have met her at the top of the stairs, manoeuvred her to face down them again, and then pushed.

He felt a chill pass over him, like the shadow of a cloud. There was no earthly reason why she should not have been upstairs at the time of his arrival, but now the situation seemed somehow unreal; a nightmare stage production where actors moved at the behest of some malignant director, acting out his darkly devised narrative. She stood looking down at him, her face shadowed; the poised victim, her position marked with scratches of invisible chalk.

He felt slightly sick. He placed his bag on the floor, and said, “Hi. Don’t come down. Something I want to show you.”

Smiling he advanced up the stairs.

She waited for him without moving, She had one hand on the rail, the other down by her side, clenched stiffly he now saw. It was almost as though she knew what was about to happen and was tensing herself for it, seeing his approach as the measured step of the executioner, relentless and inescapable.

This was impossible, but he sensed her tautness as he stepped up to stand beside her on the lending. And still, inexplicably, she faced, away from him down the stairs, a rigidly posed partner in some insane ritual dance that demanded to be performed.

He stepped behind her, placed his hands flat against her shoulders, and pushed with all his strength.

She whimpered slightly as she toppled out and flailed jarringly down to the hallway. When she was almost there, he caught a glimpse of her face, an image that stayed clamped in his mind like the result of an imperfect camera shot: blurred, but sufficient in detail. Her expression showed shock, but something else, too, something that to Kevin looked strangely like remorse.

She hit the polished wooden floor, slid two or three feet, and lay still.

He steeled himself before going down to her. Reason had already told him that it was possible that he would find himself in the sickening position of having to administer a coup de grace should the fall have actually failed to kill her. This would be risky, but perhaps necessary. He was breathing raggedly as he knelt beside her, but even before his damp fumbling failed to detect any pulse-beat in her limp wrist the position of her head told him that he had been spared the performance of this final brutality.

He picked her up and carried her into the living room, placing her carefully on the couch, and as he did so the barrier that had somehow neutralised any deep emotion that he might have felt before this dissolved abruptly.

He sat on a nearby chair, weeping. What was done was irrevocable, and it was only with the completion of the actual deed that he found himself capable of a return to something close to true rationality. For the first time for months he caught a fleeting glimpse of the strange balance between them as it had existed before his realisation and subsequent deceit; a unique thing of anticipation and echo, doomed by its own perfection. It had not been her fault, or his. It had simply been one of those unfeeling quirks of fate that seemingly at random select certain people and then inexorably steer them towards its inescapable outcome, victims of some warped caprice whose only possible ending was tragedy.

It had been an important part of his plan that he phone the local hospital as soon as it was over. His story was simplicity itself; his arrival home, his announcement of his presence, the unseen fall down the stairs as he waited for her in the living room. That was all. Medical examination would confirm the time of her death, and surely that would be all that would be needed by investigating officials; no evidence of physical conflict, no sign of any kind that the real circumstance were in any way different from what he had told them. They would simply find a desolate man and his dead wife, the quality of whose relationship would be solemnly sworn by literally dozens of convincingly appalled acquaintances.

It slowly dawned on him that he had been sitting there a long time. He looked at his watch, and was shocked to find that almost thirty: minutes had passed since last checking it before starting up the path to the house. But somehow this time-lag that should have terrified him with the way that it introduced a suggestion of possible deceit into his story failed to stir him in any great measure. Either they believed him, or they didn’t. There was no incriminating evidence of any kind, and he found that he was now contemptuous of mere suspicion. He shrugged mentally, recognising his apathy as the inevitable reaction to the destruction of part of himself, repugnant to him though it had become, the smashing of the mirror, removing for all time the opportunity to study himself, to preen and to admire the image that he presented to the world.

He shook his head, rose, and went to the telephone. As he picked up the receiver, the front door chimes rang.

He stood poised uncertainly for a moment, then replaced the receiver. It was pointless to pretend that he hadn’t heard, or that the house was empty. The lights were on in both the hallway and the living room, providing clear evidence of occupancy. No, hesitancy could only work against him. Far better to answer the door immediately, his bloodless complexion now facing him from the mirror above the telephone table giving veracity to his story and especially to his newly added coda, that he had collapsed on finding the body.

He went to the door, and opened it. A man stood on the step, a tall, heavy, blondish man, possibly a year or two his senior. He looked, oddly, to be extremely nervous. Kevin had never seen him before in his life.

The man said, “Well? May I come in?” He seemed to take it for granted that this would be acceptable.

He walked heavily past Kevin, turned, and faced him. He looked drawn, but resolute. He said, thickly, “I can see she’s told you. It must have been a hell of a shock.”

Kevin said nothing, staring at him. The man said, “Look, I can understand how you feel, but you must try and see our side of it, too. I never wanted to get into anything like this, and neither did Moira, but it’s an honest-to-God fact that we couldn’t help ourselves.” His mouth became stubborn. “I don’t think that very many people would understand, not really. It’s a one-in-a-million thing that you just…”

He talked on, with muted, shame-faced passion.

Kevin watched him, silently. It was as though he was seeing the gradual reassembly of a mirror, a slow, agonised exercise that was now permitting him to view its other side, seeing at last beyond the bland surface image that it had always presented to ram. Odd parts of this man’s discourse were new—something about furniture design and manufacture, his own business—but these were details only. For the most part the pattern was painfully familiar, a logical reflection of events that must surely have concluded as they were doing, reaching the end of the only path that had ever been open to them.

Balance, he thought. The completion of the circle, pre-ordained and perfect in its simplicity. Me, Moira. Moira, me. Moira, me. He found with a calmly accepting absence of surprise that he was actually amused by the sheer structural beauty of it all, the immaculate precision of its resolution.

He said. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” The man’s floundering: tumble of words trickled to a halt. He stared, uncomprehendingly, his mouth slightly open. Kevin felt a surge of something darkly bitter at the back of his throat, a grotesque and barely containable desire to laugh. He shook his head. “If I had, there’d have been no need—” He stopped, indifferent to his indiscretion but choked into silence by the relentlessly growing pressure inside him.

After a moment, the man said, slowly, “What are you talking about? You mean she didn’t tell you?” His eyes slid past, Kevin, focussing on something beyond the open living room door. He stiffened abruptly, his face shocked with sudden disbelief.

He made an anguished sound, and lurched forward. Seconds later, his sobs could be heard, muffled against the sprawled, waxen figure that he pawed with large, hopeless hands.

Watching him, in a distant way sharing his grief, Kevin thought briefly and with deep sadness of Lynne and the unborn child that he would now never see, feeling them drift away from him into a future where he knew he had no part, leaving behind an emptiness in which the dream had died in unison with Moira.

For every action, he thought, tiredly—how did it go?—there is an equal and opposite reaction. Something like that. And never, never more reasonably than now. Again, he marvelled at the completeness and absolute symmetry or the pattern, the clinical rightness of its logic.

Direct, he told himself, uncomplicated, final.

His laughter welled, a suddenly unstoppable flood. He stood there, head thrown back, the harshly raucous sound filling the house as he waited for the weeping man’s return.