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clean-cut, handsome male in his mid-thirties. He was in a designer business suit, but his tie was gone and his collar was unbuttoned. As were the first two pearl buttons of his shirt.
    â€œWho the hell are you?” Whitman said.
    And then Charlie came through the door. “Whit,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

 
    3
    When Charlize Daou stepped through the door to her apartment, the man she was with faded to obscurity, at least as far as Whitman was concerned. Three years might have been three hundred for all the resemblance Charlie bore to the woman he had lived with for five incredible, fitful, combative years.
    In the seconds that seemed to pour into minutes while the three principals were frozen in a tableau, Whitman breathed her into the dead place inside him that had opened up when she had thrown him out, this woman whose existence he had so successfully denied for three years. Except for that damn third rib on his right side which simply wouldn’t let him alone, as if she had broken it off and wrenched it out of him before he had left. All this while he had told himself that he had frozen in her fire. Now, in a single instant, he understood how he had fed himself that fairy tale in order to keep himself from falling apart, something he would never again allow himself to do—not after his time at the Well.
    She looked entirely different—and also precisely the same. How could that be? he asked himself. But as his reawakened knowledge informed him, when it came to Charlie, anything was possible. She seemed bigger, tawnier, though her hair was shorter, pulled back from her high-cheekboned face. Her eyes, so deep a brown they often seemed black, were the same—as large and wide apart as ever, curved up slightly at their outer edges. The shape of her ample lips was also the same, but she had quit wearing the violent reds and was now using nude-colored lipstick, which had the effect of making her mouth even more sensual than he remembered.
    She was not a big-boned woman, nor was she particularly tall. Perhaps the change in her size was due to her shoulders, which were definitely more developed. She must have gone back to working out regularly. Whitman knew she could put most Marines down within ten seconds. Hence the rib that had never forgotten her, or the left-handed blow and the power behind it.
    â€œWhat the fuck, Whit?” Charlie said now. She was wearing a mind-blowing red and oxblood Valentino with a bodice cut down to her waist that must have set her back somewhere north of seven thousand dollars, but she had a mouth like a sailor. “I mean what the fuck! ”
    â€œWhat?” he said, hands spread. “Am I intruding?”
    â€œDuh.”
    The man who had preceded her into the apartment now turned to her. “Who the hell is this, Charlize?”
    Charlize? Whitman thought. Jesus Christ. Now tell me he works for IBM.
    â€œNo one, Bill.”
    â€œClearly he’s not ‘no one.’ He’s in your apartment. He has a key.”
    â€œHe stole it,” Charlie said dismissively.
    â€œEven worse,” Bill Whoever said.
    â€œThis doesn’t concern you.”
    â€œThe hell it doesn’t.”
    She glared at him. “Let me handle this, okay?”
    Whitman walked toward Bill Whoever. “Hey, Bill,” he said, “d’you work for IBM?”
    Bill turned to him. He wasn’t belligerent, as Whitman himself would have been if their places had been reversed. His expression was pure bewilderment. Poor thing.
    â€œNo,” he said automatically. “AT&T.”
    â€œChrist, it’s even worse than I thought,” Whitman said.
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    Charlie, intuiting where their conversation was headed, quickly stepped in front of Bill and, before Whitman could antagonize him further, said, “Bill, it’s time for you to go.”
    â€œWhat? Just because this sonuvabitch is here uninvited