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rear. It was loaded with the bags, boxes, and oddments of somebody moving home. The light from the lamp opposite and the strip above the door revealed glimpses of coats and wall pictures that Shearer recognized as Fay’s. He stopped, checked again, and then changed direction to walk up to the driver’s door. A man in an overcoat and cloth cap was sitting inside, smoking a cigarette. “Hey, what gives?” Shearer demanded, gesturing, as the window rolled down.
    “Don’t ask me. I’m just a mover for hire, okay? She’s inside.”
    Frowning, Shearer felt for his keys and turned back toward the door of the house.
     

CHAPTER THREE
    The door into the bedroom was open. Fay was inside, packing the last of her suitcases. A couple of plastic bags filled with last-minute oddments, and several of her pricier dresses draped on hangers lay across the foot of the bed. She looked up with a start when Shearer appeared and leaned with a shoulder against the jamb, his arms folded loosely. Fay had long made it clear that she looked down on his choice of friends, and she seldom accompanied him on social visits. He usually came home later.
    “So... moving on to the Big Time, eh?” he said. His mouth formed a parody of a smile. Such a turn of events was not totally unexpected, but he hadn’t been prepared for things to come to a head this suddenly. The strain in their relationship had been building up for a while. A queasy feeling rose in his stomach with the realization that this was finally happening after two years. Fay was trying to suppress a shaking in her hand. If it was a nervous reaction from fear of a fight or a yelling match, she needn’t have worried. They were past things like that.
    “Big Time? Is that what you call it?” She shook her head shortly, still looking down at what she was doing, causing her hair to fly out in agitated flares of blond. She was wearing a hip-length coat of imitation white leather and fur trim over tight jeans and spike-heeled boots, with lots of rings. Her wrist jewelry jangled as she laid a sweater on top of the contents that she had already packed, and began stuffing the final few smaller items into the spaces around the sides. “Just wanting a decent house, and to be somewhere where it’s safe to walk the streets? Someone got stabbed outside the subway today.... Cops all over the street. Did you even know?” She made a quick half-gesture that could have indicated the room, the house beyond, or the rest of the world outside. “I can’t live like this. I mean, what are we — day-jobbers who’ve never seen a week’s work in one stretch, or some kind of sharks that need to be where the action is? You’re a physicist , Marc, for Christ’s sake! With degrees. I always thought that meant somebody with brains and some common sense. Well, isn’t that what it’s supposed to mean? Instead, you have these weird ideas about... oh, I’m not sure what they’re about anymore. All I know is I can’t live with it.” They had been through all this before. But it seemed that Fay had a script set in her head that she had to get out, as if to leave no doubts that could invite accusations afterward.
    “It means trying to understand reality the way it is, and not being deflected by how you’d want it to be or how you think it should be,” Shearer said tiredly. “To do that, you have to be free to accept what the evidence is telling you.”
    “Free? You call this free? Free is being able to do what you want, right? Well, I want to mix with company that’s got some class and style, okay? And I want to be able to look around me and see things I don’t see here.”
    “And eat in places where they dress for dinner, and pay someone to come in and clean the house.”
    “Is there supposed to be something wrong with that?”
    “Only the idea that it’s what being free is all about.”
    Fay glared at him as she slammed the lid of the suitcase. “Do you know how much physicists make at places like