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thing."
    "Was it hard-core?" Molly was almost disappearing with delicacy and the countereffort not to seem overdelicate for fear of further drawing attention to any tenderness.
    "No. No, not really. Just stupid." Isabella likewise was almost disappearing, but for burgeoning shame at having raised the subject at all. "He can be an idiot. And—you know this whole thing—he doesn't work. Well, I suppose he does. But not in the way that we ... that is conv—"
    "Happen often?"
    "No. Hardly ever."
    "Feel like a normal argument that a couple would have?"
    "It was just about space. You know." Isabella found a rueful smile.
    "Yes, well, it's tricky up on your floor. The apartments are half this size."
    Though she knew the time well enough, Isabella glanced deliberately at the old clock. "Damn. I really have to scoot. Here, let me plug you in." She bent and then came up again all bustle and haste. "I'll message if I'm up Thursday morning. It's unbelievable—I'm going to be late again and I have a nine with the Snicker himself."
    "Go, lady, go." Molly frizzed her hair. "Thanks for breakfast.
And really, come down whenever. If I am alive enough to make it to the door, you can come in."
    Isabella looked sympathetically at the ankle. "You'd better take it easy on the ski-jumping and stuff today, Mol. You done with your tea?"
    "Yeah. Thanks."
    Isabella put her friend's cup into the brown bag for the recycle bin and collected the rest of her things for work.
    "Okay. Bye," Isabella said.
    "See you," Molly called after her. "Soon as I'm fixed we're going to check out those sluts."

    Isabella let herself out, careful with the door and gratefully aware that Molly had chosen not to pursue her any further. One day, she resolved, she would sit down and tell Molly everything, instead of all this endless slipping and sliding around the edges. Sort Sasha. Sort work. Sort everything. Just get clear long enough to achieve a reasonable perspective and then...
    It was twenty-four minutes from her building on East Thirteenth between Second and Third to the offices of Media Therapy on Greene. And she was in the habit of walking to work. It wasn't so much that she liked the exercise, or the routine, or the therapeutic affect of witnessing firsthand the sheer size and scale of the city's endeavors (indifferent to her own)—though all of these. It was more that in some only half-acknowledged way, she continued to take the visitor's simple pleasure in a foreign city. (What was her father's phrase? "Expats make the best natives." Something faintly sinister like that...) She had lived here in New York nearly two years and three before that on and off (as much as various visas permitted), and she had been staying with Sasha at his mother's place down on Murray on September 11. And though the wide-eyed tourist was long departed, there lingered a related sense of satisfaction at the recognition of certain places, or buildings, or institutions, or instances of what she sometimes termed to herself (for want of a better expression) New Yorknesses. No, it wasn't the Empire State or the Rockefeller or any of that stuff anymore, but instead it was the pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap furniture shop run by grumpy Poles. Or it was the fact that she could find what she wanted quicker than the ever-changing sales staff in St. Mark's Bookshop. Or that she liked to cross Third just here and walk through Astor Place where the East Village kids jostled around that big black cube. Or that she was as near indifferent to Washington Square as any New Yorker. Or that, best of all, she recognized some of the owners at the dog run. Same time, same place tomorrow? So their glances seemed to say. And in her mind she would return their query with a most dependable civic nod.
    You bet.
    She was on Mercer not far from the Angelika—Sasha's favorite cinema—when her cell phone started ringing. She didn't notice at first because an ambulance was howling and her remaining