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with a warm sense of ownership. She had a mortgage, true enough, but the building and its acre and a half of land were still hers. The sense of proprietorship made up for the half-hour drive to and from the city where she worked five days a week.
    But it was almost midnight now, not morning, and what filled her as she lay staring up at her ceiling was only an emptiness and nothing more. She sat up, tugging a pillow up behind her. Half-asleep, she became more and more awake as she explored her feelings—or rather her lack of them.
    While she never considered herself emotionally unstable, she was still aware of her easy susceptibility to sudden mood swings. She was either bubbling with happiness, or vivid with anger, or mind-numbingly bored, or hopelessly sadbut never this. Never just... empty. It wasn’t the bleakness of a depression, either. There was simply nothing there.
    Why am I doing this to myself? she wondered. Of course I’ve still got feelings. It’s not like someone came along while I was sleeping and just stole them all away....
    Some vague memory stirred at that ridiculous thought. She had the oddest feeling that something strange
had
happened to her this evening, but she couldn’t pinpoint it for the life of her. Getting up from the bed, she padded barefoot out through the living room to the bathroom. There she flicked on the light and blinked at its glare. Once her eyes had adjusted to it, she leaned forward to look at herself in the mirror.
    Her familiar features leaned toward her in the mirror. Nothing different there.
    She sat down on the toilet, jumping with a start when something touched her bare calves. It was only her cat, Beng. Lean and black, Beng was a gangly eight-month-old stray that had appeared one morning on her doorstep not long after she moved in, and never left. According to a book she was reading at the time, “Beng” was a Romany word for the devil, and since the cat looked as though he had more than a bit of the devil in him, she decided that the name fit him to a T.
    “Do you think it’s time for breakfast?” she asked as she hoisted him onto her lap.
    Beng purred noisily, pushing his head agaisnt her arm while kneading her lap. Emma got no pleasure from the cat’s familiar ministrations. After a few moments, she put him down on the floor again and drifted into the living room. Past twelve. She opened her front door and stared through the screen at the night.
    What’s wrong with me? she thought. Why do I feel as though someone’s snuck in and stole away a part of me?
    She called up some memories. Office politics—Gina playing her against their superivisor—but while she could perceive that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do, she couldn’t muster any anger at Gina tonight. All right. Jimmy dropping her for that anorexic model bimbo of his. That hurt was only three weeks old. But while she could remember the pain of the moment, and her subsequent anger, right now she didn’t feel anything.
    This was starting to get scary, she thought, except those emotions, too, were more something she realized she
should
be feeling than what she actually
was
.
    Beng wrapped himself around her legs until she bent down and cradled him in her arms. Closing the door, she retraced her way to the bathroom, shut off the light, and went back to bed. She lay there in the dark, sensing the house around her, the night beyond its walls, Beng curled up and purring on her stomach, but still couldn’t call up one genuine feeling that wasn’t a secondhand memory.
    The cat, had he been able to speak, might have mentioned one more oddity to her. When she was in the bathroom with the light on, she had cast no shadow. But whatever languages Beng knew, there weren’t any that he shared with his mistress.
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    Blue held her until the flood of tears subsided into sniffles. The headbeam on his Harley had gotten a little dimmer. To save his battery, he left her for a moment to shut it off, then came back and sat