Page 24 of The Instruments of Darkness

A half shrug this time, with a half grin to match. I mirrored it. We were guys together. I knew how it was.

“Call it one for the road,” he said. “She was an attractive woman, and it wasn’t as though Colleen wanted me in her bed. Her desire for reconciliation wasn’t immediately reflected by a desire for more than that.”

“And did you get your ‘one for the road’?”

“No, Mara was gone.”

“Have you had any communication with her since?”

“None.”

“Do you still have those text messages?”

“I deleted all of them. Call it shame.”

I decided not to call it anything at all, although “shame” still wouldn’t have been the first word that sprang to mind.

“What do you know about her?” I asked.

“Next to nothing: her name, and that of her consultancy service, which is, or was, a work in progress, and doesn’t exist any longer. It might have been that not even her name was real. Who knows?”

“She didn’t share anything of her background, or where she lived?”

“I didn’t ask her to draw a family tree or a map. That stuff just gets in the way.”

“But you didn’t find the absence of personal details odd?” I persisted.

“Welcome to the twenty-first century, Mr. Parker. I know men who would regard a first name as surplus to requirements for a hookup.”

I didn’t doubt it. On occasion, the modern world made me feel old and staid.

“Do you disapprove?” he asked.

“It strikes me as risky behavior for a married man.”

“Isn’t that part of the appeal?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it?”

“I think it was for me. No strings attached, just sex.”

“So what did you and Mara talk about?”

He laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh, but the sort one directs at an innocent, or a fool.

“We didn’t talk,” he said, “or not much. Again, that was a lot of the fun of it.”

I waited until the laughter stopped. There are better ways to spend one’s time than waiting for someone to stop laughing. The sound quickly begins to grate.

“But you had telephone conversations,” I said. “What did you discuss during those?”

“I don’t recall. What we’d done, I suppose, and when we might do it again.”

“Did you speak about your home life?”

“I might have.”

“And the pregnancy? Or your son, after he was born?”

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