“Is he?”

“No.”

“How is Pritchett?”

“Stop.”

“Ana, I still love you.”

“I know.”

“You know? That’s it? You know?”

“I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s painful.”

“Let me see: you cheat on me, with Pritchett of all people, you kick me out, and you’re the one in pain.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Say…say there’s a chance.”

“There’s not. Not right now, there’s not.”

“But maybe things will change?”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“This is all I have, Ana. This is all I have.”

He watched her. He monitored her e-mail. He listened to her calls. He logged the numbers from the water meter every day. He talked to her, once more sat in the garden with her.

He had let Marcella Ahn persuade him to stay on, particularly after, as an additional incentive, she had offered him more money. Yet increasingly he felt it was a pointless exercise. He was convinced more than ever that Caroline Yip was oblivious to any of the transgressions of which she was being accused, oblivious to the fact that Toua was working for Marcella Ahn or even knew of their past. He was bored. At the end of the week, he would quit for good. By then he’d have the security deposit for an apartment.

Thursday night, Caroline Yip knocked on his door. “I’m going to the Cantab. Wanna come?”

The Cantab Lounge was a dive bar in Central Square, known for its music and cheap drinks. The last time he fell off the wagon, Toua had been a regular there. He’d bar-hop down Mass. Ave., beginning with the Cellar, then moving on to the Plough & Stars and the People’s Republik, ending the night at the Cantab, each place seedier than the last.

It was early still at the Cantab, the first set yet to begin, and they decided to first go across the street to Picante for a bite. They ordered chicken tostadas with a steak quesadilla to share, and they sat at a table beside the front window after loading up on salsa.

“How’re your poems going?” he asked.

“Así así.”

“What?”

“So-so,” she said. “Find a job yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I imagine it’d be easy for you to do something in security. What about private investigator work?”

Was she being coy? “I’ll look into it.”

“I have a question for you,” Caroline said. She wiped guacamole from the corner of her mouth. “What is it that you fear the most?”

“Like phobias?”

“No, about yourself. About your life. How you’ll end up.”

It was an awful question, one that immediately dropped him into a funk. And although he didn’t realize he had been ruminating on it, he knew the answer right away. “Dead man walking,” he said.

“What? As in being led down death row?” She laughed nervously. “Feeling homicidal these days?”

He shook his head. He told her about the look he’d seen in some perps, the MOD gangbangers in particular, the vacancy in their eyes, a complete lacuna, devoid of any hope or humanity. “I’m afraid I might become like that. Dead. Soulless.”

“The fact that it worries you insures you won’t.”

“I don’t know.”

Caroline took a big bite of the quesadilla, chewed, swallowed. “I fear that all the sacrifices I’ve made for my poetry will have been for nothing, that really I have no talent, that someday I’ll realize this but won’t be able to admit it, because to do so would invalidate my life, so instead I’ll become resentful of anyone who’s had the slightest bit of success, lash out at them with stupid, spiteful acts of malice, rail against an unfair system and world and fate that’s denied me my rightful place of honor and glory. I’ll become a cold, bitter person. I’ll never find peace, or love, or purpose. I’ll die alone.”

He nodded. “I’m glad you brought this up. I’m feeling really good now. Very cheerful.”

Caroline giggled. “Let’s go listen to some music.”

The Cantab was in full swing now, and Toua and Caroline squeezed through the crowd to the bar. “Yo, Toua-Boua, long time no see,” boomed Large Marge, one of the bartenders. “What’s your pleasure?”

He got a rum and Coke for Caroline, a plain Coke for himself. Miraculously, they found a couple of chairs against the far wall, and they listened to the R &B band on the stage. The place hadn’t changed a bit, the green walls, the faux-Tiffany lamps with the Michelob Light logos, the net of Christmas lights on the ceiling, the usual barflies and post-hippy gray-beards in the audience.

Sitting there, it did occur to Toua that Caroline had implicated herself, expressing exactly the vindictive mindset that Marcella Ahn had described. What did it matter, though? What did it matter? It was all so trivial.

When he went to the bar for another round, he ordered two rum and Cokes. It tasted like crap-Jameson, neat, with a chaser of Guinness had been his poison of choice-but since Caroline was drinking it, she wouldn’t be able to smell the alcohol on his breath.

After several more rum and Cokes, Caroline hauled him onto the dance floor, and they swayed and bumped against each other, jostled by the sweating couples around them.

Caroline hooked her arms around his neck. “I like you,” she shouted.

“I like you too,” he said, and they kissed.

It was so good to feel something, he thought. To feel anything.

They woke up together the next morning on Caroline’s futon. “Was this a mistake?” she asked.

“Probably.”

“You weren’t supposed to say that.”

She made him breakfast-cereal, scrambled eggs, coffee, toast with peanut butter. “Do you ever think of leaving Cambridge?”

“To go where?” he asked.

“ California. I went through a little town south of San Francisco once, Rosarita Bay. It’s a sleepy little place, very quiet. It’s not very pretty or anything, but for some reason it draws me. I love the idea of making a fresh start there, no one knowing who I am.”

“Sounds nice.” His head was pounding; he could have used a drink.

“Not tempted to join me someday?” she said hesitantly. He must have appeared alarmed, because she laughed and got a little defensive. “That was impulsive. Stupid. Never mind.”

“Not stupid. Just sudden.”

“Too sudden?”

He looked at Caroline. He did not know this woman. He was not in love with her, and she was not in love with him. But they might grow to love each other. It was possible. It seemed like the first opening of possibility in his life in a very long time, a fissure. “Maybe not.”

She had to go to Chez Henri soon. She was pulling a double shift, covering for another waitress. “We’ll talk more tomorrow?”

“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” he told her.

He was awoken before dawn. He had gone to bed early and fell dead asleep-the first good night’s sleep he’d had in months, hangover-induced, no doubt. On the other end of the phone was Pritchett. “Want to come down here?”

“Here” was Marcella Ahn’s house. When Toua drove up to it, a fire truck, an ambulance, two black-and-whites, and an unmarked police car were parked out front.

“What’s going on?” he asked Pritchett, his former partner.

The inside of the house had been trashed, furniture overturned and broken, upholstery shredded, wine bottles smashed onto the floors and splattered on the rugs, paintings tattered, clothes scissored into strips, mirrors shattered. Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop was spray-painted on one wall, Cunt on the front door.

“Anything taken?” Toua asked.

“Strange, not much,” Pritchett said, “just a laptop and some notebooks and fountain pens. We found them down the street in a dumpster. Notice anything else out of whack?”

“Yeah.”

Marcella Ahn was in the ambulance, a blanket over her shoulders, shaking and crying. She had been out of town for a reading, returning to find her house in ruins. “Do you believe me now?” she said to Toua. “Do you believe me now? It’s her. I’m sure of it.”