We kissed again as I prepared to leave her room-good friends, lovers, gathered into one another then and forever by the clash and caress of our bodies, but not quite healed by it, not quite cured by it. Not yet.

"She's still there, isn't she?" Lisa said, wrapping a towel around her body to stand in the breeze at the window.

"I've got the blues today, Lisa. I don't know why. It's been a long day. But that's nothing to do with us. You and me... that was good-for me, anyway."

"For me, too. But I think she's still there, Lin."

"No, I wasn't lying before. I'm not in love with her any more.

Something happened, when I came back from Afghanistan. Or maybe it happened in Afghanistan. It just... stopped."

"I'm going to tell you something," she murmured and then turned to face me, speaking in a stronger, clearer voice. "It's about her. I believe you, what you said, but I think you have to know this before you can really say it's over with her."

"I don't need-"

"Please, Lin! It's a girl thing. I have to tell you because you can't really say it's over with her unless you know the truth about her-unless you know what makes her tick. If I tell you, and it doesn't change anything or make you feel different than how you feel now, then I'll know you're free."

"And if it does make a difference?"

"Well, maybe she deserves a second chance. I don't know. I can only tell you I never understood Karla at all until she told me.

She made sense, after that. So... I guess you have to know.

Anyway, if there's anything gonna happen for us, I want it to be clear-the past, I mean."

"Okay," I relented, sitting in a chair near the door. "Go ahead."

She sat on the bed once more, drawing her knees up under her chin in the tight wrap of the towel. There were changes in her, and I couldn't help noticing them-a kind of honesty, maybe, in the way her body moved, and a new, almost languorous release that softened her eyes. They were love-changes, and beautiful for that, and I wondered if she saw any of them in me, sitting still and quiet near the door.

"Did Karla tell you why she left the States?" she asked, knowing the answer.

"No," I replied, choosing not to repeat the little that Khaled had told me on the night that he walked into the snow.

"I didn't think so. She told me she wasn't going to tell you about it. I said she was crazy. I said she had to level with you.

But she wouldn't. It's funny how it goes, isn't it? I wanted her to tell you, then, because I thought it might put you off her.

Now, I'm telling you, so that you can give her one more chance- if you want to. Anyway, here it is. Karla left the States because she had to. She was running away... because she killed a guy."

I laughed. It was a small chuckle, at first, but it rolled and rumbled helplessly into a belly laugh. I doubled over, leaning on my thighs for support.

"It's really not that funny, Lin." Lisa frowned.

"No," I laughed, struggling to regain control. "It's not... that. It's just... _shit! If you knew how many times I worried about bringing my crazy, fucked up life to _her! I kept telling myself I had no right to love her because I was on the run. You gotta admit, it's pretty funny."

She stared at me, rocking slightly as she hugged her knees. She wasn't laughing.

"Okay," I exhaled, pulling myself together. "Okay. Go on."

"There was this guy," she continued, in a tone that made it clear how serious she considered the subject. "He was the father of one of the kids she used to baby-sit for, when she was a kid herself."

"She told me about it."

"She did? Okay, then you know. And nobody did anything about it.

And it messed her up pretty bad. And then, one day, she got herself a gun, and she went to his house when he was alone, and she shot him. Six times. Two in the chest, she said, and four in the crotch."

"Did they know it was her?"

"She's not sure. She knows she didn't leave any prints there, at the house. And nobody saw her leave. She got rid of the gun. And she scrammed out of there, right out of the country, real fast.

She's never been back, so she doesn't know if there's a sheet on her or not."

I sat back in the chair and let out a long, slow breath. Lisa watched me closely, her blue eyes narrowing slightly and reminding me of the way she'd looked at me on that night, years before, in Karla's apartment.

"Is there any more?"

"No," she answered, shaking her head slowly, but holding my eyes in the stare. "That's it."

"Okay," I sighed, running a hand over my face, and standing to leave. I went to her, and knelt on the bed beside her, with my face close to hers. "I'm glad you told me, Lisa. It makes a lot of things... clearer... I guess. But it doesn't change anything in how I feel. I'd like to help her, if I could, but I can't forget... what happened... and I can't forgive it, either. I wish I could. It'd make things a lot easier. It's bad, loving someone you can't forgive."

"It's not as bad as loving someone you can't have," she countered, and I kissed her.

I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye. Once through the glass doors, I walked down the marble steps and across the wide forecourt of the Gateway Monument to the sea. Beneath the arched shadow I leaned on the sea wall and looked out at the boats carrying tourists back to the marina. How many of those lives, I wondered, watching the travellers pose for one another's cameras, are happy and carefree and... simply free? How many of them are sorrowing? How many are...

And then the full darkness of that long-resisted grieving closed around me. I realised that for some time I'd been gritting my teeth and that my jaw was cramped and stiff, but I couldn't unlock the muscles. I turned my head to see one of the street boys, someone I knew well, doing business with a young tourist.

The boy, Mukul, sent his eyes left and right, lizard quick, and passed a small, white packet to the tourist. The man was about twenty years old: tall and fit and handsome. I guessed him to be a German student, and I had a good eye. He hadn't been in the city long. I knew the signs. He was new blood, with money to burn and the whole world of experience open to him. And there was a spring in his step as he walked away to join his friends. But there was poison in the packet in his hand. If it didn't kill him outright, in a hotel room somewhere, it would deepen in his life, maybe, as it did once in mine, until it poisoned every breathing second.

I didn't care-not about him or me or anyone. I wanted it. I wanted the drug, just then, more than anything in the world. My skin remembered the satin-flush of ecstasy and the lichen stippled creep of fever and fear. The smell-taste was so strong that I felt myself retching it. The hunger for oblivion, painless, guiltless, and unsorrowing, swirled in me, shivering from my spine to the thick, healthy veins in my arms. And I wanted it: the golden minute in heroin's long leaden night.

Mukul caught my eye and smiled from habit, but the smile twitched and crumbled into uncertainty. And then he knew. He had a good eye, too. He lived on the street, and he knew the look. So the smile returned, but it was different. There was seduction in it- It's right here... I've got it right here... It's good stuff ... Come and get it-and the dealer's tiny, vicious, little sneer of triumph. You're no better than me... You're not much at all ... And sooner or later, you'll beg me for it...

The day was dying. Each jewelled shimmer, dazzling from the waves in the bay, turned from glittering white to pink, and weak, blood red. Sweat ran into my eyes as I stared back at Mukul. My jaws ached, and my lips quivered with the strain of it: the strain of not responding, not speaking, not nodding my head. I heard a voice or remembered it: All you have to do is nod your head, that's all you have to do, and it'll all be _over... And grieving tears boiled up in me, relentless as the gathering tide that slapped against the sea wall. But I couldn't cry them, those tears, and I felt that I was drowning in a sorrow that was bigger than the heart that tried to hold it. I pressed my hands down on the little mountain range of the faceted bluestones on the top of the sea wall, as if I could drive my fingers into the city and save myself by clinging to her.