“Sure. Bad weather makes me gloomy. What are we going to do today?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I’d like to take a tour around the city this morning, then this afternoon head to a spa.”

  “A spa?”

  “A spa resort. We can stay overnight, have some treatments, massages, facials, whatever.”

  “A spa resort sounds expensive.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s the off-season, so they have deals on.”

  “Yeah, but it will still be expensive.”

  “A friend of mine recommends this place. I was planning to stop there anyway for a night at least.”

  Zoe sipped her coffee to buy time to figure out what to say that didn’t sound angry. After a moment she put the cup down.

  “But the cost for both of us will be more than you’d have paid for you alone. We talked about this. You know I can’t afford it.”

  “My treat.”

  “Lorna…I can’t…” God, this was so embarrassing. “I don’t want you to spend money on me like that. It feels weird.”

  “Look, the room won’t cost any more for the two of us.”

  “But the treatments and the food will.”

  “I know, but…Zoe, I’m not trying to patronize you. Or buy your affections or reward you for what you’ve done for me since I met you.”

  “What do you think I’ve done for you? I wasn’t your first, so I didn’t make you figure out you’re gay.”

  No. That had been a woman named Jilly, who was another mom dropping her kid off at school, like Lorna with Dominic. They’d become friends, and all the feelings Lorna had never really understood had been clear at last. Nothing had happened between them. Nothing happened with anyone for several more years. But from then on, Lorna had understood who she was.

  “Zoe, you’ve woken me up. I’ve been in a coma for a long time. Walking around, looking normal, talking to people as if I was awake. But I was close to dead on the inside. Being with you, the sex.” She said it softly. “That’s been great. But that wasn’t the most important thing. Talking to you about the books, the writing, was much more important. The writer part of me, that’s who I really am too, and it’s been hidden away for so long. I’ve never spoken of it to anyone, not in person. Not even on the phone. You’re the first. And that’s a first that matters.”

  Zoe’s annoyance ebbed. “I’m glad you could trust me to be the first one to tell. You can talk to me about it all you like. I liked Ridden Hard. I’m enjoying the other one.”

  “Even if they are unrealistic.”

  “Even then. About this spa, though.”

  “I want to go. I’m tired and aching from the road. I want a good bed for a couple of nights. I want to have some time relaxing and being taken care of. And I’d like you there with me. I’m not talking about anything ridiculously expensive. A massage, a manicure, and pedicure, mostly hanging out in the Jacuzzi or the sauna for hours. To ease the aches and pains away.”

  “Well…” It sounded tempting. She’d never been to a spa, though she did like going to a sauna sometimes.

  “The food is good but simple. Healthy. It’s a spa, remember.”

  “I guess…”

  “There’s free Wi-Fi.”

  “I am so there.”

  Lorna laughed. “I wondered if that might seal the deal.”

  “You know how to tempt me. Okay, let’s do it.”

  “Great. Do you have a bathing suit?”

  Zoe grimaced. She did, but it was far too boring and plain for a fancy spa.

  “Is that a no?” Lorna asked.

  “More a ‘kinda.’ I have one, but it’s a bit old and is as sexy as a nun’s habit.”

  “In that case, before we go to the spa, we’d better do a little shopping.”

  “I am not letting you buy me a bathing suit. Good God, woman, are we engaged?” She grinned to show she was teasing, when she saw the chagrined expression on Lorna’s face. “What’s your game? If you buy it, you get to confiscate it anytime you like—including when I’m wearing it.”

  “The thought never crossed my mind!”

  “Please, it’s crossing it right now. It’s crossing it like a parade crossing an intersection—it’ll still be crossing it in half an hour.”

  Lorna laughed. “I concede the point. It’s crossing. And then reversing up to cross over again. Hell, I could use a new bathing suit myself. Come on, let’s saddle up and go shopping.”

  * * * *

  Zoe emerged from the changing cubicle at the spa in a sunflower-yellow bikini. Lorna’s bathing suit was a one-piece, sky blue, with cutout side panels. She seemed to enjoy the appreciative look Zoe gave it and her, and returned the compliment before they donned bathrobes and flip-flops and wandered through to the sauna section.

  “A couple of hours in here,” Lorna said. “Then we’re booked in for massages.”

  “Great.”

  Zoe had decided to stop worrying about the cost. Lorna had the money. She’d planned to come here. So maybe she was paying out a little extra for Zoe, but Zoe would pay her back eventually. Once she got herself settled, found a job. It was time she did. She couldn’t roam about forever.

  They had the place almost to themselves and took a hot tub, just the two of them together. Water bubbled up around them, and Zoe groaned with delight. Oh man, she loved this. She’d stay in a hot tub until she came out of it looking like a prune.

  “Does your aunt’s house have a hot tub?” Zoe asked.

  “Ha, no. I wish.”

  “You should put one in. I wouldn’t visit—I’d move in.”

  “I’ll definitely consider it then.” Lorna ducked down under the water for a second, came back up with her hair plastered to her head, face dripping and flushed. She ran her hands over her face to dash the water out of her eyes. “Yeah, I will definitely consider it.” She looked at Zoe. “So have you decided to come all the way on to New York?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Still contemplating my options. It’s time I figured things out, you know. Found myself a place to put down roots. Question is, back home or somewhere else?”

  “You get on well with your parents?”

  “They’re great. They want me to settle down and find a proper job, though. I know they get a bit anxious about me. But they don’t nag me too much.”

  “So you’d be okay about going back and living in your hometown again?”

  “That I’m not so sure about.” Zoe sank down a bit farther into the water so it came right up to her neck. “If I go there and settle down, I’ll feel as if I’m admitting to being a failure. That’s why I didn’t ask for them to send me money to come home after I got stranded in California.”

  “How did that happen exactly? Why were you so high and dry?”

  Zoe sank even lower, until the water splashed her mouth and nose as it bubbled. So did she explain? It was embarrassing. And maybe not something you wanted to tell a lover about. But after the way Lorna had opened up to her about the books, said she’d never talked to anyone else, maybe she deserved some confidence in return. Zoe sat straighter again, head and shoulders out of the water.

  “There was a woman, Eloise. I’d met her a few months before, and we’d been traveling together—a lot like we are now, though more aimless. Going where we felt like going next on a whim.”

  “And you two were a couple?”

  “Yes. She was a photographer. She took pictures everywhere we went, including loads of me—which was flattering. She said I was beautiful and unique and such nonsense.”

  “What do you mean, nonsense? You are beautiful.”

  “Thanks. It’s more the ‘unique’ part that bothers me. My race she meant. But it’s so stupid. Yeah, my dad’s black, and my mom is mixed. And no, nobody else looks exactly like me. But nobody looks exactly like you either, or anyone. Everyone is a unique combination of their parents. There’s no need to make a big deal out of it because my combination includes some different races.”

  Lorna nodded slowly. “She was making a fetish of you.”

  “Maybe. Whatever that means. But at the time it wasn’t something I thought of. I was flattered, like I said. Anyway, we stopped off in this town in Northern California one evening and stayed in a motel for a few days. When I woke up one morning, she wasn’t around, and the car was gone.”

  “She skipped out?”

  “I didn’t assume that at first. I thought she’d gone to the store or something. I tried to call her, but there was no answer, and then I realized her stuff was gone. So was our working cash. I still didn’t think she’d run out on me. I started imagining all kinds of things that could have happened—like she’d been loading the car, and after she put her bags in but not mine, someone kidnapped her and took the car. Idiotic.”

  “It’s easy to let your imagination run wild when you don’t know what’s happened.”

  “Yeah, I guess. After a couple of hours, I panicked entirely and went to the sheriff’s station.” She took a shaky breath and wanted to sink into the water again. “That’s when I learned the truth about her. For one thing that she wasn’t called Eloise Laurent. When they looked up that name on their systems, it came back as a known alias for a Louise Laurence, from Vancouver—certainly not Paris, as she’d said she was from.”

  “Hell.”

  “Yeah. Before I knew it, they were treating me like a suspect too. She had a bunch of outstanding warrants for credit card fraud and check fraud and identity theft. There was a real Eloise Laurent from Nice, but she’d gone home to France after being a student in the US for a few years. Her identity had been stolen and used by this Louise Laurence, who could even pass as French.” Zoe laughed bitterly. “It’s no wonder she always had plenty of money.”

  “How long did they treat you like a suspect?”

  “Not long. Once they’d confirmed my identity and that I had no record or warrants, they accepted that I’d been fooled by her. It also turned out she’d skipped town because she’d spotted a private detective she knew was looking for her. He questioned me too. He worked for a family whose daughter’s identity she’d also stolen and used in the past. They started getting bills and demands for payment in that daughter’s name—which was pretty upsetting for them, as their daughter died in an accident when she was eleven.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “I know. The thought of that family was the last straw. I told him and the cops everything I could think of that might help him catch up to her. They apparently haven’t so far. Gary checks up on it regularly for me.”

  “This Gary helped you out, you said.”

  “Yeah. He was a sweetheart. I was pretty much in shock by the end of that day. I had barely any cash, because she took it. No car.” And everything that had been in the car. Including the notebooks where she’d been keeping a journal of her travels. It wasn’t that they were any kind of great literary work. But they were her memories. She hadn’t kept one since. Too afraid to lose it again. She shook herself. “Anyway, Gary helped me out to make sure I was safely staying at the motel, then came to see me every day while they were trying to track down Eloise. He got me an interview with the manager of a roadhouse not far away from the motel, when I said I could tend bar.”

  “That was kind of him.”

  “It got me out of the initial hole. I earned money to pay for the motel. I thought about asking Mom and Dad for bus fare home. Hell, Gary offered to loan me the bus fare home or even drive me there. But to go home then, as a total failure—”

  “You were conned,” Lorna protested. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Maybe. But I know how I’d have felt. I went on working at the roadhouse. Then they had a vacancy at the sheriff’s station while a clerk went out sick. It didn’t pay a fortune, but I could still do evening shifts at the bar. It got me far enough ahead I could buy that car I was driving when I met you. It only cost a few hundred dollars, and I knew it was nearly junk, but I’m a pretty good mechanic, and I felt sure I could keep it on the road myself.”

  “You’re very self-sufficient,” Lorna said. “You know how to take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah, except when it comes to fake French bitches. I don’t know if I want to see her again to ask her if everything she ever said to me was a lie, or so I can punch her in the face. Or maybe I never want to see her again, unless it’s in court.”

  “You want to put it behind you. That’s understandable.”

  “I never got any closure, though. She was simply gone. Not only in the physical sense, but in every way. The person I’d thought she was turned out to be a lie. It was pretty damn hard to process. It made the previous eight months feel unreal. All the places we’d stayed, the food we’d eaten, she’d paid for them with a credit card in someone else’s name and never paid the card off. It made me feel like an accomplice, even though I’d been totally ignorant of it all. I wanted to go back to all the places and pay them. Gary told me they’d be covered for it. They wouldn’t be out of pocket. But it preyed on my mind. For a long time, I hated her.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  “I think it’s mellowed into mostly contempt. Maybe a tiny bit of understanding.”

  “Understanding?”

  “She was a photographer—a good one. Maybe the whole thing started because she needed the money to buy cameras and stuff for her work.”

  “That’s not an acceptable reason for stealing.”

  “What would you have done if you couldn’t afford a computer to write your books?”

  Lorna frowned. “I don’t know. But Zoe, you were left high and dry, desperate for money, and you didn’t turn to crime. You got a job. You got two jobs. You worked and saved your money. Eloise, Louise, whatever, made her choice.”

  Eloise. Zoe still thought of her as Eloise. Even when she wanted to add the words “that bitch” on to the end. She sighed and laid her head back against the cushioned rests on the side of the tub. “Anyway, it’s all done with. She probably ran off back to Canada, and I’ll never see her again.” And that’s a good thing. Definitely. “Come on, let’s get out of this tub and hit the lounge. I need a drink.”

  * * * *

  Lorna returned the confidences that night as they lay in one of the two queen-size beds in their room, smelling of jasmine and almonds and various other things they’d been bathed and oiled in today. It was like being a couple of concubines in a harem. But there was no husband to come and enjoy the results. Just them.

  “We were kids,” she said, talking about her and Jeff, in a soft voice. “At Catholic school, so very sheltered. We didn’t have a clue about sex. So when things happened, we didn’t even know what we were doing. That’s how sheltered we were.”

  “So you got pregnant.”

  “Yes. My mom realized before I ever did. And she and my dad soon got Jeff’s name out of me. After that, it was like being caught in an avalanche—for both of us. Our parents took over, and before we knew it, we were getting married.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen. Both of us. We had no way of stopping it. We sort of clung on to each other while it all happened around us. If we’d only known more, had some sex ed. But it was too late by then. We were married and living with his parents. Then I went back to my folks for a while, when he went to college and law school.”

  Had he really wanted to study law? He’d always been more interested in science at school. Or at least in making stuff in the chem lab go foom. But law ran in his family, paid well, and demanded long hours of study and work, which kept him out of the house. Whether he’d wanted to go that way or not, in the end it had worked out for him, and for her.

  “After he graduated, we got our own place. But already by then, we were nearly strangers.”

  “I guess he changed while he was at college.”

  “He grew up. Went from a boy to a man. Meanwhile I had my little world of me and Dominic, and it felt like an intrusion whenever Jeff was home.”

  “It must have been hard for you, still so young, with a kid yourself.”

  “I guess, but I decided that if this was the situation I was in, then I had to make the best of it. My mom used to want to take over looking after the baby, but I wouldn’t have it. Dominic was my baby, and even if I hadn’t planned to be a teenage mom, I was going to be the best teenage mom anyone could ever be.”

  They lay silent for a while, and Lorna wondered if Zoe had gone to sleep. But then she moved, shifting a bit into a new position, her smooth, soft skin sliding against Lorna’s.

  “So I guess you never split up because of the Catholic thing.”

  “That, yes. We knew from early on that we didn’t love each other. I respected him for supporting us, for giving us as good a life as he could. For staying in the marriage, for Dominic’s sake. I know he had affairs sometimes. I stopped minding. Especially once I’d had one of my own.”

  “With a woman.”

  “Yes. I figured he was entitled to some happiness. We both were, even if it had to be snatched on the side.”

  “And now that’s over.”

  “When I inherited the house, it all kind of clicked for me. Dominic would be going to college soon. He wouldn’t need us in the same way. He’d be a man. He’d be ready to deal with us splitting up. With the marriage happening when we were so young, we both still have a chance to start over and find happiness. To find someone to love without it having to be an affair or furtive or shameful.”

  “So you’ve done this for him as well as you.”

  She sighed. “I know that sounds self-serving, and I doubt I can convince him it’s true. But I hope one day he’ll believe it. I hope Dominic will too.” Dominic’s e-mails were full of judgment. She was in the wrong, no argument. Black-and-white. He was so young, so un-nuanced. He’d learn one day that life was more complicated than he’d ever imagined.

  Zoe slid her arms around Lorna and held her close. “Self-serving maybe. But it’s time you took care of yourself for a while, I think.”

  “Mm, maybe.”

  “Or let me take care of you.” Her voice was a whisper, a breath against Lorna’s ear. Lorna rolled onto her back, and Zoe slid her hand down, over breasts and belly, between Lorna’s thighs. She arched up to meet the hand, and all thoughts of the past fled.