Most of the time Pamela didn’t think about Brian. She came to the day spa as often as her schedule permitted: about every three weeks. Brian gave the best massage she’d ever had, so she gratefully considered him immediately before, during and after a visit, but otherwise, she tended to be too busy to think of anything but items on her to-do list and an exhausted future of loneliness, and to be too full of those subjects to notice any opportunities around her. Just a week earlier, for example, she was barreling along on an afternoon walk to get exercise and bagels, striding fast and head forward as usual. She didn’t notice her surroundings or even the people she passed. She had just exchanged automatic greetings with a bearded man working in his garden when she tripped on an uneven bit of sidewalk. She didn’t fall (she didn’t have time to fall, she told herself as she recovered from her stumble and kept pacing). She walked on unknowing that if she had fallen, the bearded man would have come to her assistance, and they would have met, and her future would have been entirely more pleasant.

Brian generally knew all this about Pamela but it didn’t diminish his interest. He’d been at least theoretically attracted to her since he met her a year earlier when he took the job at the spa. She was smart. She was funny. She was complicated. She was safe. He even liked it that she was seven years his senior; that felt comfortable. But he hadn’t done anything about his attraction. He was still recovering.

Eight years before, Brian had been an up-and-coming stock broker. Twenty-seven years old, good enough looking, moving around at light speed and making over a hundred thousand a year. He had a succession of girlfriends and he liked every one of them, but he never fell in love. Maybe he was overly fastidious, but something about each one of his girlfriends prevented even his infatuation: bad toes, a way of pursing her mouth that showed him how ugly her future wrinkles would be, a habit of sucking her teeth… Until Barbara.

They were introduced at a fundraiser for the symphony. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Glossy black hair, creamy skin, warm blue lash-fringed eyes, crimson mouth and nails, slender wrists and ankles, narrow hands, and a way about her, an elegant magnetism. Brian thought her perfect. He fell in love.

Barbara was from Texas, a young widowed mother with a nine-year old adorable daughter. The investigators hadn’t yet caught up with her.

She was so charming, lovely, and glamorous that she managed to get Brian to pay for her condominium and her daughter’s private school and feel that it was his idea, all in a year and a half when she only actually fucked him four times.

Brian’s friends became concerned about him. They noted his obsession and were helpless to alter his behavior, but they rallied round and tried to comfort him when Barbara suddenly left town. The men from Texas told them that the lovely widow had lost not one but two husbands, actually, both rich and both possibly poisoned, and at the very least, she had questions to answer. But by then Brian was close to filing for bankruptcy.

His heart was even more mangled than his net worth. He didn’t have the hustle to stay in the financial district. He thought he’d be a doctor and even enrolled in some pre-med courses, but he soon realized that he couldn’t afford the long course of study. He diverted himself into anatomy, physical therapy, yoga and cosmetology classes, while working as a masseur and facialist. He grew critical about glamor. But he argued with himself about that. Try as he might to lose it, Brian remained very susceptible to well-applied makeup, nail polish, and lingerie. Perfume got to him. He felt safest with women at his work, who came to his massage table clean and white-robed, without all the ornaments. But he couldn’t lose those fantasies.