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someone from her own circle of embittered divorcées with child-support problems: Ironically, people much like Francine in situation but presumably less bawdy or anyway more circumspect. Francine in fact had been a neighbor of Celeste Brownson, a pal of Robin’s whom his sister had urged him to date. “I call her Celezzy to her face,” Francine told him, “and she doesn’t mind at all! Her trouble is, she can’t ever admit to herself that she basically hates men. Poor Evan! It must have been like sticking it into a bowl of cold risotto.”
    When Sam was well, Roy did not have to search for a confidant. If he thought about the matter, he would have to confess to himself that Kristin was a surrogate, so he must try to avoid an impulse to overapologize for intruding on her workday, which he would not have had to do with Sam, who usually had no work as such and when he did, its demands could never have been as important as the needs of his best friend.
    While Roy waited for Kristin at the curb outside the Municipal Building, the cell phone vibrated in his pocket.
    â€œRoy, returning your call.”
    It was Seymour Alt, his lawyer, during a recess in some trial in a courtroom in the very building from which Roy had just emerged.
    Roy told him what had happened. “I guess I’m lucky that Holbrook left the note. Poor Francine. It would have been even worse if I was suspected of killing her. Well, I’m legally in the clear now, so I won’t need your services.”
    â€œYou let me be the judge of that,” said Alt, switching off.
    Roy regretted having called the counselor, with the man’s vested uninterest, if not disdain, for morality. Sy was a nice person when with his family or playing golf but changed into another order of being when he practiced his profession. Unfortunately it was not possible to operate a business for more than an hour nowadays without consulting an attorney. To your lawyer you were always right in every phase of every matter, as everyone else was wrong and even if badly hurt deserved no sympathy when their interests were not your own. “Of course,” Alt said when Roy once privately made that point to him. “Else you’d sue me for taking money under false pretenses.”
    Kristin was as good as her word, arriving in the Corolla soon after he had put the phone away. Her promptness was all the more impressive in the traffic of what he realized, looking at his watch for the first time all day, was already noontime.
    â€œThis really helps,” he said. “At the moment I can’t stand being in my own company…. I’m sorry. That sounds like anyone would do. Obviously I don’t mean that.”
    She was an attentive driver, keeping her eyes, after a quick glance at Roy, on the car ahead. “And I was about to say I’m only doing what Sam would be doing if he could.” She smiled at the windshield. “Obviously, I don’t mean exactly that. You’re my friend, too.”
    Roy was moved by the sentiment while being aware that any humanitarian acquaintance might say the same under the conditions at hand. The need for caution in his associations with women—even those with whom his relations were only polite, as with Kristin—had been more than confirmed by the tragedy of the Holbrooks, which he found more unbelievable each time he reviewed the sequence of its events…yet he felt compelled to keep doing so.
    She drove, and he talked. He paid no attention to where she drove and did not really care whether she was listening to what he said, which could hardly have been fascinating to her. He sensed he might even feel a retroactive humiliation later on, looking back on what was the moral equivalent of vomiting or diarrhea.
    It was pride that finally brought him back to self-control. This was not good old Sam, before whom in all these years he probably could not be embarrassed, but rather Sam’s