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been traveling with friends, but she stayed behind in Marrakesh with the man until she found out all of his lies, or most of them, or enough to spoil what was once enticing. She left one night and he came looking. He found her in Casablanca.
    She ran away again and he tracked her down in Rabat, where he shot her with a small pistol on a drunken night; a woman doctor dug out the bullet, cleaned the wound, and stitched her. Vera said she remembered the way the brownish antiseptic mixed with the blood, turning her skin yellow and sepia like a strange vegetable under the steel examining room light. The doctor told her to escape and said Vera didn’t understand that she had become a trapped prize; a woman with fair skin and blue eyes on the North African coast was precious. Like a diamond to be possessed but never loved.
    Vera made her way to Spain and flew home to the Cleveland suburb where her father sold Cadillacs and winter came in hard and the scenery was so changed from Marrakesh that she felt safe, as if delivered to a new shore with no trace of that other world. But the man began appearing, in a mirror, a store window, a distant figure on a sidewalk. She felt him everywhere: the shadow behind her in the movie theater, the stranger with his face hidden by a newspaper in a café. The man, his name was Mounir, hovered but never arrived, as if he wanted to haunt, like a wild dog slinking through tall grass on the African plains before it strikes. Vera said he would kill her; she was sure of it. She ran again.
    She had been running seven months, the bullet wound, once spreading like a purple bloom beneath her skin, healed to a raisedwhite scar. That’s when she met Kurt and me in the Philly diner and came home with us that night. She said the man had been tracking her across alleys and that she hid in a church, scrunched down behind the altar, and then slipped out through the vestibule to the street where she spotted Kurt and me in the window. Maybe, she said, it was the light over the table, but from the outside Kurt and I seemed like people she could trust, and when she came in and sat with us, she looked at Kurt’s hands, hard and battered from sandblasting and painting ships, and knew he would offer sanctuary. She said they were strong hands, solid and coarse enough to keep even a gun smuggler from Marrakesh away. That’s what she thought; that’s all she wanted, a pair of steady hands to keep her safe.
    She had not seen the man since she’d been with us, although driving down the Eastern Shore, she thought she glimpsed him behind us in an El Dorado that turned and vanished in the road dust. Vera stopped her story. She put her chin on her knees and looked at the ocean. She leaned on me and we sat in the sand. The waves were cold and clean, hitting the shore hard, mist rising, the way it does just before night when the tide and the air change and new creatures scatter over the sand.
    I didn’t know what to think of Vera’s story. It was more mysterious than even the best Lizabeth Scott movie, and I bet Kurt, if he knew the tale, which he must, felt he was in a script, on the lam, and protecting a girl with a bullet in her past. I supposed that would intrigue Kurt, that late-night, movie-watching side of him, anyway. The mark was there on Vera’s leg. It looked like a bullet scar would look, and Vera did know about spices and desert windstorms and Marrakesh with its colors, balconies, and flowers mixing in with boats and nets and fishermen hunched over hash wisps from shisha pipes. But why does a man like the one she described spend all his time following her and doing nothing? I looked behind me and down the beach. Was a stranger with an accent and a small pistolroaming the coming night? I squinted but saw nothing. Then a figure moved under the pier and headed toward us: Kurt, cursing, sandy, his blanket drenched.
    “I was sleeping and the wave hit me and washed my beer away.”
    Vera laughed. I laughed, too.