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couldn’t resist asking.
    Jane answered matter-of-factly, “Your name was Stina Salmi. You lived in Helsinki, Finland, where you were an industrial designer and worked for an associate of Alvar Aalto. You died of a cerebral hemorrhage during little vappu in 1971.”
    Felice looked at her lover’s black hands holding the blue coffee cup on her lap now. When she looked at Jane’s face again, she was smiling. “You’re joking, right?”
    Jane shook her head. “I’m totally serious.”
    “Helsinki?”
    “Helsinki.”
    “What’s ‘little vappu’?”
    “A Finnish summer festival. Everyone drinks a lot.”
    “This is mega-bizarre. How do you know these things?”
    Jane shrugged. “You asked for one of my secrets so I told you.”
    “Who were you ?”
    “My name was Milton Rice. I was born in Barbados in 1946, lived three days, and then died in the hospital—bad heart and lungs.”
    “A boy? You were a boy ?”
    Jane stood up. “Not for long. Only three days.”
    Felice pushed her hair back behind one ear. “And what were you before that? Do you remember?”
    “No. I can only see one life ago for anyone, including me. Come on, I’ll walk you back to the store.”
    Felice stood up and shook all over, like a dog shaking water off its body. “What an interesting way to start the morning”—she looked at her partner and raised one eyebrow—“ Milton .”

 
     
    THREE
     
    A child was running across rooftops. No one saw her this time because no one happened to look up at just the right moment to see a little girl in a yellow dress and green sneakers running in such a crazy, dangerous place. Why on earth was she up there? If she were someone’s daughter her parents would be screaming, “Get down! Get down from there this instant! What are you doing ? Come down right now before you fall and break your neck.” But the little girl wouldn’t. She would not come down. She had been doing this for months, day and night.
    Jane Claudius saw her one morning at three o’clock. Rollerblading home after work, she looked up and saw something, some one small move surefooted across the roof of the town bakery. But Jane was tired and distracted. She’d just had another upsetting confrontation with Vanessa Corbin and wasn’t interested in what she was seeing. Her eyes said look—something’s up there! It’s a child, did you see? Yes I saw, but I don’t care. Right now I can only think about that horrible woman.
    Vanessa Corbin saw the girl a week later. The kid stood unmoving on top of the flat roof of the high school, looking down at the world below. Driving by the building, Vanessa caught a glimpse of her but only thought the girl was up there for school or something related. Maybe her whole class was on the roof working together on a science project. Vanessa didn’t think twice about it and drove on.
    Dean Corbin and Kaspar Benn saw the child one afternoon standing on the roof of the railroad station being photographed by a man with a very professional-looking camera. They thought the picture was for a magazine advertisement or an article about their beautiful town. Of course they didn’t know the photographer was a hedge fund manager whose hobby was photography and who just happened to look up at the right moment and saw this little girl standing on the roof of the lovingly restored 1920s station.
    This man was set in his ways. A traditionalist, he didn’t like digital cameras, no matter how many millions of pixels they were capable of producing today. To him, half the pleasure of taking pictures was working in a darkroom bringing photos manually to life. He disliked the immediacy of digital cameras—how you could see a picture seconds after taking it. He thought photography should have mystery in it, something indefinable and elusive. This was why he liked working in a darkroom developing pictures. It was a hands-on process you could never measure or replicate exactly. A photographic image slowly emerging