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if she was the woman Bobby was sleeping with.”
    “You’re right. That is ridiculous.”
    “I don’t know why I thought that.”
    “Because you’re upset,” she said. “It’s been a really bad day.”
    “I wonder how a brother and sister from Hungary ended up in Great Barrington.”
    “I guess they liked the country. Maybe they had a friend around here.”
    “The detective will find out, I suppose.”
    “The more I learn about people,” Julie said, “the more I think they’re incredibly unpredictable, you know?” Her forehead gathered, producing a slight crease. A sign of age. Were we getting older without having figured everything out? But maybe that was the trick: maybe you didn’t.
    “I know I left him, but Bobby was never unpredictable. He isn’t most people.”
    “Not Bobby,” Julie corrected me. “I meant Zara.”
    But for me, Zara Moklas was completely predictable. She would always exist in my mind the only way I had ever seen her: splayed on a dark country road in mottled hues of arcing lights and her own red blood. My only expectation for Zara, ever, could be death.
    “All the neighbors said she was such a nice person,” Julie said. “Maybe she was. But maybe she wasn’t. That’s all I’m saying.”
    “Because we don’t really know. I do get your point.”
    “Exactly. We don’t know. Maybe under her nice-nicefacade she was a drug dealer and she got it for a bad debt or something.”
    “I hope so,” I said, “because that would mean the killer was specifically after her. But honestly, why would she work as a secretary and clean houses if she was making money selling drugs?”
    Julie smiled wickedly. “Good point. Okay. Then maybe cleaning houses was a front and she was a madame and one of her girls went postal.”
    I pictured a cartoon-sleazy hooker with a knife on the bucolic road in front of Julie’s house. We laughed. And then suddenly I was crying.
    Julie crossed over to my chair and we held each other and soon she was crying, too. Her hands found my face and began to smear away tears.
    “It isn’t funny.” Julie.
    “It’s horrible.” Me.
    “We shouldn’t, should we?” She didn’t ask it as a question because it wasn’t a question. We were making light of something dark. Laughing at someone else’s catastrophe. Digging a moat around the us that had always offered protection. As children we had practiced this art of separation without remorse, but as adults we had learned better. Now, when we slipped into defensive isolation against the world at large, we felt guilty and stopped. At least we tried to stop. But we both knew that I had come to Julie to escape to her, into her, with her. It was a deep and irresistible impulse of our twinhood.
    “Can we bring up my suitcases now?” I asked.
    “Come on. We’ll get you settled and put you to bed.”
    “I think I’ll check on Bobby first.”
    I called the police station and was put on hold for five minutes, only to be told that the detective said not to bother waiting up. I wondered if those were his exact words: “Don’t bother waiting up.” Even from our brief contact it didn’t seem like something Detective Lazare would say. He seemed subtler than that. “Get some sleep and he’ll be back with you soon,” seemed more like it. And then I wondered where Bobby would sleep when he did return. Would he find me in the Yellow Room? Slip between my yellow sheets? Find my body? Would our mile of distance reduce itself to the plain fact that we loved each other? Would he finally either tell me the truth or find a convincing way to un-braid my suspicions? Or would he default to my decision to leave him and find his way to a guest room? I didn’t even know where I wanted him to sleep. It would be a comfort to feel him next to me in the dark but a source of confusion if I woke to him in the morning. I had never known how perplexing it could be to deeply love someone not-Julie yet find it necessary to leave, but of the