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hit by a car, although she didn’t consider those possibilities. She was disappointed to think that he was taking his meals elsewhere.
    The last time Chloe saw him he’d been reading
Robinson Crusoe
. While she wiped down the table next to his, he told her what a great adventure story it was. “I feel like I’m twelve years old again.” He joked that he might try to survive on an island using the book as a guide and she reminded him that he was going to buy that sailboat. “You’re right,” he had said. “I almost forgot. There’s this really great line in the book. I underlined it, which is a bit nerdy of me, I know. Want to see?”
    He’d held the book up and she had read the underlined words.
I find I am not alone on the island
. She had agreed that it was a great line although privately she had thought it a little awkward and then she had gone into the kitchen. When she came out again, he was gone, leaving some bills and change on the table.
    Picking up a lunch order, she said to Liana, “Have you seen that middle-aged guy with the black glasses lately? The one who always sits at number seven?”
    “I need a little more information here. How does he take his coffee?”
    “Cream, not milk. Sometimes he orders the apple pie.”
    “Oh sure. Good tipper. But you usually serve him. I can’t really picture his face.”
    “He hasn’t been in for a couple of weeks.”
    “He hit on you or something?”
    “No, he’s not creepy. I was just wondering.”
    “You ever notice how you can tell people are on blind dates? The way they say the person’s name as if it’s a question.
Melanie? Simon?
I always want to say, ‘Go home, both of you, before it’s too late.’”
    IN THE NEXT WEEK, TIM left two messages on her answering machine. She started running in the early evenings. Her friend Natalie called from Paris, where she had gone to study art history. She didn’t know anybody yet and was lonely; why didn’t Chloe come and stay with her for a week or ten days at the end of August? She might be able to pick up a cheap last-minute ticket. But Chloe dithered on that, too.
    And then on Friday she was setting a table when she saw the man’s photograph, a small black-and-white shot on the front page of some government newsletter left on a chair. The photograph looked five or ten years old; the man still had all his hair.
    Economics Development Officer Fondly Remembered.
    So, she thought, he really was dead after all. His name was Gerry Lembeck. He had been a “vital” part of the negotiating team that had kept two automotive plants in Ontario. He had died “suddenly” — that was all it said, except that for years he had bravely struggled with an unspecified illness. He left behind his wife, Rita, head of personnel for a chain of pharmacies, his son Joe and two-year-old daughter Naomi. A memorial had already been held for ministry employees.
    She showed the article to Liana. “You know what ‘suddenly’ means, don’t you?” Liana said. “It’s code for suicide. I’m guessing the illness was depression. Did he seem depressed to you?”
    “No,” Chloe said. “I mean, yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” She meant to take the article but somehow it wasn’t in her bag when she got home. At ten o’clock her friends came to get her and they cabbed it to a club on King Street to see a band called the Stuffed Triggers. In the crowd they met up with more friends, including a guy named Daniel, a theatre major at George Brown. She had a rule against going out with actors, since in her experience they were all revoltingly needy narcissists, but Daniel was funny and good-looking and tall (which always attracted her), and he never once talked about his acting ambitions. In the early morning hours he walked her all the way home, telling her about his family’s disappointment that he didn’t want to go into the building trades. He made her laugh, so she took him upstairs. He was quite beautiful in the pre-dawn dark,