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gentle, measured way, through small gifts and intelligent, respectful notes. His attention was never overbearing, nor disturbingly selfless, but wise and reserved. Even Nina—who, despite shedding fully and completely the first third of her life, never could meet a new person without feeling wary—had liked him immediately. She still thought of him as a skinny young man with a calm, youthful voice; on his annual visits it always shocked her, at first, to confront a gray-haired fellow in his sixties.
    Back when her illness began to take hold, over a decade ago, Shepley (who had not yet met the love of his life in L.A.) had become doting and indulging, a pleasing combination of nephew and servant, driving Nina to her doctor’s appointments and tests by specialists, visiting her regularly, and always including her in holiday celebrations. But it had been eight years since he moved west to be with Robert, and Nina had grown used to his absence. Only rarely did she miss him, mostly after one of his visits, when he took her to tea at the Four Seasons and shopping at Saks in Prudential Center (though she didn’t need to buy anything and always felt exposed in public). At her apartment he would cook roasts and bake cakes and freeze things for her to eat for months to come, and afterward his joyous babbling and lurid anecdotes hung in the air—clung to the apartment itself, like cheery wallpaper—for a few days, and then fell away.
    Other than Shepley, Tama, a Russian-born journalist a decade younger than Nina, and whom she had known since 1970, was the only friend she still spoke to regularly. Tama telephoned often, long distance from Toronto, mostly to complain. But her complaints were the benign sort that always cheered Nina up, and the ease of gossip in her native tongue was a pleasure.
    Shepley too telephoned regularly, but anxiously—to make sureshe was still alive, Nina guessed. She suspected she was a bane to him. Not that he didn’t truly care for her, but his care, his concern, was itself the bane, a weight on his shoulders, since of course Nina wasn’t well and wasn’t ever going to become well, and there was no avoiding that basic fact. That she continued to live was itself problematic, in a daily, logistical way that had ultimately led Shepley to step in and make arrangements with Cynthia. And yet Nina had no desire to die. She passed her time with interest, listened to the radio and read the papers—she took the Globe and the London Times —and each day chose a different album from her collection. Shepley had set up the sound system for her, and regularly sent new recordings of Nina’s favorite works. Today’s was a recent issue of Brahms’s string sextets. If only the telephone wouldn’t keep interrupting. Nina continued to ignore it.
    No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone. Her early life of always sharing, never a private moment or corner or closet shelf of her own, had left her hungry for this, ever appreciative of solitude’s most basic sensations: rolling her wheelchair from one room to the other with not a soul in her way, and lying in her bed at night hearing only the occasional sidewalk voices or sporadic tire-swish of an automobile in the street.
    This current infiltration (as she considered the newspapers and the auction house and the telephone calls of these recent days) threatened to destroy that peace. And ever since that girl Drew had been over, memories—so vivid, they left Nina feeling weak. Even now she could feel them lurking, and something horrible ready to sidle up to her. She tried to focus on the Brahms, and looked out the window. When the ringing started yet again, she felt the last of her patience crumble.
    She rolled her wheelchair to the marble table to pick up the