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of the area rug. Their intimacy embarrassed him, and he suddenly remembered why he had come up there.
 
    He turned and tugged the comforter from her bed, disturbing another cat, this one a skinny orange tabby curled up in the middle of the pillows. As he gathered the comforter in his arms, something black between the mattress and box spring caught his attention. He stepped closer to the bed and lifted the mattress a bit. A semi-automatic pistol—he recognized it as a Walther PPK .380—rested on the white cotton top of the bed skirt. He immediately thought of Alex, but then dismissed the thought and figured it was just her way of feeling safe in the city. It bothered him, though, that she had never mentioned it to him. But then, why would she?
    He returned downstairs and covered her, then squatted next to the couch and moved her hair off her face as an excuse to touch it one more time. "I'll see you later, Jen," he said softly, unsure whether she heard him.
    He opened the front door to leave, but her voice whispering his name stopped him.
    "Don't deny yourself what you really want." She mumbled as she spoke, from alcohol, from sleep. "It's so close."
    "Jenny . . ."
    "Jack, do it. Run for DA. Just do it."
    Without looking back, he stepped into the quiet still of the night and closed the door behind him. He locked it and dropped her keys through the mail slot.
     
    He settled into the back of the cab and tried not to inhale the sickeningly sweet scent of the peach-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. And he wondered how one night in his life could have so drastically altered his view of the world.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    BY THE TIME Jack got home it was after midnight; most of the porch lights his neighbors turned on at dusk had been turned off for the night. He decided to leave the car in the driveway to avoid setting off the automatic garage door. The rumble might wake Claire and the kids.
    He opened all the car windows and turned off the engine. He reclined his seat and looked at the black sky through the open sunroof. The night had cleared and he stared at the stars but didn't see them. He could see only Jenny's face, the intensity of her dark eyes, and her lips, slightly parted. He closed his eyes, trying to block out her image, to no avail. The noise of the cicadas in the trees behind his house magnified; their relentless high-pitched droning became louder and louder. "Cheat-er! Cheat-er! Cheat-er!" they sang out at him.
    "It was just a kiss," he muttered to himself.
    He lay there for a while; he didn't know how much time had passed. He started to think about when he and Claire had first started dating, the heady feeling of those first few months. He'd met her almost immediately upon starting law school; it had been Claire's first year, too. He'd seen her from afar during the second, maybe third week. He'd just come out of his Torts class and was still worked up over a debate with his professor. Claire was sitting in the Pit, the sunken, common area in the center of the school where the students gathered between classes to socialize or study.
 
    Once he saw her, he forgot all about Torts class. He suddenly let go of every bit of skepticism he'd ever had about love at first sight—those stories he'd heard about knowing, upon first meeting a woman, that she'd be the one you'd marry. It was the late eighties, and Claire sat there on the worn, modular furniture in the Pit amid students dressed in khakis and polo shirts or oxfords, the guys with hair shorn close and the women with neat, chin-length bobs, guaranteed to look appropriate with their interview suits. But not Claire. She looked like a leftover hippie who hadn't yet realized Reagan was in office, much less nearing the end of his second term. Her curly blond hair had been even longer then, almost to her waist, and it cascaded carelessly over her shoulders and down her back and arms. Every once in a while, in an apparent effort to keep it behind her,