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to call a taxi, but half the schools in Sebastian had prom that night and the dispatcher's phone rang unanswered. He looked back at the school, at the light and the music spilling out from the gymnasium and all the girls in long dresses who weren't Anna, and he wanted very much to get away from there so he set off on foot, five miles of heat that brought him to his knees just inside the front door of his house and sent him to the hospital for a night.
       "You can't do this kind of thing," Gavin's doctor told him. Gavin had had the same doctor all his life. There was a degree of mutual exasperation. "I've been treating you for heat exhaustion since you were a kid."
       "Surely you don't expect him to miss his own prom," Eilo said. She'd driven down from college to be with him and had so far been his only visitor.
       "I expect him not to walk five miles in hot weather," the doctor said. "You'd think he'd have figured this out by now. Have your parents arrived yet?"
       "They're stuck in traffic," Eilo said, because this was easier than explaining that their father was on a business trip and their mother was most likely at home drinking. She flashed the doctor her most winning smile and left the room to deal with the discharge paperwork.

    F l o r i d a  w a s  caught in a tropical heat wave. The air conditioner in Gavin's bedroom rattled and hummed, and when he stood by the window he felt heat radiating through the glass. Three days passed before he was well enough to go outside again, and Anna still hadn't called. Two months slipped by without her. He was leaving for New York in a matter of weeks. The quartet was a memory. Jack was still around but Daniel had left town already without saying goodbye, which was puzzling. Gavin supposed they weren't best friends, exactly, but they'd spent an enormous amount of time together and he'd thought they were fairly close. He'd known Daniel since the first grade and didn't understand why he'd disappear without saying anything. Daniel had told Jack he was going to Utah. Jack thought he'd maybe gone there to work for his uncle's construction company like he'd done the past two summers. Sasha was working days in a clothing store and nights in an ice-cream parlor.
       It was increasingly clear that Anna had left him, that I'm sorry meant I'm sorry but it's over or I'm sorry but I can't do this anymore . As the weeks passed the fact of her absence began to seem like something he could live with. He didn't hear from her again, and in the fall he went to school in New York City.
       The journalism track at Columbia. His ideas about his future were vague. But he'd been obsessed with film noir and detective novels from the ninth grade onward and had decided long ago that he was going to be either a newspaperman or a private detective.
    T e n  y e a r s  later in the newsroom of the New York Star Gavin handed in a piece about cuts to playground funding in the Bronx, went out into the cold air and took a northbound subway to his apartment. The sound from the leaking shower was like rain. He lay on the sofa to listen to it, just for a moment, and woke stiff and disoriented at six a.m. He showered and found a clean shirt, took the subway back to the newsroom. It was a blue-tinged morning, a cold wind in the streets. In the light of day it was obvious that he'd made an unforgivable mistake. He called Eilo from his desk.
       "It's just such a strange situation," he said, meaning everything. "I never imagined this could happen."
       "I'm sorry," Eilo said. "I thought about not showing you the photograph. Are you okay? You sound a bit . . ."
       "I keep thinking, if the kid was staying with that woman whose house was getting foreclosed, what happened to Anna? And I keep thinking that I should have known," he said. "Her sister always said she was fine, but the way she vanished like that. The rumors at the prom."
       "Well, if we're to be honest with ourselves, I guess we