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[...] She was ready to go home.

Two nights before they left, she knocked on Brian's door before dinner and he pulled her into his room and kissed her.

He'd given no warning of his change of heart. She visited the confessor in her head and was able to say, "Nothing! I did nothing! I knocked on…

Brian, deferring to her judgment absolutely, made her choose the wine and order both dinners. Over coffee she asked him why Robin hadn't come along to Paris.

"It's the first zucchini harvest at the Garden Project," he said with uncharacteristic bitterness.

"Travel is a chore for some people,"…

When they returned to the car, the greenness of which was of a piece with the weeds around the empty gravel lot, Brian asked if she'd made plans for Europe. "You should take at least two months," he said. "I have an ulterior motive here."

"Yes?"

"If you go, then I can go for a couple of weeks…

Unfortunately, as soon as he was gone, Denise had second thoughts. She and Becky enjoyed a lovely and instructive honeymoon and then began to fight. And fight, and fight. Their fighting life, like the sex life that so briefly preceded it, was a thing of ritual. They fought about why they were fight…

At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sicken…