ON the other end of the line, the caller listened to T.C. hang up and then waited. The dial tone blared its monotonous trumpet of noise but still the caller stood mesmerized and did not replace the receiver.

It had been done. T.C. had been notified. Everything was moving forward. There was no turning back.

When the phone was finally hung up, the caller fell onto the bed and started to cry.

LAURA sat alone in the hotel room, her mind hazy and confused. The phone did not ring. No one knocked on the door. Time trudged forward at an uneven, unhurried pace. She began to feel more and more isolated from the world, from reality, from David.

Her eyes skittered around the onetime beautiful suite, finally resting on an object they found soothing, familiar, comfortable. A pair of David’s size twelve and a half green high-top sneakers, extra sturdy in the ankle since he had broken his right one while in college, lay sprawled on the carpet. One was tilted over like a capsized canoe; the other stood upright perpendicular to its partner.

She could clearly make out the Svengali label on the right sneaker. On the left, the label was blocked by a sweat sock. Her eyes swerved and found the other sock about a yard away, twisted on the carpet like a man sleeping in a fetal position. David was not the neatest man she had ever met. He used chairs and doorknobs for hangers. The carpet made a perfect bureau for sweatshirts and pants while the bathroom floor tiles served as underwear, sock, and pajama drawers. His personal appearance was compulsively clean, but his apartment looked more like a fire hazard than a human dwelling.

“It’s homey,” he would argue.

“It’s messy,” she’d insist.

Once again, a knock made the images of the past flee from her mind.

Laura glanced at her watch and saw that T.C. had been gone for almost two hours. She could hear the wild birds of the Australian coast cawing outside her window, the sun still potent despite the hour.

“Who is it?” she called out, although she knew it was T.C.

“It’s me.”

T.C.’s voice made her stomach churn painfully. She stood and walked mechanically toward the door. She passed a mirror, caught her reflection out of the corner of her eye, and realized she was wearing one of David’s button-down shirts with her Svengali jeans. She wore his clothes all the time, his Celtic practice sweatshirt on cold Boston nights, his pajama tops as a nightshirt. Odd for a woman who ran a fashion empire. She shook the thought out of her head, puzzled by how her brain could focus on something so inane at a moment like this.

She had another second to wonder if her thoughts were a defense mechanism, blocking out the grim reality, and then she swung open the door.

Her gaze instantly locked onto T.C.’s, but he looked away as if scalded by her eyes. His vision sought the floor to escape her onslaught of hope. T.C.’s face was now completely covered with patches of stubble.

“What is it?” Laura asked.

T.C. did not step forward. He did not speak. He just stood in front of her without movement, trying to summon some inner strength. With great effort he raised his head, his soulful eyes hesitantly meeting Laura’s expectant ones.

Still no words were spoken. Laura stared at him, tears welling in her eyes.

“T.C.?” she asked, her face bewildered.

T.C. raised his hand into her line of vision. Her look of bewilderment crumpled into one of sheer anguish.

“Oh, God, no,” she cried. “Please, no.”

T.C. held David’s multicolored swimming trunks and clashing green Celtic shirt.

They were both shredded.

3

GLORIA Ayars closed her briefcase, turned out the lights, and headed down the empty hallway. The company’s other executives had gone home hours ago. But that was okay. They had all paid their dues already. Gloria had not.

She glanced at her watch. The digital numbers read eleven twelve p.m.

“Good night, Miss Ayars,” the security guard called to her.

“Good night, Frank.”

“You’ve really been burning the midnight oil, huh?”

She smiled brightly. “Sure have.”

Gloria walked toward her car. She shook her head, the smile still toying with the corners of her lips. It was still so hard to believe. Gloria had heard the whispers before Laura left on her trip (honeymoon, actually, but that was a secret). Don’t do it, her cohorts had warned her. You’ll ruin your business. But Laura had ignored them and taken the risk. A big risk. She had decided to leave Svengali in Gloria’s hands during her absence—a move that had stunned even Gloria. Has Laura gone crazy, Gloria had wondered, leaving the controls of a multimillion- dollar company in the hands of someone like me?

But now Gloria knew that the answer was no. Laura’s confidence had been well placed.

As she continued to stroll down the sidewalk, men in passing cars slowed down to whistle or, at the very least, roam her body with their eyes. Gloria was used to the ogles of men. She was by no means as beautiful as her sister, but Gloria was still capable of making any man’s blood boil. There was an innocence about her looks—a gentleness to a world that had constantly punched and abused her. Worse still, all that sweet innocence lay locked in a body that could only be defined as a Marilyn Monroe-type sexual dynamo, a body that was all voluptuous curves—a body that, no matter what she wore, screamed rather than hinted sensuality.

She hopped into her car, adjusted the rearview mirror and glanced at her reflection. She smiled again, wondering if she was really looking at the same Gloria Ayars who until very recently had been a heroin addict, a cocaine snorter, a pothead, and an easy lay for any man who had wanted to exploit her. Hard to believe that it was not so long ago that she was jamming needles into her veins and on the verge of making porno films.

As she drove home, Gloria silently thanked Laura for the millionth time for saving her. If it had not been for her younger sister, Gloria would almost certainly be dead by now. Dead or worse. She pushed the thought from her mind and pulled into the Ayarses’ driveway. She parked her car next to her father’s and took out her house key. A minute later, she was in the front foyer.

Not so long ago, Gloria would not have been welcome here. There was time when her father’s face would turn red with rage at just the mention of her name, a time when she would have been thrown out of the house in which she’d been raised.

And she would have deserved it.

She put down her briefcase in the darkened hallway, took off her coat, and put them both in the hall closet.

“Dad?” she called out. There was no answer. She began to walk toward his study. He never went upstairs before midnight; plus, her mother was away in Los Angeles for the week, so lately he had been working even later than normal.