Phoebe curled up on the couch, wrapped in an afghan, cold and shaking in spite of the heat.

Bad. That could have been so bad. She’d gone into a stranger’s house in the middle of the night on the advice of something even she couldn’t quite believe. The doctor could have gone psycho on her, and people would have been picking pieces of her out of neighborhood dumpsters the next day.

She pressed her cheek against the rough weave of the couch and closed her eyes. He could have done anything. He’d been angry, he’d been demanding, but it could have been a lot worse. He could have reacted the way Michael had reacted when he caught her reading cards at a party Halloween night and realized that she hadn’t thrown her cards away. Three months after they got married.

That Halloween incident had been such a stupid thing. Dr. Luckreed found out from his wife — who taught sixth-grade social studies at the school where Phoebe was in her first year of teaching — that Phoebe read tarot, something she had kept from the attention of the principal and the school board. Up to that time, she’d just read occasionally for her friends — she’d never charged for a reading and had never gone public with her odd talent. But Sherry had been having problems, and Phoebe had offered to read for her, and the reading had helped. Phoebe thought nothing more about it until a month later, when the Luckreeds wanted a tarot reader as entertainment for a Halloween party and Sherry had asked Phoebe if she would come and throw cards. Phoebe had been delighted.

They set her up in a little heated gazebo outside the main house, with the pathway lit by pumpkins and with ghosts, bats, and spiderwebs fluttering from the bare-branched maples that arched overhead.

Phoebe’s evening had started slowly — she’d thrown cards for one woman and had been really on. Then she’d sat for a while, sipping a cup of hot chocolate from the big electric pot Sherry had supplied. She’d had time to finish almost a full cup before she heard a laughing couple come up the walk. She’d quickly nailed both the fact that they’d been trying to get pregnant for ages and that the woman had finally succeeded — something she hadn’t yet dared tell her husband, fearing that it wouldn’t last. The cards said it would.

Phoebe had had time for a few sips of hot chocolate after those two — but then she’d looked up to find a line of people stretching all the way back to the big old Victorian house. Word had gotten out, and she didn’t have time for another sip of chocolate all night.

She’d had a ball, and she’d been hot with the cards, too, steadily digging out hidden issues, helping people get a different perspective on problems that had been stymieing them, and simply letting the querents know how things were going in their lives. The whole tone of the evening had been pure, unadulterated fun.

And then she’d looked up to find Michael next in line, his patrician features twisted with fury, his green eyes glowing. Michael, who had been working late on a case and who’d said he wouldn’t be able to make the party and couldn’t really stand the Luckreeds anyway and suggested that she really should just decline the invitation. She looked into his eyes as he stood in the gazebo archway, and she saw murder. Her hands had stilled on the cards, and he’d said in a voice too low to cause a scene but poisonous nonetheless, “Forgot to tell me a few things, didn’t you, Phoebe? How dare you make a spectacle of yourself like this? I told you never to do this — this witch crap of yours — again. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know how this reflects on me?”

“I’m having fun at a party. The people here are also having fun. I don’t see how it reflects on you at all.”

“You will,” he said. He’d insisted that she leave right then. Claiming a family emergency, he’d dragged her past disappointed guests waiting in a line that had only gotten longer. He had hunted up Dr. Luckreed and made excuses, and then had hauled Phoebe home, telling the Luckreeds he would have someone pick up Phoebe’s car the next day.

He’d hurt her in ways she would never have been able to imagine, and he hadn’t even laid a finger on her. He never raised his voice, never lost control — but he started in with her trailer-park childhood and the way her lower-class manners, speech, and actions were constantly making her look like a fool and humiliating him by association. He’d mocked her career as something fit only for the talentless and unambitious, utterly ridiculed her use of the tarot deck, and called her both gullible and scheming. And then he’d accused her of being like the girl who’d left him — of being cheap and tawdry and a charlatan, of letting him down, of making him so angry that he’d said those terrible things to her when he never wanted to hurt her. When he loved her so much. And when he’d been a fool, because he’d fallen again for the same sort of woman who had hurt him before.

They’d only been married three months. She’d been young. She’d been stupid. She’d believed that she was partly at fault — that at the very least she’d humiliated him and perhaps caused him potential problems with his work. And she had let the pity that brought them together and that kept them together overshadow the stirrings of self-preservation that told her to walk away. She’d held honor in high regard back then — had believed that when she gave her word she had to keep it no matter what. No matter whether the person to whom she’d given her word was upholding his end of the bargain or not.

Young and dumb.

Over the next few months, to appease his various hurts and humiliations, she’d resigned her teaching position, had almost vanished from the lives of people who knew her, and had cut off almost all communication with her friends. Michael’s associates started being the only people that she saw.

And then, when she’d voluntarily cut herself off from everyone who might help her, the real horrors had started. And she was too ashamed at having been played the way he’d played her, and too afraid of what he would do to her, to run for help.

Young and dumb.

Eight years and the dumb had worn off, as had any illusions she might have had about honor, either his or hers. She’d run. And five years after that, she wasn’t all that young anymore, and the smarts had apparently stuck. She could see trouble and stay out of its way.

She took a deep breath, uncurled herself from the couch, and cautiously stood up. She had daylight, and errands to run.

The leg felt better. Some days were like that, and she was sure that with enough exercise and care, she would eventually be able to get rid of most of the pain and regain most of her mobility. She yearned to be able to run again; she’d loved running.

She decided to go without the cane — just tough it out. She grabbed her backpack, swung open the door, and there stood her next-door neighbor, just coming out his own door.

“Four years I managed to live here without running into you,” he said, “and now you’re everywhere.” Then he noticed she wasn’t using the cane. “Miracle worker, too, I see. Very nice.” He looked disgusted. He stared at her the way people used to when she was a kid. They’d find out she was from whichever trailer park her family was living in at the time, and they’d act like she had something contagious that would rub off.

“Like I have nothing better to do with my life than hoax some shallow, money-obsessed snob like you,” she said. “Your kid came to me at that ridiculous hour of the morning because she wanted to tell you something. No skin off my nose if that doesn’t matter to you,” Phoebe snapped and headed down the sidewalk, taking her time and going easy on her knee.

And then he was right beside her, glaring down at her. “I want to know what your game is. You think you can — what — blackmail me? Get me to pay you to tell me some story you made up about her? You figure I have a lot of money because I’m a doctor?” He looked like he’d be willing to strangle her if she just gave him that little extra nudge. “What’s your angle?”

“You’re the conspiracy theorist. You tell me.” Phoebe reached her car, grateful that her parking space was close to her front door. “But not now. I have things I need to take care of.” She gave him a cold, haughty smile — the one she’d perfected as a kid living in a one-bedroom single-wide trailer in an endless succession of dreary trailer parks, sharing a foldout couch in the wall-less den with her sister and wearing homemade clothes and hand-me-downs from relatives who were better off.

She got into her car wanting to hate Alan, slammed the door, and drove off.

But she couldn’t hate him. If she put herself in his place and tried to imagine someone coming to her in the middle of the night, claiming that he’d had a visit from her dead child, she would have been skeptical, and probably hostile. She would have been looking for the angle, too, had some lunatic claimed what she had claimed.

Phoebe could tell herself that Alan was like Michael — but her gut said he wasn’t. That the two men were about as far apart on the spectrum as two members of the same species could be.

Her gut said more about Alan, but she didn’t intend to listen to that. She’d given up on men. Living the life of a nun suited her — no one hitting her, no one hurting her, no one threatening to kill her.

Not until yesterday, anyway.

Phoebe spent an hour at the shooting range, plugging targets in tight clusters with the Browning, something she did twice a week every week, because she was never going to be unarmed and helpless again.

Then she drove down University to the Moonstruck New Age Shoppe, parked, and eased herself out of the car, careful of the knee but pleased at how it was holding up. Ben Margolies saw her crossing the parking lot and had the door open for her by the time she reached it.

Ben was, Phoebe guessed, in his late thirties or early forties. But from a few feet away he could have passed for ten years younger. He worked at his looks; his pale hair fell over his forehead in a boyish, clearly expensive style that she suspected included coloring. His eyes were the startling blue that Phoebe attributed to tinted contact lenses. He dressed in Banana Republic and Gap, and kept his body lean and supple with yoga classes he took in the gym next door. Classes he’d invited her to take with him more than once and which she had, more than once, declined.

The irritating young witch wannabes who hung out in the shop gushed about how cute he was. Phoebe thought Ben was trying too hard — but he was nice-looking.

“Hi, beautiful,” he said. “You couldn’t have picked a better day to come in. How’s the knee?”

“Hurts... But see? No cane.” She held out her hands and demonstrated cane-free locomotion for him. “I had something I wanted to ask you, but first tell me what’s great about today.”

“Ummm... I’m going to ask you out and you’re going to tell me yes?”

“Clearly you fail the psychic test,” Phoebe said. She smiled when she said it, but her stomach gave that queasy little flip she got every time he joked about asking her out. If he hadn’t recommended her for the job with the psychic hotline, she probably would have found another place from which to restock her tarot supplies, just because he was endlessly persistent, even if he kept his persistence low-key and friendly.

He had helped her get the tarot job, though, and she felt like she owed him. And even though she didn’t know him very well, he was a familiar face, and was someone who actually knew her name. She didn’t have many people like that left in her life.

Ben laughed. “Actually, I knew you were going to say that. No, today is your lucky day because I got in a new batch of incenses and some fascinating new decks. You’re going to love them.”

Phoebe smiled at him and sighed. “I’ll take a look, but you know what I like.”

“Plain white candles and Nag Champa are fine, but you could have a little zazz in your life. You deserve a little zazz.” He held out his arms and gave her a showman’s smile.

She made a face. “Last couple of days, I’ve had more goddamned zazz than the Boston Pops.”

Ben looked at her sidelong, and an odd smile crawled across his face. “Have you been cheating on me behind my back, beautiful?”

Ben laughed then, but in the instant before he did, her mind reframed everything. Ice slid down her spine and into her bloodstream, and she thought, He knows my real phone number, he could probably get my work number under some pretense, and the fact that he’s always been nice enough doesn’t mean that there isn’t something seriously wrong with him.

If he could do voices — if he’d ever heard Michael speak—

He patted her shoulder in a fashion probably meant to be friendly but that made her heart leap into her throat, and strolled across the store to pick up a big box of her favorite Nag Champa incense for her, and a dozen white pedestal candles.

“How’s business?” she asked. Her mouth was dry.

He had his back to her, putting the candles she got every time she came in into a box. “Steady. Lot of new clients — enough that I may be able to afford a full-time reader to work with me. The offer is still open.”

Chills skittered down Phoebe’s spine. “Too public for me,” she said. “Working in the shop would involve a lot of standing, and you have way too much glass in the front window.”

“You’re still doing the phone readings?” He turned, the box with the candles and the incense in his arms.

She nodded.

“That’s shit money. You could make so much more reading in here, Phoebe, and you’d develop a regular clientele in no time.”

“Reading is a stopgap for me,” Phoebe said.

“You’ve been saying that for a year.”

“I know.”

He shook his head, put the box on the counter, and added the purchases up on a receipt pad. “Thirty-four fifty-nine. That’s my cost — I’ll let you buy wholesale today.”

Phoebe reached into her backpack and brought out her wallet. She counted out bills and change with hands that were shaking and quickly put the money on the counter.

“Thanks,” she said.

Ben reached for the box, but Phoebe picked it up first and hobbled out of the store as fast as she could.

She didn’t think Ben had ever met Michael. What were the odds? She couldn’t imagine how Ben might be able to imitate Michael’s voice, either, or how he might have said the things Michael would say.

But he knew who she was. And where she was. And how to reach her. And as far as she knew, he was the only one who did.