“Okay,” she says, and sets a clipboard on the table between them, “okay. So I’m gonna read you your rights, and when I’m done, you’re gonna sign that, to show you understand.”

“I don’t need any rights,” he says.

“First, you have the right to remain silent.”

“I don’t want to be silent!”

She holds up a hand. “Bear with me. We’ll get through this. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you, in a court of law.”

“There’s no need!” he almost wails, “I came here to confess!”

“It’s done,” he says. “You can, ah,” he crouches, grey tracksuit flapping open, jerks up the plastic door to carefully, gripped by the rim, pull out the steaming cup. Offers it up to her, his dwindling hair clipped close, an abstract frown, “Go on,” he says. “Take it.”

She does, wincing. Switches to her other hand gripped carefully by the rim, sucking air through her teeth as she shakes the heat from her fingertips. White-gold hair unsprung from an otherwise ruthless queue a snarly halo in the light. A tentative sip, another wince, “This is terrible,” she says.

“It’s coffee,” he says, getting to his feet. “And hot.”

The room is dim, cramped, overwhelmed by the enormous bed set at an angle, away from any wall, safety rails engaged to either side, the head of it ramped up in a semi-sitting position, foot of it lowered, a rumpled throne surrounded by monitors on carts, pumps, stands laden with drip bags, watchful courtiers clustered about. He’s sat in the one chair, before a curtained window, poking at the phone in his hand, “Mackenzie missed her connection,” he says, hushed.

“What?” she says, hunched on the only other chair in the room, paper cup in her hands, almost empty, now.

“Her flight from Denver.” He looks up. “She won’t be here till after midnight.”

She looks down to the cup, back up to him. “Okay,” she says.

A cough of a laugh, a smile, tipped together, forehead to temple, nose to cheek, a kiss, gently pressed. “I should not have cast you out,” says Ysabel.

“I never should’ve left,” says Jo, looking away, down to the goats in their corner of the lot, enclosed by that temporary fence of orange webbing. “This is all, too late to be from, before it was built, so it must be from after it, ah, got torn down? or whatever?”

“If,” says Ysabel, that shoulder once more her pillow. “If it had.”

“How did you find me?” says Jo, cheek brushing curls. “Or is this just what, I mean, you lost the goods, right? So they took your palace?”

“And who,” says Ysabel, “do you imagine, might do that?”

“I, I don’t know,” says Jo. “The, you know. Powers that be.”

“I assure you,” says Ysabel, “my palace is where it always has been.” Sitting up. “Would you like to go within?”

The light’s changed, the warming sunlight brighter, the slanting sunlight shining upon, reflected out from, so much yellow stone, and white.

“Oh,” says Jo.

The light’s brighter, whitely sifted from fluorescents bolted to green concrete beams along with oh so many pipes, black lengths of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene criss-crossing clean white polyvinyl chloride interspersed with much more slender tubes of gleam-nicked steel, and all of them every one leaking from joints and elbows, caps and seams, water falling from all that plumbing to spang and thump and plack and tock the roofs and hoods, the windshield glass of cars that have been parked in spottily ordered rows on a concrete floor awash with troubled dimpled spattered water, with water stretched in placid sheets, with rippled runnels gurgling down choked and sucking drains, water lapping over her bare feet, over the gleaming pistol dropped to the concrete before her, submerged.

“Ahuh,” she says, she sobs, slosh-stepping back, “ah, aheh,” arms wrapped about her oversized sweater, “Ys,” she’s saying, “Ysabel!” slap and spatter, “Ysabel!” turning about and around again, stilling, stalling, water-slash stop. He’s stood there, at the far end in the moonlight slanting through the open garage door, not as bright as the fluorescents but limning him with a pearly sheen, for all that everything about him’s grey, his trousers a roughly woven shade of ash, his loosely rumpled shirt the speckled hue of gravel, his lugubrious expression the color of cold oatmeal.

“John,” she says, pitched to carry over the drip and tinkle.

“Joliet,” he says, reverberantly. “You’ve changed your hair.”

She steps off the sidewalk into the street, two lanes of dimming tarmacadam, the high stone wall behind her, the gap in the trees ahead. Not even a crumble of sidewalk on that other side, not yet, just a verge of grass where she twists a quarter turn and sets to striding, one definite foot before the other along the edge there, of yellowing grass against pavement, matte black soft-soled shoes, bare shins and knees up to loose black shorts, grey jacket zipped up to her sternum, where ink climbs in spikily knotty thickets up from under along the lines and cords of her throat, up and under to the point of her jaw. Slowly, languidly lifting her arms to either side, as if walking a tightrope, as if reaching for the stone wall to her left, out over the dropping grass and treetops to her right. One of those hands holds an awkward rubbery bundle, oxblood edged with black, the other a slender boning knife, the single edge of it curling to a needly point.

Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.