The Secret Keeping by Francine Saint Marie

come out. It was odd for their friend to be absent, especially now that the patio had reopened.
    The waiter thought so, too. He inquired twice about her.
    A blond woman sat inside reading at the window seat, nursing a glass of wine. From time to time the spine of her book fell to the tabletop and roused her from her thoughts. She would then glance hopefully outside and over again toward the entrance, but whoever she was expecting never showed up. She left roughly at nine. Lydia’s friends sometime after midnight.
    The waiter closed around two in the morning, turning the lights out after him and locking the door.

    Done for the day. The chairs had been stacked on the tables. The shades had been drawn. The sign on the door read “closed” once more. In the darkness, the rubber tree plants lining the walls trembled ever so slightly. They were glad to be alone there and proud of their flexibility.

Part Two: The Cab

    “Everyone is searching for a tall, dark and handsome stranger…such persons are rare and there is simply not enough of them to go around…the real Mr. Right is very likely someone you already know.”

    Dr. Helaine Kristenson, “Keeping Mr. Right”

    Helaine knew precisely the moment when she first laid eyes on her dark-haired stranger and it was not, by happenstance, in Frank’s Place. The overnight success of her book the year earlier had proven to be a boon for her private practice and had enabled her to move out of her small downtown offices and to take the lease on the larger and more luxurious ones located midtown in the city’s financial district.
    She had always been attracted to the youthful vitality of this neighborhood and now enjoyed observing its weekday inhabitants from her twelfth floor window as they flowed in and out of the city’s heart and rejuvenated its tired old veins. Weekdays the streets and buildings teemed with their optimistic activities.
    Even on the weekends when they had all gone home she could still feel their energy pulsing from the empty sidewalks and the high-rise windows.
    Helaine had just finished her Friday with one last difficult session and was trying to unwind in a chair beside the window, drinking her tea and making final entries in her journal. The Friday ritual. She had been listening to music as she worked, Ravel launching A Boat At Sea, when she glimpsed the young woman standing and daydreaming in the full-length office window directly across the street from her. She put her pen down and counted up fifteen stories with her finger, guessing by the woman’s elevation that she had probably earned the privilege of a few quiet moments there. The woman gazed out at the horizon, downtown, toward the waterfront.
    The music played, tranquil in the background. Helaine stopped writing. The boat drifted further and further from the shore, dropping its oars and sails. She could hear the water as it lapped at its sides and feel the cool spray on her face as the craft bobbed gently in the waves. Behind it she saw a wake of brilliant sparkles. It spread like a blanket across the deep blue sea.
    The figure on the fifteenth floor was so majestic on her cloud, so serene in her motionless state, so elegant in her black dress, that it struck Helaine that she might have invented her there. She sat stiff in her chair, afraid to look away lest the mirage should suddenly dissipate. The journal slipped from her lap to the floor with an important thud, but she didn’t pick it up.
    The woman in the clouds. A ghost ship perhaps. She wore a tight black dress, stood like a queen in her window surveying her castle’s defenses. Land and sea. Clear skies. The boat floated further. She was far more agreeable to contemplate than the list of irreconcilable differences scattered on the floor–Helaine kicked the journal aside and pushed her chair back so she wouldn’t be discovered spying.
    On the other side of the world, Dr. Kristenson’s lover had disappeared on her again, initially to the