They never talked about politics, and, while he’d asked her questions about Lizzie and Diana and their lives, he’d never once asked about Richard. Sylvie policed her own conversation carefully, and she didn’t think she’d ever said Richard’s name in front of Tim. My husband, she would say instead, relating some anecdote about moving Lizzie into the NYU dorms and how Richard had paid a pair of male students to haul her belongings onto the elevators, or how he’d believed that Diana’s college boyfriend was going to grow up to be a psycho killer. To Tim, she was Sylvie Serfer, a grown-up version of the tan and laughing teenager she’d once been, the girl who had gotten her braces off the spring before he’d kissed her and had spent much of that summer with her teeth constantly bared in a grin, or running her tongue over their newly smooth surfaces, marveling at the feeling.Up in the bedroom, she combed her wet hair with her fingers. The curl was coming back, along with the gray, but she found she didn’t mind so much.
