He heard footsteps and quickly slipped the photographs back into the leather folder. When they were tucked away, he walked over to the door and unlocked it.

Belinda’s hair was sleep-tousled and her mascara smudged. “I dreamed about Fleur again,” she whispered. “Why do I keep dreaming about her? Why doesn’t it get better?”

“Because you keep holding on,” he said. “You will not let her go.”

Belinda closed her hand over his arm, imploring him. “You know where she is. Tell me, please.”

“I am protecting you, chérie.” His cold fingers trailed down her cheek. “I do not wish to expose you to your daughter’s hatred.”

Belinda finally left him alone. He returned to his desk, where he studied the report again, then locked it in his wall safe. For now, Fleur had nothing of value that he could destroy, but the time would come when she did. He was a patient man, and he would wait, even if it took years.

The bell over the front door of the Strasbourg photo shop jangled just as Fleur set the last box of film on the shelf. Unexpected noises still startled her, even though two and half years had passed since she’d fled from Paris. She told herself that if Alexi wanted her, he would have found her by now. She glanced at the wall clock. Her employer had been running a special on baby photographs that had kept them busy all week, but she’d hoped the rush was over for the afternoon so she could get to her economics lecture. Dusting her hands on her jeans, she pushed aside the curtain that separated the small reception area from the studio.

Gretchen Casimir stood on the other side. “Good God!” she exclaimed.

Fleur felt as if someone had clamped a vise around her chest.

“Good God!” she repeated.

Fleur told herself it was inevitable that someone would find her-she should be grateful it had taken this long-but she didn’t feel grateful. She felt trapped and panicky. She shouldn’t have stayed in Strasbourg so long. Four months was too long.

Gretchen pulled off her sunglasses. Her gaze swept over Fleur’s figure. “You look like a blimp. I can’t possibly use you like this.”

Her hair was longer than Fleur remembered, and the auburn color was brighter. Her pumps looked like Mario of Florence, the beige linen suit was definitely Perry Ellis, and the scarf de rigueur Hermès. Fleur had nearly forgotten what such clothes looked like. She could live for six months on what Gretchen was wearing.

“You must have gained forty pounds. And that hair! I couldn’t sell you to Field and Stream.”

Fleur tried to pull the old screw-you grin out of mothballs, but it wouldn’t fit on her face. “Nobody’s asking you to,” she said tightly.

“This escapade has cost you a fortune,” Gretchen said. “The broken contracts. The lawsuits.”

Fleur tried to slip a hand into her jeans pocket, but the fabric was stretched so tight she could only manage a thumb. She didn’t care. If she weighed her former one hundred and thirty pounds, she’d lose even her fleeting feelings of safety. “Send the bill to Alexi,” she said. “He has two million dollars of mine that should cover it. But I imagine you’ve already found that out.” Alexi knew where she was. He was the one who’d sent Gretchen here. The room closed in on her.

“I’m taking you back to New York,” Gretchen said, “and getting you into a fat farm. It’ll be months before you’ll be in shape to work. That awful hair is going to hurt you, so don’t think I can get your old price, and don’t think that Parker can get you another film right away.”

“I’m not going back,” Fleur said. It felt odd to speak English.

“Of course you are. Look at this place. I can’t believe you actually work here. My God, after Sunday Morning Eclipse came out, some of the top directors in Hollywood wanted you.” She stabbed the stem of her sunglasses into the pocket of her suit jacket so the lenses hung out. “This silly quarrel between you and Belinda has gone on long enough. Mothers and daughters have problems all the time. There’s no reason to make such a thing out of it.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Grow up, Fleur. This is the twentieth century, and no man is worth splitting up two women who care about each other.”

So that was what everyone believed, that she and Belinda had quarreled over Jake. She barely thought about him anymore. Occasionally she saw a picture of him in a magazine, usually scowling at the photographer who’d invaded his privacy. Sometimes he was with a beautiful woman, and her stomach always did an unpleasant flip. It was like stumbling unexpectedly across a dead cat or bird. The corpse was harmless, but it still made you jump.

Jake’s acting career was stronger than ever, but even though Sunday Morning Eclipse had earned him a screenwriting Oscar, he’d stopped writing. No one seemed to know why, and Fleur didn’t care.

Gretchen made no effort to conceal her scorn. “Look at yourself. You’re twenty-two years old, hiding away in the middle of nowhere, living like a pauper. Your face is all you have, and you’re doing your best to ruin that. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to wake up one morning, old and alone, satisfied with whatever crumbs you can pick up. Is that what you want? Are you that self-destructive?”

Was she? The worst of the pain was gone. She could even look at a newspaper picture of Belinda and Alexi with a certain detachment. Of course her mother had gone back to him. Alexi was one of the most important men in France, and Belinda needed the limelight the way other people needed oxygen. Sometimes Fleur thought about returning to New York, but she could never model again, and what would she do there? The fat kept her safe, and it was easier to drift through the present than to rush into an uncertain future. Easier to forget about the girl who’d been so determined to make everybody love her. She didn’t need other people’s love anymore. She didn’t need anyone but herself.

“Leave me alone,” she said to Gretchen. “I’m not going back.”

“I have no intention of leaving until-”

“Go away.”

“You can’t keep on like-”

“Get out!”

Gretchen let her eyes slide over the ugly man’s shirt, over the bulging jeans. She assessed her, judged her, and Fleur felt the exact moment when Gretchen Casimir decided she was no longer worth the effort.

“You’re a loser,” she said. “You’re sad and pitiful, living a dead-end life. Without Belinda, you’re nothing.”

The venom behind Gretchen’s words didn’t make them any less true. Fleur had no ambition, no plans, no pride of accomplishment-nothing but a mute kind of survival reflex. Without Belinda, she was nothing.

An hour later, she fled the photo shop and boarded the next train out of Strasbourg.

Fleur’s twenty-third birthday came and went. A week before Christmas, she threw some things into a duffel bag, picked up her Eurail pass, and left Lille to board a train to Vienna. France was the only place in Europe where she could work legally, but she had to get away for a few days or she’d suffocate. She could no longer remember how it felt to be slim and strong, or what it was like not to worry about paying the rent on a shabby room with a rust-stained sink and damp patches on the ceiling.

She chose Vienna on a whim after she read The World According to Garp. A place with bears on unicycles and a man who could only walk on his hands seemed just about right. She found a cheap room in an old Viennese pension with a gilded birdcage elevator the concierge told her had been broken by the Germans during the war. After lugging her duffel bag up six flights of stairs, she opened the door to a minuscule room with scarred furniture and wondered which war he meant. She peeled off her clothes, pulled the coverlet over her, and, as the wind rattled the windows and the elevator creaked, she went to sleep.

The next morning she walked through the Schönbrunn Palace and then had an inexpensive lunch at the Leupold near Rooseveltplatz. A waiter set a plate of tiny Austrian dumplings called Nockerln in front of her. They were delicious, but she had a hard time getting them down. There were no bears on unicycles in Vienna, no men who walked on their hands, only the same old problems that no amount of running away could solve. She’d never been the bravest, the fastest, or the strongest. It had all been an illusion.

A Burberry trench coat and Louis Vuitton briefcase brushed by her table, then backtracked. “Fleur? Fleur Savagar?”

It took her a moment to recognize the man standing in front of her as Parker Dayton, her former agent. He was in his mid-forties with one of those faces that looked as if it had been perfectly formed by a Divine Sculptor and then, just before the clay was dry, given a push inward. Even the neatly trimmed ginger-colored beard he’d grown since she’d last seen him couldn’t quite hide the less-than-impressive chin or balance out the squished-in nose.

She’d never liked Parker. Belinda had selected him to handle Fleur’s movie career on the strength of Gretchen’s recommendation, but it turned out he was Gretchen’s lover at the time and not a member of the upper echelon of agents. Still, from the evidence offered by the Vuitton briefcase and the Gucci shoes, business seemed to have picked up.

“You look like shit.” Without waiting for an invitation, he took a seat across from her and settled his briefcase on the floor. He stared at her. She stared back. He shook his head. “It cost Gretchen a bundle to settle on the modeling contracts you broke.” His hand tapped the table, and she had the feeling he was itching to pull out his calculator so he could punch in the numbers for her.

“It didn’t cost Gretchen a penny,” she said. “I’m sure Alexi paid the bills with my money, and I could afford it.”

He shrugged. “You’re one reason I pretty much stick to music now.” He lit a cigarette. “I’m managing Neon Lynx. You have to have heard of them. They’re America’s hottest rock group. That’s why I’m in Vienna.” He fumbled in his pockets and finally pulled out a ticket. “Come to the concert tonight as my guest. We’ve been sold out for weeks.”

She’d seen the posters plastered all over the city. Tonight was the opening concert in their first European tour. She took the ticket and mentally calculated what she could get for scalping it. “I can’t see you as a rock manager.”

“If a rock band hits, it’s like you’ve got a license to print money. Lynx was playing a third-rate club on the Jersey shore when I found them. I knew they had something, but they weren’t packaging it right. They didn’t have any style, you know what I mean? I could have turned them over to a manager, but business wasn’t too great at the time, so I decided, what the hell, I’d give it a shot myself. I made some changes and put ’em on the map. I’ll tell you the truth. I expected them to hit, but not this big. We had riots in two cities on our last tour. You wouldn’t believe-”

He waved to someone behind her, and a second man joined them. He was maybe in his early thirties with bushy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.

“Fleur, this is Stu Kaplan, road manager for Neon Lynx.”

To Fleur’s relief he didn’t seem to recognize her. The men ordered coffee, then Parker turned to Stu. “Did you take care of it?”

Stu tugged on his Fu Manchu. “I spent half an hour on the phone with that goddamned employment agency before I found anybody who spoke English. Then they told me they might have a girl for me in a week. Christ, we’ll be in freakin’ Germany next week.”

Parker frowned. “I’m not getting involved, Stu. You’re the one who’s going to have to work without a road secretary.”

They talked for a few minutes. Parker excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Stu turned to Fleur. “He a friend of yours?”

“More an old acquaintance.”

“He’s a freakin’ dictator. ‘I’m not getting involved, Stu.’ Hell, it’s not my fault she got knocked up.”

“Your road secretary?”

He nodded mournfully into his coffee, his Fu Manchu drooping. “I told her we’d pay for the abortion and everything, but she said she was going back to the States to have it done right.” Stu looked up and stared at Fleur accusingly. “For chrissake, this is Vienna. Freud’s from here, isn’t he? They gotta have good doctors in Vienna.”

She thought of several things to say and discarded them all. He groaned, “I mean it wouldn’t be so bad if this had happened in Pittsburgh or somewhere, but freakin’ Vienna…”

“What exactly does a road secretary do?” The words came out of her unintended. She was drifting, just as always.

Stu Kaplan looked at her with his first real spark of interest. “It’s a cushy job-answering phones, double-checking arrangements, helping out with the band a little. Nothing hard.” He took a sip of coffee. “You-uh-speak any German?”