I can read your look as easily as I can read the numbers on the clock. You are wondering why, if I loved this woman so intensely, I would send Nadir to spy on her. You are thinking that it seems an incongruous act. That is because you have lived with love as more than an abstraction. Maybe you have even loved before in something other than the familial sense. And you'd argue now that love must be based on trust – not spy profiles.

I, on the other hand, have lived with two notions of love. First, and for the longest time, I did not even consider it. It was an improbability, if not an outright impossibility. Please don't believe that this was self-pity and that I only believed that I could not be loved. I also believed that I could not love. I'd never known the feeling, and it certainly would have done little for me in the career path upon which I had been set. As I learned with Christine and Nadir, once one learns to love a single person, one has suddenly developed the ability to love anyone. (DO not look at me that way; you must think beyond romantic love!) For example, I'd learned to love Christine, and promptly formed a friendship with Nadir. How would that do for an assassin? I'll tell you how: it simply would not do at all.

When love finally became a factor in my world, it was in the form of music – especially opera. Faust, Othello, Carmen: these were my models for the tenderest of feelings. Ah! I see understanding dawn in your eyes. Faust tries to win his love by allying with a demon, you are thinking, and Othello outright strangled his dearest one. Carmen flits from one lover to the next, finally chooses one, and is killed by another. What shining examples of fidelity and gentleness! With the help of the greatest composers I learned that love was fickle, cruel, and frequently lethal.

I wanted…no, I needed…to know that this was no opera. I needed to know that Christine was not dallying with that great lout before I cast what was left of my ragged, wasted heart at her feet. I could not ask her, though. I've explained that already. Calling in Nadir was the best thing I could think of. The only other way to assure that she was not with the boy would be to kill him. That would be pleasant, but self-defeating.

I did not see Christine in the time between that night on the stage and the arrival of Nadir's letter. She was apparently determined to drag the information from me by torture. In that time I devised a thousand different ways to tell her how completely and absolutely devoted to her I was, and each formulation was more elaborate than the one before it. I re-examined my old sonatas written for her, refurbished some, and left others alone. My every waking thought was devoted to her. In other words, I moped.

Finally, after a week, Nadir's letter came. I stared at it awhile before I began to tear the thing open. Inside was not a detailed description of Christine's activities as I expected. It was a single slip of paper – a memo-sized scrap with just the words, "Call me."

"She's with him, isn't she?" It wasn't the most couth greeting, but it was all I could think about.

"Erik, before you lose your cool, you need to listen." We had skipped the niceties altogether. This was more like one of our old conversations.

"If she's with him, nothing you can say will keep me calm. So, out with it. Are they dating? Engaged? Sexually…involved? Married?"

"Erik, listen."

"Listening."

"I could not determine the exact nature of their relationship…"

"They have a relationship?" I began to contemplate the variety of knives. Surely there was one that would provide a slow death for him and a quick one for me.

"It appears so, but Erik, there's no evidence that the relationship is anything other than platonic." Kid gloves. Nadir was handling me with kid gloves.

"Speak clearly, Khan. Talk to me as if I were stupid."

"No smoochies. No huggies. No snuggles." Nadir sighed. "They converse on the phone a great deal, but I saw no other contact."

"What do they talk about?"

"I don't know. The majority of the calls are from his number to hers. I did not feel that the situation merited a tap. She only has a cell phone, and that is more trouble than I care to take."

"You didn't feel that it merited a tap? This is life-or-death, Nadir." I was agitated, but not angry. How could I be angry? Nadir had as much as confirmed that, at the very least, there were no smoochies. "You could at least have tried to hear from beneath her window."

"Erik. Call her. Tell her you love her. Wait too long and she will be in his arms. He's trying. You are not."

"He's handsome and rich…I'm…"

"Wasting time. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, Erik. Call me when you want to come out to the farm again. I enjoyed your last visit."

He hung up without a goodbye. I suppose, since there was no 'hello', there did not need to be a 'goodbye'. The message was that Nadir was done. I was on my own. The fact that Christine and Raoul were not obviously actively dating (or worse) did much to calm my fevered imagination, but the prospect of the phone call was chilling.

I went into the managers' office. Poligny was there, working on some paperwork. As I had done many years before, I hefted him by his lapels and pushed him out the door. (That's a funny story that I may tell you later, but now is not the time). Unlike before, though, he had the good sense to stay out of my way.

I took the telephone in hand, cursed at it for a few minutes, and dialed her number. The phone rang several times before the receiver clicked and Christine's lovely Voice, muddled by sleep, answered.

"Raoul, it's after midnight. I told you we aren't…"

"Christine."