I traveled, because I could, and found that a beautiful view is a lonely thing with no one to turn to and say look. I had raised two good children, and I loved them, but they had their own lives and their own families and could not fill the particular Bess-shaped hole in my days, nor should they have had to.

So I rattled around a large house full of the evidence of a happy marriage, growing quietly desperate for someone to look at me again the way I had been looked at for fifty years — and I did not understand that this desperation was a kind of open door, and that there are people in the world who make their living walking through the open doors of lonely old men.

Chapter 2 — Dulce

That was when I met Dulce.

She was thirty-six — tall, elegant, always perfectly groomed, the sort of woman people turned to watch on the street.

We met at a charity event.