single thing he'd told her to evoke her sympathy and get closer to her had been a lie. All of it. Even the name he used was not his true one. The Steve Porter she knew and thought she loved was entirely a fabrication.
It was worse than anything that had ever happened to her so far, worse even than losing Joe. That had been heartbreaking, but it was real and she knew he loved her. This man was a con artist and a criminal. He had lied to her, used her, stolen from her, and taken advantage of her in every way he could. She suddenly felt sick and dirty. It made her feel ill thinking of him now and the things he'd done to her, the intimacies they'd shared. She felt like a prostitute, except he was the prostitute. He was worse than that.
She sat for a long time with the letters in her hand, and then put them back in the drawer and locked it. She didn't know what to say to him, how to escape him. And then with a sense of terror, she suddenly wondered if the professor had confronted him, if Steve knew what the professor had discovered about him, and had somehow hurt him. The thought made her tremble. She felt sick as she thought of it, but she suddenly knew that something terrible had happened.
She left the room quietly and went back to her own room. She was sitting on the bed, trying to sort out her tangled thoughts about all of it as Steve came into the room and saw her.
“You okay?” She looked strange to him, but she'd had quite a day. It was a real bonus he had never expected. He had thought the old fool was dead broke, and all he had to go on was Gabriella's salary and meager savings. This was a real windfall, and he didn't doubt for a minute that he had her in his pocket.
“I have a terrible headache,” she said, sounding groggy. She was stunned by the realization of her discoveries in the professor's desk, and she turned to look at Steve now as though he were a stranger. He was, nothing of what she knew of him existed.
“Well, sweetheart,” he said glibly. He was in high spirits. “You can buy a hell of a lot of aspirin with six hundred thousand dollars. What do you say we go out to dinner to celebrate tomorrow night? And then maybe go away somewhere… Paris… Rome… Atlantic City…” The possibilities were endless. He had some real work to do on her now, and Europe would be the perfect place to do it.
“I can't think about that now, Steve. Besides, I can't just leave Ian on the spur of the moment. And the professor wanted me to use the money so I can write. I can't just throw it around, that wouldn't be fair to him.” She didn't even know why she was wasting her breath on him, but she had to say something. She had to buy time until she could figure out what she was doing. But just looking at him now was painful, particularly if in some way he had been responsible for the professor's “accident,” or his death, as she now suspected.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, looking amused by her pangs of conscience, “the professor is never going to know what you do with it. It's yours now.” She nodded, unable to think of anything to say to him. Even now, his true colors were showing.
They slept in her room, as usual, that night. He used his as an office and a closet. And she told him again how ill she felt. She knew that if he tried to touch her, she would hit him. His was an abuse of a kind she had never known, but it was nonetheless clear to her now. It was no prettier than what her mother had done to her, it wasn't physical, but in its own way, it was just as ugly.
And in the morning, she pretended to go to work, just to get away from him, but she called Ian from a pay phone down the street, and told him she was ill. She went to the park then, and sat on a bench, trying to figure out what she was doing.
She knew that Steve was going out that day, to meet friends for lunch, and that morning he had talked to