He lay on the hotel bed with her, the room smelling rancidly of the sex they just had. It wasn’t a cheap hotel room, she wasn’t a cheap trick, but the whole thing smelled cheap. He wasn’t even sure what her name was. Randi, the escort service had said. But who knew. He’d lied about his name to her, and once you lied yourself, you could never be sure of the anyone else’s truth.

Randi announced that she was going to take a shower, so he put on his boxers and jeans to go out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. The match flickered in the wind as he lit up his tenth Marlboro since Randi came this morning. It was his two-hundred sixth since he started again a month ago. Why was he keeping track? A way to mark the time, he supposed. The higher the number got, the more time passed, the older he was.

It was chilly in the April ocean breeze, but he didn’t care. Not much had mattered since he came home to an empty house and a good-bye note from Cathleen. But that was another life, not the one he lived now.

Today was Easter Sunday. For six years, Easter had been a day of no sleep, just like every other holiday in between. The kids always woke him up, jumping on the bed between him and Cathleen, shaking him out of sleep like some kind of earthquake.

He’d joke with them to compensate for the initial annoyance he’d feel at being startled out of slumber. His little tornadoes, he called them, making them laugh. He could never be mad at Shawn or Kevin for long. And then the two of them would drag him out of bed, off on the holiday hunt to find the treasure the Easter Bunny had left them. The results were always just as much a surprise to him as to the kids, because Cathleen was always the one who set up the hunt, bought the presents, wrapped them up and hid them. Somehow it never occurred to him to help her. He felt as if he’d missed out on something important.