When Kitti was alive -- and he remembered the pressure of her hand resting lightly on his arm -- she had been the center of his life.

She was the sun, he the closest planet orbiting around her, the rest of the world existing and visible yet removed.

For fifty-five years he had lived, progressing towards a no-goal, eating, working, breathing without plan, without reason.

Kitti had come along to justify everything. She was his goal, she was his reason. He had lived all his life waiting for her.

Not once, in the time that he had known her, had he ever considered the possibility, not once, not for one one-thousandth of a second, of her infidelity.

He could not consider it now. Not really. And so he walked, aimless again.

The walk ended, inevitably, right in front of his hotel building. The doorman began to nod his head automatically, then remembered who Gilborn was, what had happened to him the night before. He looked at Gilborn with undisguised curiosity.

Gilborn passed by him without seeing him.

He crossed the lobby and rode up in the elevator lost in his own thoughts.

In the apartment itself, all was still. The police were no longer there. There was no evidence that anything was different than it had been.

Except that Kitti wasn't there.

Without taking off his coat, he sat in the blue chair which still faced the closed bedroom door.

At last, sitting there, in the familiar surroundings, the truth began to sink in.