Every now and then he would go to the pond behind the office building and light one up. He didn’t have to go outside. There was a lounge just around the corner from his office, and it would be years before people would become hypersensitive about second hand smoke and the like. But it was peaceful, even serene, if such a term could exist in his world.

Every now and again he would meet her there at the pond. It was where they had first met, she weeping, he smoking. She was the bean counter upstairs near the VP’s office crying over a pregnancy that had gone bad. He was the peon down on the bottom floor in customer service whose tears had been dried up long before by the smoke. They were the perfect match.

Every once in a while he thinks he sees her face, like he saw it in the pond, just before he quit going down there for smoke breaks. He thought it was shadow at first, then thought he was just going mad. His employers agreed, and that’s why he sits at home now, still haunted by her face creeping up from the bath water, under the waves made by his big toe when he tests the water. Sometimes he thinks he sees her over his shoulder while he shaves. Once he awoke staring into the whites of her eyes, her pupils all rolled up into her head.

Every once in a blue moon, he thinks about the love making down at the pond, about that final day when she told him about the baby. He wonders if she tried to trap the other guy, the one she was crying over on the day they met, wonders if it was coincidence that she happened to be down at the pond, the one she could see from her office window. He is often curious about whether the other guy worked there too. Did she use the same kind of veiled threats with him?

Every so often he thinks that he may have been a little too rough with her, maybe he should have been a little more understanding like he was with the other baby, the one he helped pay to abort. He’s a thinking man, which has always been his downfall. Now he is wondering if her foot came untied again from the line like it did the first time, the time after which he quit going to the pond. He wonders if that is why the cops have just pulled up to his apartment building, if the steps he hears pounding up the stairwell are aimed at his door. He is amazed at how quickly the little white pill, the one he bought on the street, works, and he is curious about why he hadn’t thought of this sooner.