No One You Know by Michelle Richmond Page A

boy actually wanted you to sign Thorpe’s book. I was furious. Lila was dead, and here they were treating you like a celebrity.”
    As I spoke, I tried to keep my voice steady, so as not to betray my fear. “After a couple of hours you finally came out. The first thing that crossed my mind was that you weren’t what I expected. The way you looked, the basic physical description—yes, Thorpe had gotten that right. But everything else—the way you moved, the way you spoke—he’d gotten it wrong.”
    “Of course he did. He never met me.”
    “What?”
    “I know,” McConnell said. “In the book, he gave the impression that he spent a lot of time interviewing me, but we actually spoke only once, on the phone, for five minutes.” He rubbed his thumb back and forth over the bill of his cap; the cloth in that spot had faded to a pale purple. “What did you expect?”
    “I expected you to seem more, I don’t know, dangerous. I thought there would be something about you—” Here, I stopped, surprised to hear myself saying these things to him. I remembered distinctly thinking that there should be something obviously off, something in his eyes, maybe, or his bearing, that marked him as a murderer, but there wasn’t.
    “You took the train back to the city,” I continued. “I left my car behind and followed you. You ended up at Enrico’s in North Beach. I got a table and watched you eat. After that I didn’t go to Stanford again, but every Monday I went to Enrico’s. And every time, you were there—spaghetti with prawns in marinara sauce, ice water, followed by espresso. You were always alone, always working, scribbling away in your notebook, as if the world was invisible to you. I always wore a hat and sunglasses, but I expected that, one day, you would recognize me.”
    McConnell shifted in his seat. His face in the candlelight was striking. I could see now what Lila would have seen in that face—the interesting angles, the depth of the eyes, the enormous pupils, the flat, honest width of the mouth. “I did,” he said.
    “You did?”
    “Of course. Lila had shown me pictures—some of you together in Europe, another of the two of you on the beach, pictures from childhood. And there were the photographs in Thorpe’s book. But even if I hadn’t seen pictures, I would have known.” His voice grew quieter, and his gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth, my neck. I looked toward the kitchen for Maria, but I could neither see nor hear her.
    “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.
    “I assumed you would approach me one day. I would have liked to talk to you. For several months before Lila died, I saw her constantly. Aside from the time I spent with my son, she was the best part of each day. I loved talking to her. More than that, I loved listening to her. Then she was gone. You looked so much like her, I wondered if you sounded like her, too. I wanted to hear your voice. But you just sat in a corner, watching.”
    “I kept planning to confront you,” I said, “but I never could work up the nerve. Even in that setting, with all those people around, I couldn’t be sure how you would act. And then one day, you were gone.”
    There had been a time, a period of years, when I looked for Peter McConnell everywhere, and because I was looking so intently, on a number of occasions I thought I saw him. On the street, I would catch a glimpse of a profile and hurry toward the man, only to realize it wasn’t him. Or I would see a movement in a museum, a tilt of the neck or a certain gesture of the hands, and sidle up beside the person, who would invariably end the illusion by turning his face toward me.
    After a strange, unsettling year of sex and alcohol following Lila’s death, I had spent my twenties in a series of brief relationships, never willing to truly commit. At the time I told myself I was too busy, but I later realized that the problem was Peter McConnell. I had created a sort of personal mythology around