It was so hard on me when I lost my Nancy, but maybe made twice as hard by little Nicholas Loyola stumbling into that pool less than a day later. I hadn't even got my own news out to everyone before they were all flocking over to comfort poor, poor Sandra Loyola and her husband, Bill, who we all used to make fun of behind his back because he always seemed a bit confused when a joke came up, never knowing whether to laugh or not, and when.

It's no surprise, really, I shouldn't have been so worked up over it. The people I was telling, well, they hadn't seen me in months, probably, and they were sad to hear, but Sandra, they saw her at yoga class, at the supermarket, at dinner parties, at whatever it was my college friends were so busy with those days, anyway.

I do see them at the shops sometimes, but I always duck out before a situation can arise. It's much too embarrassing, really, watching them hesitate, should I hug her, do I shake her hand, do I kiss her, I used to kiss her, but do I now? Promising that they'll call me soon and then remembering later why they stopped calling me in the first place. I prefer to just avoid the whole thing.

Well, that day when I was mugged for the second time since I started making money, I was in a shop where I knew the man who worked at the counter, but I didn't think he'd recognize me anyway, so I kept shopping and just didn't look at him.

And what a quaint little place it was, all feathered hats and strappy shoes, leather belts. Not the sort of place I'd normally just muck about in without any real business, but that day, I fancied a new hat.

Unfortunately, hat stores are known to be rife with mirrors, one of which took me rather off-guard as I entered, because since Tom had left I'd only been looking at myself in mirrors before leaving the house, and even then, only in the most preparedly pleasing expression, hair strewn over half of my face. But in the shop mirror, well, there I was, all sunken cheeks and thin neck in my felty, cream coloured jacket. I blinked at how thin I looked, flexing and unflexing my abdomen under the jacket. Oh, it was a rather good jacket, really, especially on the arms. Well hidden were my hulking, muscle-taut shoulders, or, as Tom had called them, my man shoulders. The woman in the mirror rolled her eyes at the thought, but they watered for a second, real pain. Well, maybe he was right, no one liked a lady with shoulders like a well-trained bull. I'd caught people staring before when I wore sleeveless dresses or t-shirts.

Who cares about your man shoulders? I told myself that day, giving Mirror Woman a smirk before melting into the shop with all the other, normal-shouldered people. I bought a black felt hat that I thought made my cheeks look less hollow and I was right, the man at the counter didn't recognize me at all. Just to give him a jolt, I said, "Thanks a bunch, Marco," when he handed me my bag, even though he wasn't wearing a nametag.

It's easy to forget that I lost Nan so many years ago, since when I see the young mothers in the streets pushing their prams, the wound feels so fresh. And, Sandra likes to assure me, it does for her two, even as in the Christmas card where she's saying it, her two new sons are glossy and blond on the front, leering replacements for the sweet, lost little boy.

Sometimes people ask me, Do you have kids? And usually I will tell them, actually, not anymore, my daughter died fourteen years ago. Many say, Oh, that's so awful, I'm sorry, but a bold few will ask what happened. I tell them some story, usually, about her falling off a ledge or getting cancer or we were in a car accident, or if I'm in a wicked mood, she drowned in a pool.

Because once you've told someone your daughter died fourteen years ago and they ask how, you can't just tell them you had a miscarriage. Why? Well, you'd understand if you'd tried it. Oh, I hate those looks, the squinty-eyed scrutiny. The almost disappointed, "Oh. Well," as if they want to follow it with, Then she didn't really die, then, did she?

I guess that's why it depressed me so much to see the support for the Loyola's after Nick's body surfaced out of the deep end, as if just because Nancy drowned in my womb, not in a pool, she was less real, less pitiable.

What did I do then, after only two sympathy cards and a single casserole, a prayer service with no body to bury and a priest of a God I don't believe in where I was too embarrassed to invite anyone but her father and even he had an important meeting at work? Well, after that I crawled into bed and didn't come out for almost a month.

Walker humored me for a while, bringing me food and kissing me goodnight at the end of my bed-bound day, holding me while I cried. But eventually, he got restless. Started reaching for me in bed, ignoring me when I curled up on my side and begged, Not yet, not yet. He started saying things like, "would you go take a shower? You're disgusting," and, "When are you going back to work?" and even, "would you get over yourself?"

So he left me.

And you know what? I didn't realize how hard it would be to find another husband. So here I am, forty-one, unappealingly ripped, fashionably half-Chinese, with my modified Northern accent that says, I'm not from Leeds anymore.

I clutched my bag from the shop tightly in my fist, purse slung over my left shoulder. The breeze in Manchester felt heavy and damp all the time, like a wet cloth dragging over your face. I thought of my new sunglasses stuffed into the digesting belly of my purse and wished they were on my face as a woman's eyes locked suspiciously on mine, her hand wrapped tightly around her son's. I am foreboding, I have been told, menacing, threatening, ominous, like something come back from the dead. It's the muscles, I guess, and the cheeks, and the way my eyes look so dead and disdainful, even when I don't mean it.

But it was then, tearing my eyes away from that mother and son, that my bag slipped down to my elbow and then, suddenly as a stone thrown into a pond, the weight of it sunk and disappeared. I didn't look down for a second, but when I did, well, it was too late by then. She'd taken off.

Or rather, it should have been too late. But never! Never too late for Acacia Yung-Cooper and her thick, muscular calves that make men wince when she stands up and starts to walk! Even in my high-heeled boots, I felt certain my long, once spindly, now ropy legs could overtake the little runt if I set myself to it. Adrenaline shot down my spine. "Hey!" I shouted. "That's my purse!" as if anyone was going to help me. Which of course, no one ever does.

I only caught a glimpse of her before she hightailed down the block, shoving through the unsuspecting civilians. I watched them recover and then re-panic as I blew past, heels clacking like keys on a typewriter. Trees flew past, mothers and babies, men in khakis, pigeons, divots in the sidewalk. Oh, Manchester, song of my anxiety, dirge of my soul. In Leeds I always wanted Manchester and in Manchester, I longed endlessly for London.

I caught a glimpse of her back again as she turned the corner, shoving aside a man waiting to cross the street. Her hair, thick and inky as my own, streaked behind her like the tails of a kite racing through the wind. She wore a long gray sweatshirt that flapped around her, several sizes too big, and jeans even bigger. My eyes darted down to the heel of her shoe as her left foot disappeared around the corner. Leather, incongruously. With something like a wooden heel. She cradled my purse like a baby with the strap wrapped around her forearm.

"Hey!" I yelled again. I threw myself around the corner, my heel sliding underneath me as I yanked my body in the opposite direction. Swearing to myself, I stopped only long enough to tug the damned things off my feet, tucking them under my arm and pursuing my thief with twice the menace I'd possessed before. Nothing like an unwieldy heel to get a woman angry.

I finally caught up with her when she (rather unwisely) took a turn down a sparsely populated ally. Her hair flew behind her like a beacon. "Hey! I've got you now," I called, plunging myself into the shadows of the big brick buildings. The noise of the world seemed muffled, and my voice bounced around on the walls. Ann eerie feeling settled in me, but I kept running, feet recoiling at the loose gravel in the road piercing the rough skin on the soles of my feet, hardened from long days spent on the grayish, rocky beaches of Manchester searching for God in the ocean. The rocks stabbed into my somewhat corroded callouses, making me wince, but I didn't shout.

The girl did actually seem to realize she'd been caught. There was an open road on the other side of the alley, busy with cars, but it was a long ways off and my long legs carried me ever closer to her as her shoulders slumped, realization of her failure possessing her movements. That didn't stop me from tackling her, of course.

I grabbed her from behind, gripping a handful of her hair in my whitened fist. Her arms tightened around the purse as we slammed toward the ground in tandem.

I didn't even feel the pain of it, my blood was so on fire that I didn't feel anything, not any sort of empathy for this girl, not fear that I may be arrested for assaulting this random minor, not the gravel embedded in between my toes and along my forearms. I just felt blank with adrenaline, ready to kill. I was on top of her, feeling her heartbeat through her back against my chest. I yanked her hair, lifting her face from the ground. "Give me my purse," I snarled.

The girl grunted, not bothering to struggle. "I would, if you'd get off of me. You've got my arms pinned."

With a deep growl that surprised (and in some way delighted) me, I got to my knees and dragged her to her feet along with me, never letting go of her hair as she turned toward me.

She was scrawny, obviously, clothes comically oversized beneath her narrow face. Her nose was a little bulb in the center of her face, reddened along with her cheeks from the cold and the excitement. Her entire face was ruddy, colored up to match her embarrassment. She had tea-coloured skin, so similar to the hue of my own that when I reached for my bag, there was a moment where I thought one of her hands could have been my own. She did have big hands, though, big feet too in those strange leather shoes, peeking out from under the wide brims of her pant legs. I saw that she had some sort of a rope tied through the belt loops, wrinkling the pants tightly to her waist.

Her eyes met mine when I snatched back the purse. I blinked in surprise to see two thin slits beneath dark brown, my own affliction mirrored back at me. All the makeup in the world never seemed enough to save me from my own face. She stared up at me with my eyes, we had monolids like my father's. We. What was I thinking? This little thief and I, in it together with our thin, muddy eyes.

The girl held onto the strap. Whether she'd done it on purpose or had forgotten it was wrapped around her arm, I couldn't tell. She let me unravel it, looking away. I held her firmly by the shoulder instead of her hair, because that could have looked strange to the people walking by. Besides, they might figure we were mother and daughter anyway. Not a thief and an assaulter.

But my adrenaline wasn't finished dragging me along yet. Still red in the face, I shook her, watching those blank brown eyes blink at me. She seemed mad, almost, angry that I'd caught her. "What makes you think," I barked, "That you can steal from people? Who taught you that? What would your parents think of this?"

She blinked with defiance, although her eyes were watery and red, not quite afraid, but maybe apprehensive. She had a very guarded face, I thought, strong with prominent cheekbones and a firm chin, eyes hidden under thick brows. Those eyes, muddy but strange, sparkling, empty in a way that only seemed empty because they were full of something I didn't understand. "Let me alone," she demanded. "I gave it back."

The adrenaline had begun to recede again from my system. My brain unfogged, putting before me my situation: barefoot in an alley with a random juvenile delinquent with my eyes. I felt my heart softening to her a bit, even if that wasn't what I wanted. "Sure you did, this time," I said. "Because I caught you. But lord knows, next time it'll be some little old lady who can't get to you, won't it?"

Her eyes wandered away again, like a criminal looking for her escape car. "Well, no ma'am, of course I wouldn't."

I scoffed, a little harshly. "Oh, so now you're the standard of morality, aren't you?"

She looked back at me, but a new feeling had been added to the guardedness -- a vague sort of confusion. "No ma'am. That's not . . . Why would I take a purse from some random old lady?"

I felt a cold pang in my heart, feeling my face assemble to match her confusion. "Well, why wouldn't you, if you've already taken my purse?"

"Because it was your purse I needed, wasn't it? Can't be going around having some random purse, no use to it."

That was when I saw that in her eyes there were walls, but in those walls were search towers, scrutinizing me, trying to pull me apart, put me back together and make sense of me. She knew me, I realized. She knew who I was. My fingers jumped away from her shoulder. Suddenly, her skin felt too light and soft, almost like it might not have been there at all. "Scram," I said. "Just get out of here. Leave me alone."

She didn't lose my gaze, her brows furrowed like I was a crossword that was giving her some trouble. "Well maybe you aren't then, anyway."

"What?" My heart spiked me with a rush of blood sending my head into light, dizzy whiteness. "What in the world is that supposed to mean?" I looked her up and down, taking in her shabby, obviously stolen clothes, her straight, boyish hips and flat chest. The firm set of her lips. Her white knuckles, clenched around something. I could see her thumb pressed to the top of it. She caught me staring and snatched the hand behind her back. "What've you got?" I said. "Give it to me. What'd you take?"

"Nothing of yours. I have to go."

"You little thief!" I called, but she was gone by then. I had my keys and my phone and my wallet so I decided to put my shoes back on and go back to being a civilized person. I decided to forget about her.