Most Likely To Die

Chapter 14

New York City, May 2006

“Mommy?”

Lindsay Farrell bolted from her bed, heart pounding wildly from the shrill middle-of-the-night ringing that had just startled her from a sound sleep. She gripped the phone tightly against her ear.

“Mommy…why did you do it?”

“Who is this?” she demanded, her heart pounding wildly. She strode blindly across the darkened bedroom, stubbing her toe painfully against the footboard of her queen-sized bed, barely noticing.

“It’s me, Mommy.” The voice was strange, high-pitched. It could belong to a child…

But he wouldn’t be a child anymore, she reminded herself.

No, her son would be nineteen now-twenty this coming summer.

He was born right here in New York City, the week before she started her first semester at Fordham University in the Bronx. She’d attended her first day of classes with engorged breasts that throbbed painfully, and a heart that ached even worse.

“Why did you give me away, Mommy?”

“Stop calling me!”

Lindsay disconnected the call and tossed the cordless phone across the room. She heard it fall to the carpet with a dull thud.

It wouldn’t be broken, though.

She’d thrown it even harder last night, against the wall, and she was certain it wouldn’t work when she found it this morning.

She hoped it wouldn’t…not that she honestly believed a broken telephone receiver would put an end to the eerie wee-hour phone calls. According to her Caller ID box, they were coming from a Private Name, Private Number. Pressing star-sixty-nine on the dial after the calls got her nowhere. Somehow, the number was completely blocked.

Meanwhile, she’d gotten a call just about every other night for the past week or so-always the same voice, always saying the same thing.

Why did you give me away, Mommy?

So somebody knew her secret.

Was it really that surprising?

Of course, she trusted the kindly nuns at Blessed Sacrament, the Queens home for unwed mothers, where she’d arrived that June just after high-school graduation and stayed until she had the baby.

And she trusted Sister Neva, the aging Reverend Mother at St. Elizabeth’s, who’d arranged her referral to the home.

She’d confided her secret to no one else-even to this day.

Did she really believe she’d kept it that well hidden?

At the time, yes.

But in her muddled, distraught state-first because of the pregnancy, then because of Jake’s shocking murder-she really couldn’t be sure of anything.

Looking back, she recalled that she’d bought at least seven home-pregnancy-test kits when she first realized, just before that ill-fated Valentine’s Day dance, that her period was late. She’d bought them at various drugstores and supermarkets, thinking that was wiser than returning to the same place over and over again. And she’d always attempted to camouflage her telltale purchase with several other items. Had she really thought the cashier wouldn’t even notice a pregnancy test nestled among the packs of gum, magazines, panty hose?

Maybe. She was such a wreck back then, even before the tests confirmed her worst suspicion.

Afterward, she remembered trying to conceal her thickening waistline and swelling breasts beneath her ugly, ill-fitting school uniform in those last four months of school. She had always been slender; a few people-especially her mother-commented that she seemed to be “filling out.” Aurora Zephyr even jokingly told her she’d better watch out that she didn’t add the notorious “freshman fifteen” pounds when she got to college.

Had her friends been whispering about her escalating weight-and speculating about the possible cause for the gain-behind her back?

Maybe. Probably. Her group of friends, always tight knit, seemed to splinter after Jake’s death. Even Kristen and Rachel, her closest confidantes, became distant.

If that hadn’t happened-if Jake hadn’t been killed-Lindsay might have confided in them. She might even have told her parents, who would have been disappointed but probably would have stood by her and helped her hide her condition-if only to protect the family name.

But she didn’t share her secret with her parents or her friends.

Instead, she miserably battled round-the-clock morning sickness on her own, hoping no one would overhear her daily vomiting sessions in the school bathroom.

When somebody eventually did, it was the last person with whom she would have expected to share such a scandalous confidence.

Perpetually patrolling the corridors in her black habit, leaning heavily on her wooden cane, the Reverend Mother was an intimidating figure. Never more so than the day Lindsay emerged from a bathroom stall to find Sister Neva standing there, expressionless, obviously having heard every last gag and retch.

“Are you sick, child?” she asked, fixing Lindsay with a level stare.

Lindsay started to stutter, then burst into tears.

To her shock, Sister Neva folded her into a firm embrace-more bolstering than affectionate, but it was what Lindsay needed in that moment.

She found herself being led to the inner sanctum: the Reverend Mother’s office, furnished only with an austere desk, guest chair, file cabinet, and of course the ubiquitous crucifix on the wall.

There, Lindsay confessed her greatest sin-and was met not with disapproval, but stoic support.

With resignation, the aging nun agreed not to tell Lindsay’s parents, on the condition that Lindsay allow her to make arrangements for the baby to be delivered-and adopted-on the East Coast.

There was no question, ever, that she was going to have the baby. She was a devout Catholic.

But Sister Neva stepped in and took all-encompassing control of the situation as if it were her own personal mission to ensure that there would be no other option. She was determined to propel Lindsay through the pregnancy until the baby was safely delivered to deserving Catholic parents.

Until she arrived on the scene, Lindsay hadn’t given much thought to what would happen after she gave birth.

Which seemed hard to believe now, from an adult perspective. As a high-powered Manhattan event planner, her entire career was based on intricate short-and long-term calendar organization.

But back then, she was more concerned with the immediate future-her own-than the long-range repercussions of her condition on herself or anyone else. Even the baby.

So it was a relief to defer that monumental decision to somebody with infinitely more wisdom and connections. The nun cleverly arranged for her to take a summer class at Fordham University so that her parents wouldn’t question her early departure for college. Not that they would have anyway, after all she had been through.

They tiptoed around her for months after Jake died, attributing her withdrawn behavior entirely to the fact that her longtime boyfriend had been brutally slain and she had found his body.

They seemed relieved when Lindsay announced she was leaving two months early for college, and they didn’t bat an eye when she said the campus dorms were unavailable until the fall semester. No, they never suspected that her temporary summer address was a diocesan-run home for unwed mothers.

Lindsay left the details in Sister Neva’s capable hands without a second thought…until it came time to hand over her son to the waiting adoption official.

That was her first moment of regret-and far from her last.

But by then, it was too late.

In a matter of seconds, the baby was gone, whisked from her life and into another, presumably with a pair of loving parents, a stable home, and a brighter future than an unwed, unemployed college freshman could provide.

She went on to get her undergraduate degree at Fordham and her MBA at Columbia.

In the two decades that followed, not a day had gone by without Lindsay wondering about her lost son. Wondering what he was doing, where he was, who he was. Every time she passed a boy about his age on the street, she did a double take-especially if the boy happened to have dark hair and eyes like her own…and like the father’s.

The father.

She had long since taken to thinking of him that way, ever since the nuns in the home first questioned her about him that summer.

“Have you told the father, child?”

“No. He…died before I could tell him.”

It was easier that way, she told herself and God, asking forgiveness for the lie.

She alone signed the adoption papers. She alone suffered the barren consequences that lingered for years, lingered even now.

Especially now.

Thanks to those unsettling phone calls.

Obviously, somebody had stumbled onto the truth and wanted to torment her now, just when her life felt settled at last.

But who would do such a thing?

Chuckling softly to herself, she hung up the telephone, pleased with Lindsay Farrell’s frightened reaction to her taunts.

I bet you thought nobody knew what you did, she silently told her former classmate, picturing her, alone and scared, in her far-off East Coast apartment. You tried so hard to hide your tracks.

Or so Lindsay Farrell must have believed.

She’d had no way of knowing that her every move was being watched. That someone had stealthily followed her up and down the aisles of the drugstore, watching her furtively pluck a pregnancy test from the shelf. Her forced nonchalance was laughable. She did everything but roll her eyes skyward and whistle tunelessly as the cashier rang up her purchases.

Of course, I couldn’t follow her into her bathroom back at home and watch her take the test…

No, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out the results. Not when she proceeded to buy test after test in the days that followed, as if hoping to convince herself that the first one was wrong.

So. Lindsay Farrell was pregnant with Jake Marcott’s baby.

Whether Jake carried that news to his grave or was oblivious to it was unclear.

What was clear was that to this day, Lindsay remained troubled by what she did.

I can hear it in her voice.

I just wish I could see it in her eyes, too.

But it wouldn’t be long now.

The reunion was less than two months away.

Lindsay would be winging her way back to Portland, unaware that her first trip home in twenty years would be her last.

Unless…

What if she isn’t planning to attend the reunion at all?

That would be a shame.

No, it would be more than just a shame. It would be disastrous.

I’ll just have to give her a good reason to come home.

Phone still in hand, she quickly dialed general nationwide directory assistance.

“Yes, I’d like the number for United Airlines, please.”

Settling her head against the pillows once more, Lindsay inhaled, held her breath for as long as she could, then exhaled, the way she did when she was stretching and winding down from her strenuous Saturday morning spinning class.

Right now, though, her pulse was racing faster than it ever had at the gym.

Maybe I should call the police, she speculated…and quickly discarded the thought.

The NYPD had far bigger concerns. Terrorism, gridlock, a masked rapist who had been attacking women on the Upper East Side. They’d probably laugh at her if she approached them about a couple of prank phone calls.

It wasn’t as though she’d been harmed.

Not physically, anyway.

Emotionally…

Well, that was a different story. But she’d survive. She always did.

She did better than survive, actually.

Look at me now, Nana, she would think every time she achieved another milestone. Her undergrad degree, her master’s, her first entry-level job, her first promotion, the launch of her own business…

Look at me now.

Her grandmother would have been proud of her. She owned a spacious-for Manhattan, anyway-one-bedroom co-op on the East Side, with a terrace. She had furnished the apartment with a mix of custom-made pieces and antiques handed down from Nana herself. She had even recently enrolled in a cooking class so that she could become proficient in the kitchen; her own family had always relied on their personal chef.

Plus, she was single-handedly running Lindsay Farrell Events as efficiently as her widowed grandmother used to run Farrell Timber.

Of course, Nana had help from Lindsay’s father, Craig, and his brother, Andrew. If you could call it that. The brothers never got along. They couldn’t even agree where their mother should be buried when she passed away, back when Lindsay was in high school.

Grandpa had been cremated, his ashes scattered over the timber farm. Nana didn’t want that. She was a devout Catholic; she wanted to be buried beneath a granite cross on sacred ground. But the cemetery that adjoined Saint Michael’s, her home parish well east of Portland, was too close to the Columbia River. There were old wives’ tales of caskets being lowered into watery graves. Dad was vehemently opposed to that.

Uncle Andrew was just as opposed to Nana being buried right in the West Hills, at St. Elizabeth’s cemetery. He reasoned that Nana’s ties to that church were too recent; she’d only started attending when she moved in with Lindsay and her family, too infirm to care for herself any longer.

In the end, Dad, the elder sibling, won out. He usually did.

Lindsay was pleased. She’d visited her grandmother’s grave often-until she left St. Elizabeth’s, and Portland, for good.

Now, her mother had told her the last time they talked, the old school and church were about to be razed. The news was unsettling.

“What’s going to happen to Nana’s grave?”

“I imagine the cemetery will stay intact,” her mother said vaguely and changed the subject to yet another investment property she and Lindsay’s father were purchasing in Nevada, where they’d moved after retirement.

Lindsay hung up troubled by the thought of the familiar old red-brick school-her alma mater-being destroyed.

Ironic, since her lingering memories of the place were less than positive.

It was there, in the garden labyrinth that lay between the school and the cemetery, that she had discovered Jake Marcott’s body, pinned to a tree by a crossbow.

The macabre sight had haunted her ever since…

Among other grim memories.

I should be glad that St. Elizabeth’s will be closed down, she told herself now. Maybe that will bring some closure.

For Jake’s horrific death, and for her own persistent maternal ache.

Except…

Somebody knew her secret.

Probably somebody from her past who had resurfaced to taunt her in the middle of the night.

It was just a cruel prank.

Now, remembering that Jake’s murder had never been solved, she couldn’t help but hope, with a shudder, that that was all there was to it.

The arrangements had been made. She was going to New York the day after tomorrow, staying in a hotel on the East Side. Not fancy, but you’d have to be a multimillionaire to afford a fancy hotel in Manhattan for as long as she’d need to be there.

The best part: she had cleverly selected one of those all-suite hotels that catered to business executives who needed to stick around New York for more than a couple of nights. Nobody would question her ongoing presence-a single woman alone in a big city. They’d just think she was there on business.

And I will be.

Important business.

She smiled to herself.

And she kept picking her way through the basement of St. Elizabeth’s school, guided by her lighter’s flickering beam to the secret supply closet.

After twirling the lock, she slipped inside and closed the door after her-as though it were necessary. As though anyone in their right mind would want to be down here…

Anyone other than me.

Then again, some people might think she wasn’t in her right mind. But they didn’t know what Jake-yes, Jake, and the others-had put her through. Nobody knew.

That was why nobody would ever suspect her when this was over and her mission was accomplished.

She lit the lantern’s wick and surveyed her handiwork: the reconstructed row of lockers that had once lined the wide corridor a few stories above.

Tonight, she bypassed Kristen’s and paused only briefly at Haylie’s, with its newest relic added just the other night: that ridiculous black armband she used to wear in ongoing mourning over Ian’s death.

What an unexpected bonus it had been to find it tucked into her jewelry box right on her dresser. She’d discovered it while ransacking the apartment, trying to make it seem as though the murder had been triggered by an interrupted burglary. She took her wallet, some jewelry, and a couple of stock certificates.

Passing Louie Blake, a nefarious local junkie, slumbering on the sidewalk not far from Haylie’s apartment, she was struck by inspiration. She tucked the wallet, jewelry, and stock certificates in among his belongings heaped in a shopping cart.

The armband, she kept, of course-and spirited it right over to its place of honor in Haylie’s old locker.

Haylie really was a sicko to have saved it for all these years.

But now it belongs to me.

Along with everything else assembled here.

She opened locker 123-Lindsay Farrell’s.

The contents were meager, so far. Taped to the door, in an attempt to reconstruct its senior-year state, were dozens of pictures of Jake, surrounded by shiny red paper hearts. There were also a couple of textbooks on the shelves.

On a hook, however, was a prized item: the sleeveless ice blue dress Lindsay had worn to the Valentine’s Day dance that night. Lindsay’s mother went through the family’s closets every season and donated a whole load of clothes to a secondhand shop run by a charitable organization.

The spring after Jake’s murder, the ice blue dress was among them, as she had prayed it might be.

What a thrill it was to spot it hanging there on a rack amid designer dresses worn once, if at all, by Portland’s elite, then cast off without a backward glance.

It had obviously been cleaned after that night. Yet if she looked closely, she could still see the faintest remnants of a stain in the satiny folds of the skirt.

A bloodstain.

It made her giddy just to look at it, to remember Lindsay covered in blood.

Somebody else’s blood, that night.

But soon enough, it would be her own.

The dress was a find, and a steal…

And I didn’t even have to steal it.

She would have, though. Just as she had stolen-and would continue to steal-all those mementos from the others.

This shrine was a work in progress. She planned to have it completed before the wrecking ball swung into the brick wall of the old school this summer.

It seemed fitting that these forgotten relics be buried deep in the underground rubble…

Just as their owners would, by then, also be buried.

Dead and buried.

But forgotten?

She doubted it. But she sure as hell was going to try to forget all that could never be forgiven.

Chapter 15

“Lindsay Farrell,” she said into the phone, her eyes still on the report in her hand.

“Lindsay?”

“Yes?” Then she recognized the voice and set the report aside, surprised to hear from him.

“It’s Isaac.”

“Isaac! How’ve you been?” she asked her ex-boyfriend-the man she had honestly thought, if only fleetingly, might be The One.

Yes, he had baggage…who didn’t?

Yes, he was a couple of years younger than she was…who cared?

Not Lindsay. Not at first, anyway.

Isaac Halpern’s dark, brooding good looks blinded her to the fact that he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship.

Or maybe it was more that his dark, brooding good looks reminded her of someone else.

Someone she still wasn’t over, even after all these years.

Someone who’d never even known that she was truly in love with him…

Because she’d never realized it herself.

Not back then. Not until it was too late. For them. For a lot of things.

But that was ancient history.

Isaac was more recent-but history nonetheless.

“I miss you,” he said simply.

She hesitated. “I miss you, too.”

It was true.

She did miss him. But nowhere near as much as she missed his predecessor, who showed her that phrases like weak in the knees and butterflies in the stomach were rooted not just in the romantic novels she liked to read, but in reality.

Weak knees, butterflies, a pounding heart, a light head…those were all things she experienced when she was with him.

But she never felt those things with Isaac.

Not with anyone else, ever.

Still, she couldn’t help hoping that maybe someone would eventually come along to make her forget him. Yes, maybe someday she’d fall in love again, get married, have a baby…

Another baby.

One she’d get to keep, raise, love.

But I loved you, too, she silently told the son she hadn’t seen since the day he was born. It sounds crazy, but I really did love you. No, I really do love you. Still. You, and your father.

The father.

“I thought maybe we could meet for a drink some night after work,” Isaac was saying in her ear.

“Why?” It came out more sharply than she intended. “I mean, you know nothing can come of it, right?”

“Right. I know.” He hesitated. “I’m with somebody else now, Lindsay.”

Her breath caught in her throat. For a moment, she couldn’t find her voice. When she did, she couldn’t complete a coherent sentence anyway.

“It isn’t…she isn’t…you didn’t find…”

“No. It isn’t Rachel. Her name is Kylah.”

“Does she know?”

“About Rachel?”

“Yes.”

Rachel. The woman who haunted Isaac Halpern the way her baby’s father haunted Lindsay. If anyone could understand how that felt, it was Lindsay.

That was why she’d left him. Because she understood. Because she didn’t want to settle for second place in his heart…even though she was willing to give him second place in her own.

“No,” Isaac said heavily. “She doesn’t know about Rachel.”

“You should tell her.”

“Why? So that she can leave me, like you did?”

“Isaac-”

“Look, I don’t blame you, Lindsay. Nobody wants to compete with my long-lost first love.”

And that, Lindsay thought, was precisely the reason she herself might never meet someone and get married after all. Because she couldn’t let go of her long-lost first love. She didn’t want to let go.

“Sorry,” Isaac said, shifting gears, “this was a bad idea. I just thought maybe we could still be friends, like you said.”

That’s right, she had. Wasn’t it what you said when you broke up with someone?

Let’s still be friends.

Along with those other old standbys, There’s nobody else and It’s not you, it’s me.

She’d used all of those lines, many times, with different men, in her adult life.

But she’d never had a chance to say those lines to him, twenty years ago-even if she had been so inclined.

To him, she’d said nothing at all.

She’d just pretended it never happened, and so had he.

And nobody ever knew there had been something between them that rainy long-ago New Year’s Eve, or that Lindsay had borne his child the following summer.

Mommy…why did you give me away?

No. She was wrong.

Somebody knew about the baby.

That meant they might know about him, as well.

Maybe it was time for her to revisit the past after all, before her closet doors opened wide and all her skeletons came tumbling out.

“Lindsay?” Isaac said, startling her back to the present. “I’ll let you go. I’m sorry I bothered you at work. I just wanted to touch base.”

“I’m glad you did. And…I’d love to have a drink some night after work. You know, just to catch up. Okay?”

“Okay.” He sounded surprised. “How about, um, next Tuesday?”

“I can’t…I have a cooking class Tuesday nights.”

“Cooking?”

She could hear the smile in his voice. He knew she was useless in the kitchen.

“I thought I should learn.”

“Good for you. How are you doing so far?”

“Great.” She felt obligated to add, “Then again, we’re still on prep work-you know, easy stuff like chopping and dicing. But I’m an ace with a Bermuda onion, let me tell you.”

He laughed. “Your Nana would be proud. All right, then…if you can’t do Tuesday, how about a week from this Thursday?”

She faltered. She really didn’t want to put something on the calendar.

Then again, she was free that night, and Isaac always could smell an excuse from a mile away.

“Sure,” she told him reluctantly, and entered it into her on-line calendar before hanging up the phone.

She could certainly use all the friends she could get these days. Jillian, her longtime across-the-hall neighbor, had relocated to an uptown co-op. Terri and Amanda, her former happy-hour pals, had both married and moved to the suburbs, like most of the other friends she had known along the way.

New York was becoming a lonely place for Lindsay. Sometimes, she found it hard to believe she’d lived here longer now than she had ever lived in Portland.

For some reason, that still seemed like home.

And she suspected that perhaps this never would.

If it was this challenging to get into Lindsay’s office suite, it was going to be even more challenging to get into her apartment.

Challenging…but not impossible. And she had always liked a challenge.

She knew that New Yorkers couldn’t be counted on to hide keys outside their doors. They were much too savvy for that.

But I have a good plan. Not foolproof, but so far it’s working, she congratulated herself now, nearing the end of phase one.

Lindsay’s assistant was easily distracted by a muscular bike messenger who kept her flirtatiously occupied at the front desk. He had his price, of course-everyone did-and it was a steep one. But he didn’t ask questions.

That was the great thing about New York City, as opposed to Portland. People here might not hide their keys in plain sight, but they definitely paid less attention to others. They tended to mind their own business. Yes, they were wary about the usual urban threats-muggers, speeding cabs-but they never really looked strangers in the eye. That went with the territory.

Busy with the messenger, Kara never even noticed the intruder slipping past the front desk, making her way down the short corridor beyond.

There were three offices in the suite. In one, a young man tapped away at a computer keyboard, oblivious to anyone passing by. The next was empty. There was a light on in the third and largest office, and Lindsay’s name was on the door.

There was an office machine alcove across from it. The overhead light wasn’t on and the machines were off, as if they were rarely used.

Perfect. She ducked behind a copier and waited for Lindsay to leave her desk.

Twenty minutes later, her patience paid off.

Lindsay didn’t have her purse in hand when she walked quickly down the hall toward the ladies’ room.

Turned out she left it on a hook behind the door of her office.

I was counting on that.

She was also counting on Lindsay’s keys being inside. She reached in and felt around for them…

Bingo.

It took her less than ten minutes to slip back out of the suite, have copies made at the hardware store down the avenue, and return.

By then, the messenger was gone.

Kara looked up from the desk when she appeared.

“Hi-I just found this by the elevator on this floor,” she said, handing over the silver Tiffany key ring, which was, fortuitously, engraved. “Someone must have dropped these. The initials are LF. Are they yours?”

“No, but they’re my boss’s. Those must be hers. Thanks so much. I’ll give them to her.”

That was it. Easy-breezy.

From there, she headed over to Lindsay’s East Fifty-Fourth Street high-rise building, where she was hoping the doorman would be willing to look the other way, for a price.

Of course, he would have to be used to it. She had done her homework and was aware that the building happened to be home to J. T. Maguire, the former lead singer of a boy band, now hugely famous as a solo artist.

Groupies and paparazzi frequently staked out the place, hoping for a glimpse.

She approached the doorman, a bored-looking young man with a thin black mustache.

When she furtively told him what she wanted, he didn’t even seem suspicious that a thirtysomething woman was interested in J. T. Maguire.

Why would he be? She’d read that white-haired old ladies dropped off their panties for the twenty-year-old heartthrob.

The doorman pocketed her wad of bills and motioned her to go ahead into the deserted lobby.

“Thanks,” she called belatedly over her shoulder.

“No problem.”

Not for you, she thought gleefully. And not for J. T. Maguire, either.

But Lindsay Farrell? She was about to have a big, big problem on her hands…

Returning from a twenty-minute conference in her assistant Ray’s office next door, Lindsay stopped short in the doorway of her office.

That was strange-there were her keys, sitting right in the open on her desk.

How had they gotten there? She could have sworn she had put them back into her purse, same as always, when she unlocked her office door earlier…

But then, she’d been a little bleary-eyed this morning, thanks to yet another wee-hour phone call last night. It was the same high-pitched childlike voice that didn’t belong to a child. It kept calling her Mommy, asking her why she’d given him away.

She’d finally slammed down the phone in tears, and she hadn’t slept another wink.

“Lindsay?”

“Yes?”

She looked up to see Kara, her recent hire, standing in the doorway of her office.

Slender and attractive, she had so far proven herself to be less interested in her entry-level administrative duties than she was in taking long lunch breaks and flirting with the newlywed Ray, with the computer-repair technician, and even, just this morning, with a bike messenger.

Oh, well. It was May. A whole new crop of college grads would be sending out resumes. It shouldn’t be hard to find another entry-level assistant when Kara inevitably was fired or quit.

“The mail just came.”

“Thanks, Kara.” Lindsay accepted the stack and flipped through it briefly: several bills on top in white legal envelopes, a couple of trade publications and promo catalogs tucked beneath them, and a large manila envelope on the bottom. “Did you remember to book the Gramercy Room at the Peninsula for the banquet in October?”

Kara slapped a hand against her red-lipsticked mouth. “I knew I forgot something. I’ll do it right away. It was for the ninth, right?”

“The twelfth.”

“Oh, right. The twelfth. Gotcha.”

Lindsay sank into her chair and sighed as her assistant scurried from the office. She swiveled away from the desk, the stack of mail in her lap.

The plate-glass window was spattered with raindrops, and the sky beyond it, above a monochromatic skyline, was a milky shade of gray. This kind of weather never failed to remind her of home.

Home being the Pacific Northwest, where rainy, overcast days were as prevalent as honking yellow taxicabs were here. Not just in midspring, but much of the year.

I have to stop dwelling on Portland today, she scolded herself. It only reminded her of things she should be trying to forget.

Seeking a distraction, she flipped through the mail again, coming to rest on the large manila envelope on the bottom.

So much for a distraction.

The return address was in Portland, and the name above it was a familiar one.

Kristen Delmonico.

Formerly known as Kristen Daniels.

Formerly known as Lindsay’s BFF, as they used to call each other, along with Rachel Alsace.

Best Friends Forever.

Other than Christmas cards that arrived every December with all the regularity-and scintillating detail-of her exterminator’s yearly retainer bill, Lindsay never heard from Kristen.

So why now?

With slightly trembling fingers, Lindsay reached for a letter opener and slit the envelope open.

Inside was a thick packet of folded papers.

Oh.

The class reunion.

Twenty years.

Aurora had already contacted her about it, leaving a message asking if she wanted to be involved in the planning. Of course, she’d said no-via a return message, glad she didn’t actually get Aurora on the phone, knowing how persuasive she always could be.

Lindsay verbally blamed her lack of involvement on the fact that she was a continent away. But truly, she simply wasn’t interested in revisiting the past. There were too many painful things about it.

Now, however, scanning the invitation and the accompanying forms, including a chatty letter from Kristen, Lindsay found herself smiling.

All right, so there were a few good memories, too.

Hmm.

She was almost feeling tempted to consider making a reservation…despite serious doubts. It might be nice, after all, to see all those girls again. To catch up, to say good-bye to the old school building, to lay the past to rest at last.

Yes, maybe she should go.

She scanned the reservation form and the update questionnaire. There was also a brochure from a new Marriott Residence Inn that had gone up not far from their alma mater, apparently on the site of the strip mall where she and her friends used to shop before getting pizza at Ricardo’s nearby.

So the old neighborhood was changing. She wondered if the old pizzeria was still there, with its red plastic booths where they had all hung out. Maybe it was gone, like the strip mall, and some new hotel or chain restaurant had been built in its place.

Who knew what would stand, a few years from now, on the site of St. Elizabeth’s school?

This is your last chance to go back, she told herself.

Maybe she really would…

Then she flipped back to the invitation and saw that the reunion wasn’t just for St. Elizabeth’s alumnae. The Western Catholic grads would be there, too.

Jake had gone to Western Catholic. If he were alive, he’d be at the reunion.

She ran down a mental list of his friends, wondering if they’d show. Dean McMichaels, Nick Monticello, Craig Taylor, Chad Belmont…

It would be a kick to see those guys again…some of them, anyway.

Maybe you should go, then.

People would expect her to be there.

Once upon a time, she’d had a hand in everything that went on at St. Elizabeth’s. Once upon a time, she’d been voted the girl most likely to succeed. It was a narrow contest, between her and Kristen.

Lindsay won that one.

Kristen, however, was valedictorian. And that was more important than any silly senior superlative contest.

Lindsay found herself wondering what her old friend was doing these days. She’d heard sketchy details over the years-Kristen was working as a reporter at the Portland Clarion, had married her college sweetheart, had a child. She always signed her Christmas cards-generic, store-bought ones-Love, Kristen, Ross, and Lissa. She never even bothered to write a note.

Lindsay always tried to do that, at least. And it was a time-consuming process. She ordered her elegant holiday greetings by the hundreds, imprinted with her name, and sent them to all her family, clients, and old friends.

Yet other than once a year, she had been lousy at keeping in touch with Kristen and the others, despite their tearful promises made at graduation.

Maybe it’s time to go back, Lindsay told herself, flipping through the papers again, looking for contact information for someone on the reunion committee.

Then she saw it.

The photograph was a familiar one.

A copy of it still sat, in an eight-by-ten frame, on the bookshelf in her parents’ Nevada condo.

This version was smaller, and glossy instead of an elegant matte finish, but there she was: carefree seventeen-year-old Lindsay Farrell, beaming at the camera, blissfully unaware that just months after the photographer snapped his shot, her life would turn upside down.

But this reproduction of her senior portrait now seemed to bear chillingly symbolic testimony to troubles yet to come: her face was marked, from her right temple to the dimple on her lower left cheek, with an angry red slash.

Chapter 16

“How do you think you did?”

“Hmm?” Leo Cellamino looked up to see an attractive green-eyed redhead smiling at him. Her name was Sarah Ann, or Sarah Rose-something like that. She’d been sitting in front of him in biology lab all semester, smiling shyly in his direction every once in a while.

Now she’d fallen into step with him on the way out of the lecture hall where they’d just completed their final exam.

Ordinarily, Leo would welcome the attention from a pretty girl, but today, his mind was far away from this Queens college campus. All he wanted to do was get back home to his computer and take another look at that e-mail he’d received late last night.

What if it was no longer saved in his in-box? What if it had somehow evaporated into cyberspace overnight?

I should have printed it out, he thought, frustrated. But at the time, shaken by what he had just read-and seen-he didn’t dare.

He was afraid his kid brother, Mario, would somehow get his hands on it. Most of Leo’s stuff wound up in his brother’s clutches at some point. That was what you got when you shared a room with a nosy twelve-year-old.

But Leo couldn’t afford to move out of their mother’s house. Not if he wanted to complete his college education and make a decent life for himself someday. Anyway, Ma needed him around; he was the man of the house now that Pop had taken off for good.

“Leo…? It’s Leo, isn’t it?”

Startled, he looked up and realized that the girl-Sarah Rose, that’s it-was still walking along beside him.

“Oh…right, it’s Leo.” He flashed her a brief smile, ever the gentleman, as his mother had taught him.

“How’d you do on the exam?” she asked again.

“All right, I guess. How about you?”

“I don’t know…I’m not very good at science. And all that genetics stuff was confusing, don’t you think? Dominant genes, recessive genes…” She shook her head.

Confusing? Ha.

Leo could tell her a thing or two about confusing genetics, if he wanted to.

But he didn’t.

It was none of her business that he had grown up the dark-haired, dark-eyed son of blue-eyed, sandy-haired parents of Sicilian decent. That they let him believe he was their biological child until he encountered his first Punnett square in high-school science.

It wasn’t until then that he stumbled across a startling scientific fact: two blue-eyed people couldn’t possibly have a dark-eyed child.

When he confronted his parents with his puzzling find, he half expected them to say that Mr. Davidson, his biology teacher, was wrong. Heck, he expected them to confirm that Gregor Mendel, the father of human genetics, was wrong.

Instead, they told him that he, Leonardo Anthony Cellamino of Queens Boulevard, wasn’t who he thought he was.

He had been adopted as an infant, his mother-not really his mother-told him tearfully, rosary beads tightly clenched in her hand for strength to get through the conversation.

“The doctors had told us we couldn’t have children,” she sobbed. “We were heartbroken.”

“What about Mario, then? How’d you have him?” Leo knew his brother wasn’t adopted; he remembered his mother’s pregnancy, remembered comforting her through her labor pains while his aunt Nita tried to track down his father, who was MIA as usual.

“We never expected Mario to come along. It was some kind of fluke.”

“Fluke?” Leo’s father-not really his father-bellowed. “You call our son a fluke?”

Our son.

In that moment, Leo realized it wasn’t just his imagination that his father always favored his kid brother. That was because Mario was his biological son. Leo was not.

“He was a miracle,” Betty Cellamino amended. “Not a fluke. We thought God sent us another baby to save our marriage.”

That was pretty funny, in retrospect.

His parents-not really his parents-were divorced not long after Leo graduated from high school. He turned eighteen just in time to become the man of the house, and his father took off for Miami or Fort Lauderdale-somewhere down on Florida’s southern Atlantic coast. Leo didn’t know exactly where Anthony Cellamino was now and he didn’t care; he had no intention of ever seeing him again.

But Ma still cried and prayed every night for his return.

And Mario still called him on the sly-mostly asking for money, Leo supposed. Sometimes Pop sent some cash in an envelope addressed to Mario alone.

Leo tried not to let that bother him. Just like he had tried, for the past few years, not to let the truth about his birth bother him.

But it often nagged at him, like an itchy, aging scab that was still firmly rooted on one edge, and that if touched, would rip open and bleed all over again.

So Leo tried to leave it alone.

That had worked, for the most part…until last night.

The e-mail, with the provocative subject line birth parents, came from an AOL screen name he didn’t recognize: cupid 21486.

Leo opened it after a moment’s hesitation, thinking it was probably spam and wondering why he was bothering.

I have information about your birth parents. If you’re interested in finding them, please reply to this e-mail.

He’d still have thought it was some kind of hoax, except for one thing: a jpeg file was attached. He worried just briefly that it might contain a virus. Then temptation outweighed common sense and he opened it anyway.

He found himself looking at a photograph.

It was a professionally snapped portrait of a beautiful dark-haired girl who appeared to be about Leo’s age now, maybe a little younger. He could tell by her dated clothing and hairstyle that the photo had been taken years ago.

With her coloring, her delicate bone structure, and that distinct dimple in her lower left cheek, she bore such a striking resemblance to Leo himself that she could only be a blood relative.

My mother?

He had replied to the e-mail, of course.

Thank you for sending the picture. I’m very interested in finding my biological mother and father and I would appreciate any information you might have.

That was late last night.

As of this morning before he left for campus, there had been no reply. But he quickened his pace instinctively now, eager to get back home to his computer.

Sarah Rose kept up with him. “Are you done for the day?”

“With exams, you mean? Yeah.”

“Do you want to grab a cup of coffee or something, then?”

“I can’t.”

He said it hastily, harshly, almost-and instantly regretted it when he saw the hurt expression on her face.

“I have to be somewhere,” he explained, softening his tone. “Maybe some other time.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Give me your number. I’ll call you.”

She did give it to him…but her expression told him that she doubted he’d dial it.

He doubted it, too.

Then again…he did give her his number when she asked for it.

After all, he and his high-school girlfriend, Elisa, had been broken up for months now-ever since she came home from St. Bonaventure over Christmas break and told him she wanted to see other people.

Which meant she was already seeing other people. More specifically, one other person, Leo suspected.

Turned out he was right.

Oh, well. He and Elisa were mostly a comfortable old habit by that time, anyway. Moving on was the right thing to do.

As for pretty, red-haired, green-eyed Sarah Rose…

Maybe he’d call. Maybe he wouldn’t.

Right now, the only woman on his mind had dark hair and eyes and a dimple to match his own.

“See you,” he told Sarah Rose and hurried toward the subway, unaware that he was being watched from the shadows beside a campus bus shelter.

“Kristen?”

“No…this is her daughter.”

“Oh. May I please speak to Kristen?” Lindsay held her breath, hoping her old friend was at home. It was around noon in Portland. She had tried the work number first, at the newspaper, only to get her voicemail. She hung up. She couldn’t just leave a message after twenty years.

You did when you called Aurora back, she reminded herself.

But that was different. She couldn’t leave a message about something like this.

“Who’s calling, please?” asked the teenaged voice on the other end of the line, sounding polite, efficient, and bubbly-very much like her mother had twenty years ago.

“It’s an old friend…about the reunion.”

“Okay, hang on,” the voice said politely. There was a clatter, then a bluntly bellowed, “Mom! Phone!”

Lindsay would have smiled if she weren’t still so shaken by the doctored photograph in her hand.

“Hello?” The voice that came on the line was a decidedly grown-up version of the one that had just left it.

“Kristen?”

“Yes…?”

“It’s Lindsay.”

There was a gasp on the other end. “Oh my God. I was going to call you later.”

Yeah, sure you were, Lindsay found herself thinking reflexively. She’d heard that before, senior year, when they were both trying halfheartedly to cling to a doomed friendship, pretending they still cared about each other, that they were still making an effort.

Then she reminded herself that this wasn’t high school anymore. Kristen was no longer holding a grudge against her over Jake…she couldn’t be.

Really? Then why did she disfigure your picture?

Lindsay told herself, yet again, that it had to be some kind of accident. Kristen couldn’t possibly be that immature even if she hadn’t gotten over Jake.

Maybe somebody had spilled some red nail polish on Lindsay’s photo, or…

Something.

That was why Lindsay had decided to call her old-perhaps former-friend. To find out what was up. To reassure herself that there was nothing sinister behind the red slash.

“Listen,” she began, “I just got the reunion invitation, and for some reason my picture was-”

“You heard about Haylie, right?” Kristen asked simultaneously.

“What?” they both said, after a brief, startled pause.

“Lindsay…your picture was…what were you about to tell me?”

“There was a red mark slashed through it.”

“Across the face, right? I didn’t do it,” Kristen said in a rush.

“The envelope had your name on the return address.”

“I know, I put the packets together, but the picture didn’t come from me. Somebody tampered with the envelopes and put them in. We all got them.”

“All…who?”

“Me, you, Rachel, Bella, Aurora, Mandy…and Haylie.”

All our old friends, Lindsay thought incredulously. What was going on?

When she asked Kristen, she said, “We think Haylie sent them. She had just lashed out at all of us at the last reunion meeting.”

“Why?”

“Same old thing. Ian. Jake.”

“Still?”

“Some things never change, apparently. She was still a real nutcase.”

“Did you guys confront her and ask her if she sent those pictures, then?”

“We would have if she hadn’t-”

“What?” Lindsay prodded when Kristen cut herself off.

There was a pause. “So you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Haylie’s dead, Lindsay.”

She gasped.

Somehow, even now, with years and miles separating her from her old life, her old friends, she was sickened, shocked, at the untimely demise of the girl she once knew. “How…when did it happen?”

“I don’t know exactly when, but the police think it’s been a couple of days at least. She, uh, lived alone, except for a bunch of cats, so nobody found her right away. One of the neighbors noticed a smell…”

“Oh my God.”

“I know. It’s horrible. Lindsay, I’m scared.”

“You’re…scared? Because Haylie died?”

“She didn’t just die. She was murdered-”

“What?”

“-and the police don’t know who did it.”

Murdered. Just like Jake. Lindsay’s thoughts whirled madly as Kristen’s shocking words sunk in. Somebody killed Haylie? And got away with it?

And now somebody is calling me in the middle of the night, and sending me pictures with my face crossed out…

“They think it might have been a random thing.” Kristen’s voice broke through her frantic thoughts. “It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, and her apartment had been burglarized…”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Lindsay pondered that.

“Listen,” Kristen said briskly, “you’re not home, are you?”

“No, I’m in New York,” she replied, before she realized that New York was supposed to be home.

But Kristen was talking about Portland, as if she sensed how Lindsay felt about it even now, after all these years. Home. Portland was home.

“Good. You still live there, right?” When Lindsay murmured an affirmative, Kristen said, “You should stay put, then, Lindsay. Just in case you were thinking of coming back for any reason.”

“I was going to come to the reunion.”

“It’s not until July. Hopefully by then the police will have figured out what’s going on with Haylie’s death. But if I were you, I’d stay as far away from Portland as possible until they find out who did it. I’m not even living at home right now. I’m too scared someone will come after me next.”

“Then…what are you doing there now?”

“We just happened to be here packing up some more stuff because there’s no telling how long we’ll have to be away.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m at-” Kristen broke off suddenly.

Then she said, her voice laced with trepidation, “I’m afraid to say over the phone. It might be tapped or something.”

“You’re not serious…are you?”

“Yes, I’m serious. Listen, somebody broke into my house and my car, stole some of my old stuff, and tampered with those reunion invitations…”

“I thought you said it was Haylie.”

“I’m pretty positive it must have been. But…well, what if it wasn’t?”

Lindsay shuddered with renewed consternation about those wee-hour phone calls she’d been getting.

“I guess with Haylie gone, we might never know for sure who sent the pictures,” she said slowly.

But she did know that the phone calls couldn’t have come from her. Not if she had been dead for several days.

“I should go. Somebody’s at the door. But listen, Lindsay, if you need to reach me, just try me at work or use the e-mail address on the reunion invitation.”

“But…what should I do about the picture? Do you think I should call the police here in New York?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, what would they do about it? They’d just think it was some stupid, childish prank. Which it probably was. And Haylie probably did it…”

Lindsay could hear the rumble of a male voice in the background, and Kristen said, “Wait, Linds, hang on a second.”

Linds.

She found herself swept by nostalgia at the sound of the familiar nickname. What she wouldn’t give, in this moment, to go back to those innocent high-school days-before everything fell apart. Before Jake’s murder, and New Year’s Eve, and Valentine’s Day, and the baby…

But there was no going back. Especially now.

Jake was dead, and now Haylie was dead, too. Murdered.

“Lindsay?” Kristen was abruptly back on the line, her friend’s formal name back on her lips. “Ross said a couple of detectives just got here and they want to talk to me about Haylie. I’ve got to go.”

“Why do they want to talk to you?”

“I don’t know…because of the picture? Because we were friends years ago? Because I just saw her?”

“Oh, right. You said she came to the reunion committee planning meeting. So she was still spouting off about Ian and Jake?”

“Still. After all these years.”

Lindsay considered that. “You don’t think her death has anything to do with-”

“I don’t know what to think, Lindsay. All I know is that I’m going to be really careful until the police figure out who did this. And you should be, too. I know you probably feel safe in New York, but you never know, even there.”

“Right,” Lindsay agreed absently, thinking about the phone calls, wishing she could tell Kristen-tell someone-about them.

But that would mean revealing that she’d had the baby.

Maybe I should…especially now. Maybe the calls are connected to Haylie’s death. Or Jake’s. Or both. Maybe everything is connected. Maybe I’m not dealing with just a crank caller, but a killer.

“Kristen,” she heard herself say impetuously.

“Yeah?” Kristen sounded impatient; Lindsay heard someone talking in the background on her end again.

The moment, the impulse, were lost.

“Never mind. I’ll let you go. Just be careful, okay?”

“You, too. And listen, quickly, Aurora is supposed to be in New York City sometime this month for a mother-daughter weekend with her oldest-that’s her wedding present.”

“Aurora got married again?”

That probably shouldn’t have been surprising, considering that she’d wed her high-school sweetheart not long after they’d graduated. Those marriages rarely lasted-but Lindsay assumed that if anyone could make it work, it would be Aurora and Eddie.

“Are you kidding? Aurora’s marriage is still going strong,” Kristen said with a snort. “But their daughter just got married and now she’s expecting a baby. Aurora’s wedding gift to her was a girls’ weekend in New York, which they were going to do this fall. But now she wants to do it before her daughter is too pregnant to get around.”

Aurora…a grandmother.

“Wow,” Lindsay murmured. “That’s hard to believe.”

“A lot of things that have happened are hard to believe. So…should I tell Aurora to look you up when she’s there?”

“Yes…make sure that you do.” It would be good to see her, Lindsay thought, suddenly longing for her old friend’s zany sense of humor.

“Just watch your step, Lindsay,” Kristen advised her again. “Whatever you do, wherever you go…watch your step.”

With that final warning, the call was disconnected and Lindsay’s pathway to the past was severed once again.

Close up, in person, the boy looked just like his mother…but not much like his father at all, she noted in mild surprise, stealing a furtive glance over the top of the open New York Post in her hands.

They were on the eastbound number seven train that ran on elevated tracks above Queens Boulevard. At this time of the afternoon, it wasn’t very crowded. Rush hour wouldn’t begin for another hour.

There were plenty of seats, and she had chosen one diagonally across from his, facing him. She wanted to get a good look at the son of Lindsay Farrell and Jake Marcott.

Yes, he looked very much like Lindsay, with hair and eyes more black than brown, and features that were almost too delicate for a man. All except his jawline. His was squared off and rugged where Lindsay’s was gently rounded.

But Jake’s jaw hadn’t been that pronounced, and there was a deep cleft in the boy’s chin. Jake had had none. Jake’s hair had been a lighter shade of brown. And he had been broad where this boy, his son, was lean and lanky. Yes, they were both tall-but Jake had towered at six-four in his socks. This boy was, by her estimation, about six-one.

So? He didn’t have to look like his father, or have his father’s height and build.

But she was expecting to be reminded of her late nemesis when she came face-to-face with his son, and that hadn’t happened.

No, instead, she was reminded solely of that bitch Lindsay.

The train jerked to a stop. The conductor announced the station: Eighty-Second Street in Jackson Heights. An elderly Asian woman, who had been dozing beside Leo, jumped to her feet and headed for the door rustling several white plastic shopping bags.

Something-an apple-dropped from one and rolled across the floor.

Leo jumped up, snatched it, and handed it to her with a fleeting smile before she darted from the train with a muttered thanks.

That smile…

There and gone in a flash, it had revealed a familiar dimple, she realized, pretending to be engrossed in her newspaper as he settled back into his seat and the train rumbled on.

Lindsay’s dimple.

And there was something else…something familiar about Leo’s smile.

Yes, in the unique way that he tilted his head, curved his sensitive lips, and bared a row of even white teeth for a mere instant before resuming his straight face…

Leo reminded her of someone from the past.

Someone other than Lindsay.

And it wasn’t Jake.

She just couldn’t put her finger on who it was…

Oh, well. It would probably come to her eventually, she thought.

For now, she’d just keep an eye on him…and on his mother. It was almost Lindsay’s turn…

But not yet.

Not until I’ve had my fill.

It was still too much fun to taunt Lindsay Farrell, to imagine the nightmares those late-night phone calls must inspire, to imagine her growing trepidation as she comprehended that somebody was in on her deep, dark secret.

Did she realize yet that somebody wanted to watch her suffer, see her die?

She’d definitely become aware of that in time. But not yet.

The train jolted around a curve in the track and the power shorted out.

Under the unexpected cover of darkness, she took the luxury of smiling to herself, thinking of Lindsay’s impending demise. She relished the knowledge that she alone was aware of Lindsay’s fate. She alone was in control of it.

Oh, yes. This was more fun than she’d had in years.

Or ever.

When the lights flickered back on a moment later, her face was carefully masked in neutrality once again.

Chapter 17

“Why did you leave me? You have to pay for what you did.”

Terror pulsed through Lindsay’s veins as she faced the shadowy stranger who held a loaded gun in two outstretched hands, pointed right at her.

“Please…please don’t hurt me.”

“Sorry, but you have to pay, Mommy.”

The stranger stepped into the pool of light and she saw that he was an adult-sized, squinty-eyed, red-faced newborn with tufts of black hair.

“No! Please!”

There was a shrill ringing sound then, and her creepy tormentor abruptly evaporated.

A dream. It was only a dream, Lindsay realized, sitting up.

Yes, and it was morning. Sunlight streamed through the sheer curtains that covered her window, an eastern exposure high on the thirty-fourth floor.

She reached for her alarm clock before realizing that the ringing was coming from the telephone.

Her stomach roiled as she picked up the receiver. It wasn’t the middle of the night, but it wasn’t a reasonable hour yet, either.

Was she in for another eerie prank phone call? A couple of days had passed now since she’d had one, but it was taking her a long time to fall asleep every night. She kept tossing and turning, her body tensed, as if waiting for the inevitable call.

Now, as she pressed the Talk button and said a tentative hello, she braced herself all over again.

She could hear only heavy breathing on the other end of the line.

“Stop calling me,” she said tightly, clenching the phone.

“What?”

The voice was masculine. Not an unearthly falsetto.

“I’m sorry…who is this?” she asked quickly, glancing at the clock again as she stood up. It was just past seven. Who would call at this hour?

A client might…but none of them had her home number, thank God.

So who was on the line?

She lowered the receiver to check the Caller ID window.

“You don’t know me,” the voice was saying when she raised the phone to her ear again, “but my name is Leo Cellamino, and I live in Queens…”

Her gaze automatically shifted to the window. From it, she could see the East River and the sprawling rooftops of the outer borough beyond. The caller lived there, in Queens.

You don’t know me…

So who was he?

Oh.

Oh my God.

Somehow, she knew. Before he even said it, she knew.

It was partially because of the voice-the voice was vaguely familiar.

But it wasn’t just that.

Maybe it was some long-suppressed maternal instinct as well. Some connection that had been forged twenty years ago, and never fully detached.

In any case, she knew, before he said it, that she was talking to her son.

She sank down onto the edge of the bed again as his next words confirmed her suspicion.

“I think you might be my birth mother.”

Leo heard her gasp on the other end of the line.

He shouldn’t have called.

He should have just gone over there in person. He had her address.

But when he’d Googled it, he had seen that it was a fancy high-rise near Sutton Place. There was undoubtedly a doorman. It wasn’t as though Leo could walk right up to her door, knock, and introduce himself. And explaining the situation to a uniformed sentry in an effort to see her in person seemed much too awkward.

So he opted to call.

From a pay phone, because he didn’t want his mother to overhear him talking to her from home, and because his mother paid his cell phone bill and he didn’t want her questioning any unfamiliar Manhattan phone numbers.

And now here he was, with his biological mother on the line, trying to figure out what to say next.

She relieved him of that duty, sounding dazed as she asked, “How did you find me?”

“Someone e-mailed me the information. About you, and my father.”

“Your…father?”

“I know he died,” Leo assured her swiftly. “I saw the articles.”

“Articles?”

He hesitated, struck by a terrible thought. What if she didn’t know? About Jake Marcott? And the murder?

“From the Portland papers,” he said gently. “I got some links in that e-mail, and I read them all. You knew…right?”

“About the e-mail? No, I have no idea what you’re-”

“About Jake Marcott. You know…that he’s…”

“Dead. I knew. I was the one who found him,” she said, and he could hear the stark pain in her voice, could imagine it on her face.

A face that looked so like his own, even now.

He knew that because along with her contact information and the links to the newspaper archives, he had received another jpeg attachment. It was a digital photo, a little fuzzy and snapped from some distance. It showed a woman who was easily recognizable as the girl he’d seen in the other picture. She had the same dark hair, the same delicate beauty, the same slender build.

She was walking down a Manhattan street-he knew it was Manhattan because he could see the subway entrance disappearing into the sidewalk in the background, though he couldn’t make out the sign above it.

She wasn’t looking at the camera, which suggested she had no idea her photo was being taken…

Which gave him the creeps, really.

He was fascinated by the shot, though. He’d studied it for days, memorizing every detail, trying to work up the nerve to get in touch.

He finally had, and here she was, Lindsay Farrell-my mother?-on the other end of the line.

“I didn’t know you were the one who found Jake’s body,” he said, trying to remember the details from the articles. Jake’s body. It sounded so impersonal. And it was…except that the stranger in question, Jake, was his father.

“I just knew it had been a friend of his,” Leo rambled on, “but it didn’t say who.”

“The paper couldn’t print my name. I was underage then. Seventeen.”

“You were eighteen by the time you had me in August, though. Right?”

No response.

Not at first.

Then, so softly he had to strain to hear it, she said, “Right.”

Thud. His heart seemed to split in two and land in the soles of his feet.

So she really was his mother, and his father really was dead. As badly as he wanted to find his mother, to think that Lindsay Farrell was her, he hadn’t wanted to believe the other part. About Jake.

There went his fantasy of playing catch with a man who wouldn’t check his watch impatiently and say he had to go after the first couple of tosses.

There went his ideal father, someone with patience and attention and a heart full of love for his son.

There went another dad, gone, poof! Just like that. Just like Anthony Cellamino.

It wasn’t fair.

“Leo…did you say that was your name?”

It wasn’t fair, but she was still there. Lindsay. Sounding tentative. Vulnerable.

As tentative and vulnerable as Leo himself was feeling.

“Yes,” he replied somewhat hoarsely, “that’s my name.”

“Are you happy?”

That was a strange question. He didn’t know how to answer it.

“Happy?” he echoed stupidly. “What do you mean?”

“Just…are you happy?”

“You mean right now?”

“I mean in general. Your life. Has it been happy?”

He thought back to the time before his father left. And even about some times after he was gone.

“Mostly,” he admitted. “It’s been mostly happy. But there’s been sad stuff, too.”

“Everyone’s life is like that. But it wasn’t bad, right? Nobody beat you up, or starved you, or anything like that, right?”

“Right.”

She sighed. “I just want to know that I did the right thing. I want to know that you were raised by someone who loved you with all their heart.”

“My mother did. Does,” he amended, before he remembered that Betty Cellamino wasn’t really his mother.

No, but she loved him with all her heart. That wasn’t in dispute here, and never would be.

“What about your father?”

Leo’s thoughts darkened at the question. “He’s gone.”

“Gone? You mean he died?”

“No.” Worse. “He left.”

Silence.

Then, “I’m sorry.”

“I always thought-I mean, since I found out I was adopted a few years ago-I thought that maybe…” Leo trailed off.

“What?”

“Forget it. It’s stupid.”

“No, tell me. What were you thinking?”

“I had this fantasy of finding my dad…you know, my birth dad. And he would be this great guy. And he would be in my life. For good, you know? But that’s not going to happen now, so…it’s stupid.”

No reply.

“I mean, he’s dead,” Leo continued, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “And my other father is as good as dead. So there go all my options. I guess I’m on my own, where dads are concerned.”

Again, silence.

Until she said, so faintly that he could barely hear her, “Maybe not.”

Lindsay hung up the phone with a trembling hand and a wildly beating heart.

Why did I say it?

Why to him, of all people?

Why now, of all times?

But the answer was clear, really.

Because he, of all people, deserved to know the truth.

And because now, of all times, he was reaching out to her.

That was either a monumental coincidence or a monumental sign that somebody was manipulating fate.

Leo said he didn’t know who sent the e-mail that led him to her.

But when he mentioned the screen name, it made her blood run cold.

Cupid 21486.

Jake had been felled by an arrow through the heart, on Valentine’s Day. 2-14-86.

That screen name couldn’t be a coincidence.

Nor could the timing of the e-mails sent to Leo.

The only saving grace, as far as Lindsay was concerned, was that the mysterious person behind them believed Jake was the father of her child.

Still, whoever it was had found out, somehow, about the pregnancy. It might be only a matter of time before they also found out the truth about the father and contacted him as well.

I’d rather he heard it directly from me. He deserves that.

He deserved a lot of things she hadn’t given him.

Because I couldn’t.

Not back then.

Who knew where he was now? Probably married, with a family.

Or maybe not.

Probably not.

He never did seem like he’d turn out to be the marrying type, she thought, remembering his rakish grin…his rakish ways.

Kind of like Jake-only Jake was darker beneath the surface. Much.

But he hid it well. People thought Jake Marcott was this great guy beneath that devil-may-care attitude.

I even convinced myself of that, for the longest time. But I knew, deep down, there was more to that bad-boy demeanor than just image…

Just as she knew that there was more-much more-to the other bad boy in her past-the one who stole her heart on that long-ago New Year’s Eve, then vanished from her life.

Whose fault was that? an inner voice demanded.

Both of ours, she told it stubbornly.

Then she amended, maybe it was mostly mine.

She just couldn’t handle what she’d done. She wasn’t the kind of girl who had a one-night stand with a guy she barely knew. And she had no excuse, other than the fact that she was feeling down that night, still trying to get over Jake, knowing he’d be there, probably with somebody else.

It was just a rebound thing. At least, that was what she’d told herself then. That was her excuse.

Yet she still remembered every detail about that night. She remembered looking up, and there he was. They talked, and she was wildly attracted to him…and she sensed that it was mutual. And she left the party with him.

For once in her life, she allowed herself to do exactly what she wanted to do.

Then guilt-good old-fashioned Catholic guilt-took over.

She couldn’t deal, so she walked away.

Of course, the next time she spotted him, he was with another girl. That wasn’t surprising. He was a ladies’ man. Everyone knew that.

For all she knew, he still was.

Or maybe happily married with a bunch of kids.

But after all these years of wondering about him, she was going to find him. She was going to drag him back into her life.

She had no choice.

The tide had turned. Another classmate had been murdered.

Maybe it was random-it probably was-but maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe the phone calls were just a prank-but maybe they weren’t.

Lindsay was no longer frightened just for herself and for her friends back home. She was frightened for her child.

It made no difference that she hadn’t seen him since the day he was born, that he was somebody else’s responsibility.

Leo’s adoptive mother didn’t know what she knew.

Leo’s adoptive mother didn’t know that her child might be in danger.

Only I know that.

The time had come at last for Lindsay to unburden herself of the weighty secret she had carried for twenty years.

Of course, she hadn’t told Leo the whole truth on the phone just now. She’d only revealed that Jake Marcott hadn’t been his father.

“Who was he, then?” Leo asked breathlessly.

“I can’t tell you…not yet. Not until I tell him.”

“He doesn’t know about me?”

“No,” she admitted around a lump in her throat. “He doesn’t. I’m sorry.”

“What do you think he’ll say?”

“I have no idea.”

Now, with a trembling finger, she pushed three numbers on the telephone pad. 4-1-1.

But I’m about to find out.

“Telephone.” Allison held out the receiver in a manicured hand.

“For me?”

“For you.” She smiled briefly, coldly, then returned to the bedroom where, presumably, she was packing the last of her things. She had been up at five a.m. to get it done.

She was moving from his four-bedroom Colonial in a gated shore community to a small garden apartment in Stamford. The complex had a pool and a gym, she had told him, as if she were trying to convince him-and herself-that she couldn’t wait to get there.

He didn’t believe that for a minute.

He just wished he believed she was as disappointed to be leaving their failed relationship behind as she was to be leaving his house, which had a beautifully landscaped private pool off the back terrace and a home gym on the third floor.

He had been trying to stay out of Allison’s way, puttering around his well-equipped gourmet kitchen throwing together a spinach and goat cheese omelet, pretending-to himself, and to her-that he was sorry she was moving out.

But he wasn’t.

The day she’d moved in with him in January, he’d known it was a mistake.

Maybe if it had been a different day-any other day of the year, really-he wouldn’t have felt that way.

But it was January 1. Like some cosmic coincidence.

Oh, come on…people always moved on the first, didn’t they? It was the first day of the month, when new leases kicked in. Besides, January 1 was the beginning of the year. Traditionally the day to make a fresh start.

How ironic, then, that twenty years ago, January 1 marked the end of something that held so much promise for him.

The end?

It had barely begun.

He and Lindsay Farrell had merely spent a couple of hours together, ducking out of that New Year’s Eve party long before midnight.

Nobody saw them leave.

And nobody would have guessed they’d left together, heading out into the icy rain hand in hand.

He, the womanizing bad boy, and Lindsay, the beautiful heiress whose heart had belonged to Jake Marcott for as long as anyone could remember.

The two of them had broken up just before Christmas. He had assumed she was still licking her wounds, that his private fantasies about her could never become a reality.

But their eyes met that night, and for the first time ever, she seemed to really see him-and not just that. She seemed to see beyond what everyone else saw.

And something just…clicked between them. Across a crowded basement rec room. It was like something out of an old John Hughes movie.

They didn’t even spend all that much time talking before he asked her if she wanted to get out of there.

He never expected her to say yes.

He never expected her to agree to go to his house, where his parents were out, of course. Not just because it was New Year’s Eve, but because they went out all the time. He was usually alone when he was home. For once, he was glad of it.

When he took Lindsay in his arms, he never expected her to kiss him back. He’d imagined it, of course-so many times that the sensation of her lips beneath his almost seemed familiar.

There she was, just like he had dreamed: running her hands over his bare shoulders beneath his T-shirt, wantonly pressing her soft flesh against his hard angles, throwing her head back when he kissed her neck, kissed her collarbone, found his way to her bare breast.

At first he thought she might have forgotten that it was him, and not Jake.

But he looked up to find her gazing at him, staring tenderly into his eyes, and that was all the encouragement he needed. He dared to keep going, further and further, lost in the familiar, overwhelming throes of teenaged passion.

But that night, in his boyhood bedroom, he found himself venturing into uncharted territory.

Lindsay Farrell was different from the other girls he’d had. She made him feel different. She made him feel, period.

It wasn’t his first time. Far from it.

But it was his first time with emotion-real emotion, as powerful as physical sensation, and then some.

When his body joined with hers, their eyes locked, he nearly cried at the intensity of it.

But of course, he held back.

Boys didn’t cry. His father had reminded him of that fact often enough through the years.

You have to toughen up, his father used to say when he was very young, at the mercy of Shane and Devin, his two bullying older brothers. Toughen up, son, or the world will eat you alive.

Boys didn’t cry.

Men didn’t cry, either.

Looking back at that New Year’s Eve, he always knew that was the night he became a man. The night he first fell in love.

January 1 was the day he realized that some things weren’t meant to be.

She left in the wee hours of the new year, whispering that she had to get home. She didn’t look at him when she said it.

In fact…

She never looked at him again.

It was as though she was ashamed of what had happened between them. As though she had remembered he wasn’t good enough for someone like her.

He never got the chance to tell her that he had been infatuated with her from afar for a long time, from the first time he spotted her at a Western Catholic dance-on Jake Marcott’s arm, of course.

Yes, he had been infatuated, but now he really loved her. Only her.

It didn’t matter. He was who he was, he couldn’t change his reputation or his financial and social status. Not then, anyway.

He and Lindsay Farrell weren’t meant to be. She left, and he wanted to cry, but he didn’t.

He soon heard, through the grapevine, that she was still in love with Jake, that Jake was still in love with her. That Jake, in fact, was dating one of her best friends, Kristen Daniels, just to make her jealous-and it was working.

That alone was enough to make him back off. He didn’t compete for girls. They had always been drawn to him, drawn to his dark hair and eyes, his lean, lanky build, his quick grin.

Ironically, one of the girls who popped up on his radar in Lindsay’s wake had been Bella Marcott, Jake’s sister. He’d told himself he’d have been attracted to her even if she didn’t go to St. Elizabeth’s. Even if she weren’t a good friend of Lindsay’s. She was cute and quick-witted-the kind of girl who always had a sharp comeback. He liked that. He liked her-but of course, he didn’t love her.

He loved Lindsay.

And when he was with Bella, Lindsay was usually in the vicinity. He could sneak glances at her when she wasn’t looking. Bella caught him a few times, though. She seemed to shrug it off. Most girls did.

Everyone knew he wasn’t the steady boyfriend type; there were plenty of girls in his life back then. Always had been.

Still were.

And now another one bites the dust, he thought, watching Allison disappear into the bedroom without a backward glance.

Easy come, easy go.

Yeah, and his life had become a series of bad cliches.

Become? It always was.

With a sigh, he tossed aside the knife he’d been using to chop the onions for the omelet and lifted the phone to his ear.

“Yeah, hello?”

Stunned, he listened to the response-and heard the voice he’d been longing to hear for twenty years.

Her voice. Uttering his name.

“Is this Wyatt Goddard?”

Wyatt Goddard?

She frowned in surprise at what she had just overheard. Why on earth would Lindsay Farrell be contacting him after all these years?

After all these years?

Come on. Why would she contact him ever?

It was hard to imagine that someone like her had ever crossed paths with someone like him.

He wasn’t from the wrong side of the tracks, exactly…but pretty darned close.

He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools-once for smoking, and once for truancy-and his parents were both alcoholics. Not that those things made him an instant loser.

Far from it, actually. Wyatt Goddard was popular well beyond the boundaries of Washington High. He always had more girlfriends than Oregon had bridges…and Lindsay Farrell always had a boyfriend.

Well, she did until a few months before Jake died, anyway.

As for Wyatt, yes, he was popular-but a little scary, too, as far as the girls of St. Elizabeth’s were concerned.

There was something intriguing, enigmatic, even, about him-a series of contradictions.

He was athletic, a track star-as well as a pack-a-day smoker.

He had a reputation as a loner-still, there he was at every party, with girls hanging all over him.

He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools, but he got decent grades-and he continued to dutifully attend Sunday Mass, usually solo.

His family was lower middle class, if anything-yet he drove a BMW convertible.

He always wore the same clothes: well-worn blue jeans, plain T-shirts, and low-heeled boots…even though his mother was a clerk in the young men’s department at Nordstrom and his father worked at Nike. Sunglasses, too, most of the time-even on cloudy days.

He occasionally revealed a sharply honed sense of humor, but he rarely smiled. When he did, it was there and gone, like a flash of summer lightning that came out of nowhere and left you wondering if it was ever there at all…

The smile…

That’s it!

She knew it seemed familiar.

Leo Cellamino-who looked nothing like his supposed father, Jake Marcott-happened to have precisely the same smile as Wyatt Goddard.

She hadn’t been able to put her finger on who he reminded her of at the time, but now she knew.

Hmm.

Meanwhile, here was the esteemed Lindsay Farrell, placing a call to Wyatt out of the blue, never stopping to consider that her telephone might be tapped…even after Kristen’s warning.

Hmm.

This, she realized, listening intently for whatever was to come, should be interesting.

An unexpected bonus, if her hunch was correct.

“It’s Lindsay,” she managed to say, sounding deceptively levelheaded when her brain felt as though it were about to explode.

“Lindsay Farrell. From Portland. St. Elizabeth’s,” she prodded when the man on the other end of the line didn’t react.

“I know.” She heard him exhale loudly, as though he were puffing the air through his cheeks. “I know who you are.”

No, you don’t, she found herself thinking. You know who I was…not who I am now.

And I never knew you at all.

“You’re in Connecticut now, huh?” she asked, still marveling at the coincidence that Wyatt was living right here on the East Coast, in Fairfield County, less than fifty miles away.

Coincidence? There were over twenty million people in this metropolitan area. That they had both ended up here wasn’t nearly as coincidental as it would be if they both lived on some remote island.

Still…

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve lived all over the place, but I’ve been on the East Coast a few years now.”

“What…what do you do?”

“I’m self-employed,” he said briefly, as if that explained everything-or anything at all. “You?”

“Same thing.”

“In New York.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes…how did you know?” she asked, wishing her stomach wouldn’t flutter at the prospect that he’d kept track of her.

“Caller ID,” he said simply. “I just checked it and recognized the 212 area code.”

“Oh.”

So much for his keeping track of her. She was lucky he even remembered her name.

Lindsay struggled to pull herself together, to remember what it was, exactly, she had just rehearsed saying to him, before she actually dialed.

Wyatt, you should know that I got pregnant the night we were together and I gave birth to your son. I came to New York and had him, then gave him up for adoption because I thought he could have a better life that way. And now he’s found me…and he wants to find you.

Yes, that was what she was going to say. It had seemed best to go the straightforward route.

Before this moment, anyway.

Now she found herself acutely aware that she couldn’t go around dropping bombshells like that over the telephone. Not when she was less than an hour away from the person whose life would be forever altered by her news.

She had to deliver a bombshell like that in person.

“I need to see you,” she hastily told Wyatt Goddard, trying not to wonder if the woman who had answered the phone was his wife. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him. About the two of them. It was about their son.

“Did you say you want to see me?” he echoed, sounding surprised…and intrigued.

“No. I said I need to see you. As soon as possible, actually.”

She expected him to argue.

He didn’t.

He said, “I’ll come to New York.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Chapter 18

Driving down I-95 along Long Island Sound in morning rush-hour traffic, Wyatt Goddard was careful not to let the Pagani Zonda’s speedometer rise past eighty. He didn’t want to get another ticket and wind up in traffic school again.

Sure, he always drove fast-speed was as much a fact of Wyatt’s life as his good looks and fat bank account were.

Today, however, he was tempted to raise the velocity not as much out of habit as out of anticipation.

But a traffic stop would only delay the payoff.

The payoff: after two decades, he was going to see Lindsay Farrell again.

He had dressed carefully, formally for the occasion. Sure, he still favored jeans and T-shirts in his everyday life. But he now had a closet full of well-cut designer suits, custom-made shirts, Italian silk ties, shiny leather shoes, and sunglasses that cost almost as much as his first car did.

It had taken no time at all this morning to go from the boxer shorts he’d slept in to the elegant attire he now wore. His dark hair, still damp from his shower, was cut much shorter than it had been back in high school, but he still had a full head of it. Luckily for him, receding hairlines didn’t run in the family. Even his father had aged well, despite his years of hard living.

And so had Wyatt. Nobody he met ever realized he was closing in on forty. He forgot, most of the time, himself. The only hint of his age, whenever he looked in the mirror, were the faint beginnings of crinkly lines around the corners of his eyes.

At the moment, they were concealed behind a pair of black designer sunglasses.

No, the sun wasn’t shining brightly today-not yet, anyway. But he had donned the glasses despite the overcast sky, the way he used to back in high school. Back then, he used them as an impenetrable fort that could keep the world at bay.

Not anymore. He didn’t have to hide anymore.

And he wasn’t hiding from Lindsay-not really. But the glasses would give him an advantage. He wouldn’t have to look her in the eye until he’d had a chance to get used to the fact that he was with her again. Until he figured out how he felt about that-and had a chance to look at her and maybe figure out how she felt about him, and why she had called him so abruptly.

He supposed she was going to tell him. She’d said she had to talk to him about something. What could it be?

Whatever.

That she had crashed into his world out of the blue for the second time in his life seemed fitting. He only hoped that this time, she wouldn’t blow right on out of it again.

Maybe she won’t. We’re both adults now.

Right. They had that in common, if nothing else, he reminded himself wryly. That and, oh yeah, irony of ironies: money.

During their brief conversation, she had acted clueless about his life now-and he had pretended to be just as clueless about hers.

Of course he knew she was an event planner in Manhattan-a successful one, judging by her address and her client list.

Keeping track of her was simple, despite the fact that Wyatt’s parents were long deceased, his brothers had relocated, and he’d lost touch with his other hometown connections when he left.

Google was a handy invention. Plug in someone’s name and poof! There they were: name, location, occupation…

He only wished there had been a photo of Lindsay on the Web, but there never was when he checked.

And he checked often.

Well, now you don’t need a photo. Now you’ll get to see her for yourself.

His right foot pressed down on the accelerator before he remembered to lighten up.

This wasn’t a race. After twenty years, he could wait another half hour to see her.

Yeah, sure you can.

He forced himself to steer his way into the right lane, allowing the luxury sports car to languish behind a relatively slow-moving double semi.

Why did she call him? What did she want? And in person, no less.

Maybe she was interested in him now that she’d found out that he could now buy and sell her old man-and Farrell Timber-from here to the West Coast and back.

She wouldn’t be the first opportunist from his past to resurface.

Then again, Lindsay had never struck him as a gold-digger.

Come on…she didn’t have to be.

She had her own money, plenty of it. Everybody in Portland knew that money grew on the Farrell family tree.

Anyway, information about Wyatt wasn’t readily available on the Internet. He was a silent partner in the business, importing exotic luxury cars for high-profile clients.

Cars had always been his thing, even back in high school.

That was how he first noticed Lindsay, in fact. He’d turned his head to admire a sleek black Porsche that had pulled up in front of church one Sunday morning before Mass. Then she’d emerged from the backseat, and he was instantly more captivated by her than the car. Which was saying a lot.

In those days he worked his ass off, holding three part-time jobs to save enough for his used BMW. There were plenty of days when he got home at three a.m. after washing dishes at a local restaurant, too exhausted to wake up for school the next morning. You miss one too many days, and you’re expelled.

And once you’ve been expelled from one school, the next one has a zero-tolerance policy. Get caught having a cigarette on school grounds, and you’re out. No excuses accepted, no questions asked.

Of course college was beyond his reach anyway, so he didn’t worry much about his academic record. After graduating from Washington High, he found his way into automobile sales-first in Portland, then Indianapolis, then Daytona. Race cars.

From there, he got into luxury imports, found his way up the East Coast through a series of stepping stones, and here he was. Still working his ass off.

But the reward now was much greater. He was wealthy, living among blue bloods who made Lindsay’s privileged family look like paupers.

It wasn’t about money, though. Not for Wyatt.

And it wasn’t about Lindsay rejecting him all those years ago because he wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t even about his parents, who never believed in him, or his brothers, who didn’t either-until he sent them each a Jaguar for Christmas a few years back. Of course Shane promptly sold his to keep his L.A. townhouse from going into foreclosure, and Devin totaled his during an icy Montana rain that spring.

Oh, well. Let bygones be bygones, Wyatt figured. No need to hold grudges.

If Wyatt Goddard ever had anything to prove, it was to himself.

He should have been satisfied now, a bon vivant living life on his own terms.

He wasn’t.

Not entirely.

But he figured he was as close to satisfied as he was ever going to get on his own.

Sure, something was missing. Something he couldn’t even put his finger on, most days.

Today, however, he could.

Maybe because Allison had moved out.

More likely because Lindsay had contacted him.

No, she wasn’t the thing that was missing, per se…

It was just that hearing from her reminded him-far more than Allison’s departure had-that he was alone.

Alone again, alone always…

Alone.

There were plenty of people in his life, but he held them at arm’s length, the way he always had. It was his nature. In his relationships with women, with family, with friends and colleagues.

If he didn’t let them in, he didn’t have to push them out-or worse, let them out when they wanted to leave.

He didn’t have to take Psych 101 to know that it was a defense mechanism, honed by years of being a latchkey kid with parents who were absent even when they were physically there. He had long ago forgiven both of them, quite some time before he found himself at their consecutive deathbeds, keeping vigil, holding it together while his older brothers fell apart and stayed away. His father went first: cirrhosis of the liver. No surprise. His mother followed within a year: emphysema. No surprise there, either.

Wyatt had long since quit smoking, and he never touched a drop of liquor. Never did drugs, either, not even pot. Not even when he ran around with that crowd back in school.

No, he was an expert at always remaining in control…

Even at high speed.

He checked the rearview mirror, glanced over his shoulder, then flicked on his turn signal and swerved left.

Then he allowed his foot to sink onto the accelerator, gunning the sports car down the highway toward New York, and Lindsay.

This was going to be tricky.

She couldn’t help but wish Lindsay and Wyatt were going to meet at Lindsay’s apartment so that she could easily eavesdrop in the comfort of her Lexington Avenue hotel room a few blocks away.

But when Wyatt said he was coming to New York right away, Lindsay immediately suggested meeting in a public place.

She didn’t say it that way, of course.

When he asked, “Where do you live?” she replied immediately, and nervously, “Oh, I’ll just meet you somewhere. I was going out to run some errands on the way to work, so…”

Errands? On the way to work?

No, you weren’t, Lindsay. You made that up-why? So that you wouldn’t have to meet Wyatt Goddard in your apartment?

She could think of just two reasons a woman wouldn’t want to be alone with a man. One, because she was afraid he might hurt her.

Two, because she was afraid he might make a move on her.

With Wyatt Goddard, either scenario was a possibility.

Not that he had ever hurt someone, to her knowledge. But there always was an air of danger about him.

In fact, to her own private amusement, his name came up a few times in the wake of Jake’s murder-as a suspect.

Not officially, though the police did question him. But they questioned everyone who had been at the dance that night. Methodically. Taking more time with some kids-like Lindsay, who had found him, and Kristen, who had been his date-than with others.

Wyatt was never an official suspect, but there was plenty of talk, particularly among Jake’s friends, that he could have done it. Mostly because he was an outsider, never one of them. And because he had been there that night, with Jake’s sister.

Of course, she kept her distance from him after that.

Pretty much everyone did.

Then again, they all kept their distance from each other, too, their close-knit group hopelessly frayed as graduation loomed.

By that July, everyone had gone their separate ways.

This July, they were planning to come together again at last before the old school was destroyed.

But some of them wouldn’t live to see that day.

And those who did would be forever haunted by all that had gone before.

Lindsay Farrell would be part of the former group.

She hadn’t yet decided where Wyatt Goddard was going to wind up now that he was back on the scene.

She’d just have to wait and see what happened between him and Lindsay.

They were meeting just down this next block, in a large, popular coffee shop Lindsay had suggested. It would probably be crowded at this hour of the morning.

Crowded enough that no one would give a second glance to a frumpy, heavyset blonde dining solo.

But too crowded, she saw in dismay as she arrived in the doorway, for her to possibly land a seat anywhere near Lindsay and Wyatt.

There they were, greeting each other right now at a small booth near the back, surrounded by other booths and tables, all of them occupied.

Lindsay she had already glimpsed many times these last few days, having kept her under close surveillance. She had been seated when Wyatt arrived, her back to the door.

Now, after they had exchanged a brief, awkward grasp of each other’s arms-which wasn’t a hug, but wasn’t anything else, either-Wyatt sat down facing the door, and she did a double take.

She hadn’t seen him in twenty years.

If she weren’t looking for him, expecting to see him there, it would have taken her a while to recognize him.

He was still tall, dark, and handsome. More so than ever, in fact.

But there was a sophistication about him that had never been there before. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and tie-obviously expensive, even from here.

Even if she were able to sidle into the vicinity-confident they wouldn’t recognize her between the wig, the padding, and the glasses-she wouldn’t be able to hear what they were saying. It was much too loud in here: chattering voices, clattering silverware and plates, jaunty Greek music playing in the background.

Disappointed, she turned and left the coffee shop, realizing she’d just have to piece it all together later.

There he was.

Right in front of her.

Looking at her, presumably, from behind the dark glasses that shielded his eyes.

Touching her-his hands on her lower arms in a brief grasp-but that was all.

And that’s good, Lindsay told herself, trying not to be disappointed that he didn’t initiate a hug or kiss. That would have been too awkward. It wasn’t as though they were officially long-lost friends-or long-lost anything.

Not officially.

“You look really good, Wyatt.”

Why did I say that? she wondered on the heels of her impromptu comment as they both settled into the booth-she for the second time.

I said it because it’s true, for one thing. He does look really good.

Great, in fact.

She never in a million years expected Wyatt Goddard to show up dressed like a successful businessman, cleanshaven below his sunglasses, his black hair attractively cut with a bristly top that seemed to beg her fingers to spike it further.

Was he a successful businessman?

He must be successful at something, living where he does. The Fairfield County shore towns weren’t affordable otherwise.

“You look pretty good yourself, Lindsay.”

Dammit, she could feel her cheeks growing hot at the innocuous compliment.

Or maybe it wasn’t so innocuous.

She looked up to see that he had removed his black shades and was looking at her as though…

Well, as though he hadn’t forgotten what had happened between them that New Year’s Eve.

She hadn’t, either. Not for a second.

But not, apparently, for the same reason as him.

Oh, she definitely remembered what it had been like-Wyatt Goddard making love to her.

You don’t forget your first time.

But she had a feeling she wouldn’t have forgotten Wyatt even if he had been her hundredth lover, or her thousandth.

How ironic that after going out with Jake for so long-two years-she never could bring herself to sleep with him. Everyone assumed that they were. And he assumed that they would.

Right, and he pressured her from the start. Jake Marcott was used to getting what he wanted-including sex. He couldn’t believe his girlfriend wasn’t willing to provide it. Back then, Lindsay marveled that he stuck around anyway.

Now, having learned infinitely more about human psychology, she had a feeling that if she had given in, he wouldn’t have stayed with her for as long as he did.

You always want what you can’t have.

And, if you were Jake Marcott, you were hell bent on getting it.

That was what kept him around.

And it was why he finally got fed up and dumped her.

She wasn’t quite sure why she never gave in to Jake back then, she only knew that it wouldn’t be right. She loved him, yes-but there was something about him that she just didn’t trust.

How strange, then, that she instinctively trusted Wyatt Goddard from the moment they first connected. Really connected-at that New Year’s Eve party.

She knew who he was before that, of course. He was always around, on her peripheral radar, but she was with Jake. And even if she hadn’t been, Wyatt wasn’t her type. He had too much of an edge…or so she believed.

Maybe that was because she’d never gotten a good look at him. At his eyes. Not until that night.

Unless you were a rock star, you could hardly show up at an indoor party, in the evening, in the dead of winter, wearing sunglasses. So there he was, without his ever-present shades-looking at her. She could feel his stare long before she allowed herself to meet it. And when she did…

Well, it might just as well have been midnight. Fireworks and confetti seemed to erupt with fanfare somewhere inside her, heralding the beginning of something new and promising.

She was drawn to Wyatt Goddard as she had never been drawn to anyone before.

At the party-and afterward. When they were alone together.

Even now, twenty years later, she knew that if she closed her eyes, she’d see the look in Wyatt’s that night as he lay intimately above her, propped on his elbows, her face cupped in his hands…

So Lindsay didn’t dare close her eyes.

She didn’t want to remember that. Especially not now.

She didn’t want to remember the unexpected tenderness that lay beneath his rough exterior…

No, because she’d feel even guiltier for not telling him about the baby.

Back then, in the months that followed their brief connection, she had managed to convince herself that she was doing him a favor not revealing her pregnancy. That a guy like Wyatt Goddard wouldn’t have any interest in a child, not even his own.

It was only when it was too late, when Wyatt-and the baby-were long gone from her life, that the fog lifted. It had comforted her in that year-the numbing haze that had enveloped her like a protective cloak, shielding her from the icy reality of her pregnancy and the harsher one of Jake’s murder.

But when her head began to clear, the memories came back. She was forced to acknowledge, if only to herself, that there might have been more to Wyatt Goddard than met the eye. More than she was able to see before they got together, more than she was willing to recall after she left him.

I cheated him, she told herself now-not for the first time. Not by far.

But sitting here across from him, looking into his eyes, the knowledge hit her harder than ever before.

“Coffee?” a waitress asked briskly, appearing with a steaming glass pot and a couple of laminated menus.

Wyatt nodded and turned over the cup before him in its saucer.

Lindsay did the same, though she was sure that if she tried to take a sip of anything right now, she’d gag.

In fact, she might gag anyway. She might throw up right here and now, in front of Wyatt and the waitress and everyone else.

To distract herself from the wave of nausea washing over her, she focused on returning the waitress’s brief, efficient smile as she poured their coffee.

Good. That’s better. She focused on the middle-aged woman’s faded gray eyes that matched her faded gray hair. Her plastic name tag said Marissa. That was interesting. She didn’t look like a Marissa. She looked more like a Bea or a Madge.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked, peering at Lindsay with motherly concern. “You look a little green.”

“I’m fine…just a little…” She trailed off, conscious of Wyatt’s eyes still on her.

“Green,” the woman supplied, and chuckled.

“Right.”

“I’m right there with ya. I’m still in my first trimester-this is my fifth kid-and I’ve got morning sickness every day.”

Morning sickness? She can’t be much older than me, then, Lindsay realized with a start. She had her pegged for at least a decade beyond.

Well, Marissa was a coffee-shop waitress in New York with four kids to support and another on the way. She’d probably led a difficult life, and her struggles had taken a physical toll.

Which would indicate, in turn, that Wyatt must have led a relatively easy one. He didn’t look a day over thirty.

“I’ve been scarfing down saltines all morning,” the waitress continued conversationally, lifting the small stainless steel creamer from their table and making sure it wasn’t empty. Nope. She set it back down. “Every damned time I get pregnant, pardon my French, I tell myself it’s going to be different. I tell myself I’m not going to throw up every morning for the first couple of months. And every damned time-pardon again-it happens worse than ever.”

Lindsay murmured something appropriately sympathetic, because the woman seemed to be mainly addressing her.

“Oh, I’ll be okay in the end. The reward is worth it. I just love my babies.”

Lindsay offered her a taut, queasy smile.

“How about you? Do you have children, hon?”

Talk about a loaded question.

It certainly wasn’t one she wanted to answer in front of Wyatt Goddard.

She merely shook her head.

The waitress looked from her to Wyatt and back again. As if she’d been assuming they were a couple-and now realized her mistake-her smile lost some of its cheer.

“I’ll be right back to take your order.”

With that, she was gone.

Wyatt picked up one of the menus and wordlessly handed it to Lindsay.

She glanced at it blindly, her thoughts rushing along like a swollen mountain stream in April.

I have to tell him.

Right now.

Just get it out there, in the open.

Just get it over with, for God’s sake.

But somehow, the words refused to come.

“Do you know what you want?”

Yes. I want to tell you that you have a son.

But I can’t seem to do it.

She glanced up to find him looking over his own menu.

“I’m just having toast,” she said, because she felt as though she’d have to order something.

“I’m having it, too.” He snapped his menu closed. “With eggs, bacon, and a side of sausage.”

She couldn’t help but grin. “Hungry?”

“Always. There are just some things I can’t resist.”

He’s talking about food, she reminded herself, even as she noted the provocative quirk in his brow.

For some reason, she found it necessary to say, “Like cholesterol?”

“Among other things.”

Okay, so he’s not talking about food.

But you should. Just to keep things straightforward and make it clear that nothing is going on here, under the surface.

“Do you, um, eat a huge breakfast every morning?” She could hear the nervousness in her voice.

“When I’m home, I do. I like to cook. In fact, I’ve always known my way around the kitchen, ever since I was a kid.”

“Really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I am.”

“A lot of things about me might surprise you, Lindsay.”

He set his menu aside, leaned back in the booth, steepled his hands, and looked at her.

“So,” he said, “what’s up?”

And away we go.

Except…she still wasn’t ready.

So she hedged. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Twenty years last New Year’s.”

Whoa. Nothing like throwing it right out there, she thought, ducking her head to gaze at her menu again so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

Wait a minute.

This was ridiculous. She wasn’t a teenaged girl anymore. She didn’t have to skirt around the fact that she’d had a, a-thing-with him. Wasn’t that essentially why they were here?

Forcing herself to meet his gaze again, she saw a glint of amusement there and actually found herself relaxing. Just a tad.

“I wasn’t talking about that, specifically,” she allowed herself to say, referring to their one night together.

“No, but you were thinking about it…right?”

He leaned forward abruptly, and she found herself with a close-up view of the face-the eyes-she had tried so hard to forget.

No wonder she couldn’t.

She was mesmerized all over again.

“I’ve thought about it a couple of times, too,” he told her.

“You mean…about that New Year’s Eve?”

“Yeah. Come on, you didn’t forget…did you?”

You have no idea.

She shrugged.

“You couldn’t have,” he said simply, leaning back again, folding his arms. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here now. Right?”

“What do you mean?”

“You looked me up. It must have something to do with the past…unless you’re looking for a Lamborghini.”

“What?”

He frowned slightly. “Cars,” he said inexplicably.

“You lost me.”

“That’s what I do. Exotic luxury cars.”

“Oh!” She hesitated, wondering if she should let him think she had invited him here on business.

What? Have you lost it?

What are you going to do, buy a Porsche from him to throw him off the scent?

“I didn’t know that was what you did,” she said, buying time.

He shrugged. “That’s what I do. You?”

“I’m an event planner.”

He nodded as if he already knew that.

Had she told him?

She doubted it-but she seriously couldn’t remember.

Right now, under the heat of his gaze, she seriously couldn’t remember much of anything at all.

Oh, yes she could.

She remembered his lips…his mouth…his hands…his skin against hers; his weight, pressing the hard length of his body against hers, into hers…

He remembered, too. She could see it. He was remembering right now.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Dammit. Why was there always this…thing, this connection, between them?

Always?

Talk about an exaggeration.

There was no always where Wyatt Goddard was concerned. It was more like…

Never.

“Did we decide?” the waitress asked breezily, materializing beside their booth again, shattering the moment.

Thank you, Marissa.

Lindsay ordered toast.

“White, wheat, rye, whole grain, pumpernickel…?”

“Whole grain.”

“Butter, margarine…?”

“Butter.”

“On it, or on the side?”

Oh, for God’s sake, it’s just toast! she wanted to scream, the distraction she had just welcomed now irritating the hell out of her. She wanted to be left alone with Wyatt again.

Truly alone, though.

Not here, in a public coffee shop.

Alone.

She ordered the butter on the side.

Wyatt ordered eggs, toast, bacon, a side of sausage.

“How do you want your eggs?” Marissa began. “Scrambled, over, up, poached-”

“Surprise me,” he cut in, and thrust the menus at her. “On all of it.”

The waitress sent him an amused, knowing smile and left them alone again.

“You might get hard-boiled eggs and pumpernickel toast with margarine,” Lindsay informed him with a grin.

“Sounds good.” He shook his head, reached across the table unexpectedly, and grabbed Lindsay’s hands.

There went her heart again, a ricocheting hockey puck skittering around in her rib cage.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said. “Really, really good.”

He was a flirt. She knew that; had always known.

This was part of his charming routine, she told herself sternly. Once a womanizer, always a womanizer.

“I haven’t seen anyone from back home in years.”

“Actually, neither have I,” she admitted. “Except my parents. But they don’t even live in Oregon anymore.”

“Where are they?”

“Retired. Near Las Vegas. How about yours?”

“They passed away.”

“I’m sorry.”

A shadow slid over his face. “So am I.” He squeezed her hands, let go. “But people die, and you move on. That’s life, right?”

He’s trying to be cavalier, she thought, and it isn’t working. Not at all.

“Are you married?” she asked, realizing she didn’t even know, grateful he had let go of her hands. Just in case he was.

Not that anything could possibly come of this if he wasn’t. But still…

“No.”

Her hopes soared ridiculously.

“Divorced?” she asked.

“Nope. You?”

“Nope.”

“So you’re…Are you married?”

She shook her head quickly, trying not to smile. But she felt so damned giddy, realizing he was interested in her status.

“I’m surprised,” he said, and poured a generous amount of creamer into his coffee. “I always pictured you married to a great guy, with a couple of kids.”

Kids.

About to sip her own coffee, she set the cup down again hard, the untouched black liquid sloshing over the edge.

“No,” she said tersely. “Not married to a great guy with a couple of kids.”

“Any particular reason why not?”

She shrugged.

“Let me guess. You’re still waiting for Mr. Right to come along. Right?”

She forced herself to look at him. “Isn’t everyone?”

It was his turn to shrug.

You have to tell him.

Now.

She couldn’t just sit here shooting the breeze with him, flirting, letting him think this might be some kind of casual reunion for old times’ sake.

Or worse, the deliberate sparking of an old flame.

He deserved to know the truth before this went any further.

I just wish I didn’t want so badly for it to go further.

Wyatt insisted on picking up the check Marissa had dropped on the table. Lindsay argued, but she let him.

She didn’t argue, however, when he suggested that they take a walk through the park. He had a feeling that wasn’t just because she wanted to delay getting to the office or because it was a beautiful May morning.

Something was weighing on her mind.

Something she hadn’t been able to articulate back in the coffee shop.

A couple of times, he got the feeling that she was about to say something significant.

Other times, he sensed that she was tempted to bolt.

He was glad she hadn’t.

Seeing her again, he felt almost as if there had been a real and enduring relationship between them in the past, something more than a one-night stand.

Of course, there hadn’t been.

Yet somehow, they had reconnected the way a former boyfriend and girlfriend might, distinctly aware of rekindled chemistry, deliberately keeping the conversation light and rooted in the present.

As they ate-or rather, he ate, and she toyed with her toast-he told her about the various places he had lived and about his business. He deliberately downplayed the scope of his success, having realized that she didn’t know, after all. She had called him for a specific reason-that much was obvious from her preoccupied air-but as far as he could tell, his newfound wealth had nothing to do with it.

They made their way from the bustling, pedestrian-and-traffic-clogged corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue into the comparative solitude of Central Park.

The warm, brilliant morning sunlight gave way to cooler dappled shade, and he shoved his sunglasses high over his forehead. No real reason to wear them here.

And no real reason to hide. Not anymore.

Birds chirped from leafy overhead branches, bikers and joggers whizzed past, and strangers strolled in their midst…yet essentially, they found themselves alone together.

It was time for Wyatt to find out why Lindsay had reached out to him today.

He looked over his shoulder. There was no one remotely in earshot other than a plump woman pushing an expensive-looking baby carriage along, maybe a hundred feet behind on the path.

She was probably a nanny, he found himself noting idly. The sleek buggy was stereotypical for an Upper East Side family, but the woman pushing it was not your average upscale Manhattan mom. She was too overweight, sloppy looking, unsophisticated.

And you’re stalling, speculating about random strangers instead of focusing on why you’re here with Lindsay.

Breaking the silence that had settled between them, he turned to her at last and said, “So…tell me.”

Her head jerked toward him and he saw that she was startled-and dismayed.

“Tell you what?” she asked slowly.

“Why you called. You don’t want a car from me, I’m assuming…So what is it that you do want?”

She didn’t answer.

Their footsteps crunched on the gravel.

Behind them, he could hear the nanny strolling along, her footsteps padding along the path, the cushy rubber tires of the baby’s buggy almost soundless.

In the distance was the faint sound of street traffic, along with the distinct clopping of a horse’s hoofs and the rumble of the carriage it was pulling, undoubtedly occupied by romantic tourists.

Wyatt found himself picturing himself riding in one with Lindsay snuggled beside him. In his fantasy it was night, and winter, and they were a couple.

Then Lindsay spoke, shattering the image-a good thing, because he wasn’t back in high school, daydreaming about a girl he couldn’t have. He was a grown man, for God’s sake…

Right. Daydreaming about a woman you can’t have.

Or could he?

When he heard what she was saying, hope came to life within him.

“It’s something I should have told you years ago. I should have said it as soon as I knew, but…I couldn’t.”

As soon as she knew? Knew what?

Oh.

Whoa.

All at once, he realized what she was going to say.

She was about to tell him that the feeling he had assumed was one-sided twenty years ago was, in fact, mutual. That she had figured out after they slept together that she was falling in love, just as he had. But she, like he, chose not to reveal her feelings.

His pulse quickened in anticipation.

Say it, Lindsay. Just say it.

But she was in no hurry to play her hand.

He did his best to coax her along. “It’s okay that you couldn’t say it back then. I mean, you can still say it now.”

He tried to catch her eye, but she refused to look at him. She stared straight ahead, inhaled deeply, exhaled audibly, her nerves palpable.

He waited, fighting the urge to touch her fingers, take her hand, guide her along.

“It’s not easy.” She sounded almost…distraught.

“I know. Would it help if I told you I felt the same way?”

“What…?”

“I should have told you, too. But I didn’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I felt the same way, Lindsay. My God, I mean…I never expected that to happen that night. And when you took off afterward, I figured you weren’t interested in someone like me. So I kept it all to myself.”

“What?” she asked again, turning to look at him at last.

That was when he saw the utter confusion in her eyes, and his heart sank.

“Wyatt…I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing here.”

“I guess we’re not.” He shook his head. Fool!

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

She knows. She knows what I was talking about, even if I have no idea what she was talking about.

Terrific.

He had gone and let his guard down for an instant, spilled his guts, and all for nothing.

“For a second there,” she said slowly, “I thought you might have known all along…and that would have made this so much easier.”

“Made what so much easier? What the hell are you talking about, Lindsay?” he demanded, his patience fraying fast.

“That night-the night we-Wyatt, I got pregnant,” she blurted.

Her words swept through him like a tsunami.

Above the roar that consumed him, body and soul, he heard the rest. “I had a baby. The baby. Your baby.”

Keeping a careful distance, she watched Wyatt Goddard abruptly stop walking and rake a hand through his hair.

The motion knocked his sunglasses to the ground. He appeared not to notice.

Her hands tightened on the handle of the empty baby carriage she had just stolen from its vulnerable sidewalk parking spot outside a deli on a nearby side street.

She slowed her footsteps, not wanting to overtake them.

A breeze rustled the branches overhead, so that it was impossible for her to hear.

Lindsay faltered, touched Wyatt’s shoulder, then leapt back as if she had been burned when he appeared to brush her off with a brusque comment.

Lindsay seemed to be pulling herself together for a moment, then she said something else to him.

The breeze stopped and a snatch of conversation reached her ears.

She stopped pushing the buggy altogether and bent over it as if adjusting the nonexistent baby’s blanket.

“…so sorry, I just didn’t know what to…”

That came from Lindsay.

So, louder and more clearly, did, “Please, Wyatt, don’t-”

The wind gusted again, dammit.

Wyatt was talking, she saw, sneaking a glance in her direction as she fussed over the imaginary occupant of the buggy.

Then a couple of phrases reached her ears even though the leaves overhead were still stirring. They were separated by unintelligible comments, or protests, from Lindsay.

“How could you?”

“Dammit, Lindsay, I had a right to know.”

And finally, “So he’s in Queens?”

I was right, she thought triumphantly.

Wyatt Goddard had fathered Lindsay Farrell’s baby.

She only wished Jake Marcott were alive to know about his girlfriend’s shocking betrayal.

Ex-girlfriend, she amended.

Still, even when it was over between Jake and Lindsay that December of their senior year, people assumed it wasn’t over. You didn’t forget a longtime relationship just like that. Unfinished business still seemed to linger between them. Jake still loved Lindsay; Lindsay still loved Jake. Everyone figured that was the case, including Kristen Daniels, who dated Jake next-and last.

The rumor was that Jake dumped Lindsay because she wouldn’t sleep with him.

She had heard it many times during the two years they were dating.

When she realized Lindsay was pregnant, she assumed the rumor was obviously false.

Now, all at once, it was viable again.

Lindsay might not have been sleeping with Jake, but she was sleeping with Wyatt Goddard behind his back. How scandalous of her. How daring. And how cunning.

In fact…

It almost makes me admire Lindsay, she realized with an ironic smile, watching her watch Wyatt Goddard striding away.

But that doesn’t change what I have to do to her.

If anything, it would make it even sweeter, knowing that perhaps Lindsay Farrell’s true love hadn’t been buried after all in the Marcott family plot on that bitter February day.

No, it appeared that her true love was alive and well.

Look at Lindsay, bereft, standing there alone on the path as Wyatt disappears. Potent yearning practically radiated off of her.

Despite the obvious turmoil between them, she was probably still hoping they had a second chance.

Maybe she was thinking that together, they could meet the son they’d given up. That the three of them could walk off into the sunset and live happily ever after, a family at last.

Sorry, but that’s not going to happen, Lindsay.

You’re not going to live happily ever after.

You’re not going to live at all.

Oblivious to her chilling fate and the figure watching her from a distance, Lindsay gazed at Wyatt walking away.

Storming away, really, and she watched him go until he disappeared around a bend in the path.

Then the ache took hold, a longing so fierce that she actually doubled over, just briefly, hugging herself. When she straightened and looked around, she saw a heavyset woman with a baby buggy, poised behind her in the path.

She was looking up, at Lindsay, but she quickly looked down again, at the baby in the carriage.

Typical New Yorker. She probably thought Lindsay was in some kind of physical trouble, and didn’t want to get involved.

Whatever.

Lindsay didn’t need help. She was fine.

Just fine.

She took a deep, trembling breath, steeled her nerves, and walked on in the direction Wyatt had taken.

She wasn’t going after him, though; she knew better than that.

He needed time to absorb what she had told him. Time to cool off.

Maybe he never would.

But at least she had done the right thing at last.

That was what mattered here. All that mattered.

Lindsay had no business longing for something more with Wyatt.

Maybe not, but you are.

All right.

So she wanted more. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to see him again, she wanted him in her life.

Absorbed in wistful, futile fantasies, she never looked back.

She never saw the plump blond nanny abandon the baby buggy in the path.

She never saw her reach over to pick up the sunglasses Wyatt had dropped, tucking them into her pocket with a thoughtful smile.

Chapter 19

Leo Cellamino’s cell phone rang just as he was walking past a group of old men playing checkers in the Thursday evening twilight outside a prewar apartment building off Queens Boulevard.

His first thought was that the caller would have to leave a message; he was carrying a large, flat white box that was already fifteen minutes late. How well he knew, after three years delivering pizzas for his Uncle Joe’s pizzeria, that hungry customers had low blood sugar; low blood sugar made a person irritable and impatient; and irritable, impatient people didn’t tip well, if at all.

Anyway, it was probably Sarah Rose. She had called his home number looking for him, and his mother said she’d given her his cell number, too.

Then Leo remembered that he had given Lindsay Farrell his cell phone number, too, the other morning when they spoke.

He immediately looked around for somewhere to set the pizza box.

Spotting no convenient resting places, he set it carefully on the ground at his feet and pulled his ringing cell phone from the pocket of his shirt.

The Caller ID window showed an unfamiliar Manhattan number.

“Hello?” he said eagerly, ignoring the disapproving stares from the old men.

“Leo, this is Lindsay Farrell.”

His mother.

“Hi.” His voice came out sounding strangled.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. There were just a few things I needed to do.”

Right. Like inform my father that I exist.

Truth be told, he hadn’t expected her to get back in touch this soon, if at all.

“That’s okay,” he told her, and took a step away from the glaring old men.

His foot nearly landed square in the middle of the pizza box on the ground; it was all he could do to keep it airborne and maintain his balance.

Good save. At least I didn’t squash the merchandise, he told himself, turning his back to the old guys and carefully straddling the box on the ground.

“Leo, I was wondering if you were going to be around this weekend at all. We’d…like to meet you. If that’s what you want.”

“We? You mean…?”

She cleared her throat. “Your, ah, father. And me.”

“Are you kidding? I would love that.”

He heard her exhale as if she’d been holding her breath.

It was only then that he realized, for the first time, that he wasn’t the only one who had a lot at stake.

Lindsay Farrell did as well.

And so did his father…whoever he was.

Heck, it didn’t even matter who he was.

What mattered was that he knew about Leo now…and he wanted to meet him.

“Wyatt, it’s Lindsay. I, um, got your message and I went ahead and set something up for this weekend in Connecticut, like you said. Saturday afternoon at your place, right? I hope that still works for you. I told him you were sending a car to pick him up…but really, you don’t have to send one for me. I’ll get myself up there, so don’t worry about-”

A second beep cut off her final word.

…me.

Oh, well. She doubted he was worried about her.

It wasn’t as if he had touched base with her these past few days, after she’d made her big revelation that morning in the park.

His reaction was pretty much what she expected.

He was shocked, angry, upset.

He’d made it obvious that he wasn’t interested in excuses, so she didn’t offer any. She offered nothing other than a heartfelt apology, several of them, all of which he brushed off.

Can you really blame him?

They had gone their separate ways, and she had at first thought she might never hear from him.

She supposed she probably deserved that, in the grand scheme of things…and she could accept it. She really could.

But where would that leave Leo?

Perhaps no better off, or worse off, than he’d been before.

After all, you can’t miss something you never had.

That’s bullshit, and you know it better than anyone, she told herself, hanging up the phone and heading into the bathroom.

There, she splashed some water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror.

She hadn’t realize how much she had missed Wyatt until she saw him again.

Until he left her there, in the park.

Somehow, Lindsay pulled herself together and went to her office. Somehow, she made it through that workday, and then another, and another.

She even made it through the long nights, untainted by further prank phone calls.

With the news of Haylie’s murder almost a week old by then, and the memory of the prank caller’s eerie voice fading as well, she was no longer as fearful about her own safety, or Leo’s.

In fact, she’d almost convinced herself when she woke up this morning that she should just let go of everything connected to the past: the reunion, Haylie, Jake, Leo…and yes, Wyatt, too. Especially Wyatt.

Then, tonight, she came home from work and found her message light blinking.

“Lindsay, it’s Wyatt…”

His voice-even a recorded version-stole her breath away.

“Listen, I’ve thought about it and I think we should meet him, if that’s what he wants. I’m assuming it is. I mean, that’s why people track down their birth parents, right?”

He made a sound, a bitter laugh, it sounded like.

He went on to instruct her to set up a meeting for Saturday at his house. It had to be Saturday, he said, because he was flying out first thing Sunday on business and wouldn’t be back for a week. He’d send separate town cars for her and for Leo at two o’clock, to transport them up to Connecticut, and he’d arrange for the cars to take them back later.

His instructions were businesslike, his tone void of emotion.

She recognized the air of detached efficiency; she herself adopted it whenever she was working, making arrangements for upcoming events.

But this wasn’t just an event, she told herself as she rummaged in a drawer for a tube of lipstick.

Saturday’s meeting loomed as a life-altering milestone.

You’d think he’d have exhibited a little more awareness of that.

Leo certainly had, when she’d called him minutes ago to spring it on him.

His voice had radiated enthusiasm, especially when she told him that his father was sending a car for him.

“Is he rich, then?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she lied.

She had discerned from Wyatt’s appearance, from what he told her about his business, and from what she knew about where he lived, that he was rich.

There-she plucked a soft pink lipstick from the drawer, bypassing the red one Isaac had once complimented her on when she wore it.

She was meeting him for a drink tonight, but she wasn’t trying to impress him. Not these days.

Wyatt was a different story, though. She’d taken great care with her appearance the morning they met. She wondered if he had done the same or if he always dressed so elegantly.

Maybe he did. He had to travel in fancy circles these days.

The money had changed Wyatt outwardly, but she could tell, even from the brief time they’d spent together, that it hadn’t changed him inwardly.

He hadn’t lost his sensitive core that had captivated her twenty years ago, would captivate her still, if he’d let her in.

He was going to…

She could tell. Before she dropped the news on him, his walls were coming down. He was making her laugh, trying to put her at ease…

Then I went and ruined everything.

Not that she’d had a choice. She had to tell him; that was why she’d contacted him. He wasn’t going to pretend they were merely catching up; he knew there was something on her mind.

Right, but he thought it was something else.

Would it help if I told you I felt the same way? he had asked.

I never expected that to happen that night. And when you took off afterward, I figured you weren’t interested in someone like me. So I kept it all to myself…

Kept all what to himself? His feelings? He had feelings for her?

She couldn’t help wondering, in the moments before everything fell apart between them, whether there was actually a glimmer of hope.

Was there some way she and Wyatt could-

The ringing of the telephone shattered that thought.

She swiftly finished outlining her lips, set aside her lipstick, and hurried to answer it, checking her watch on the way. Lost in her reverie about Wyatt, she had taken too long to get ready. Now she was late-only by a couple of minutes, but it was probably Isaac on the phone, wondering if she’d forgotten.

“Hey, stranger,” a female voice greeted her.

“Who-oh my God! Aurora?”

“Hey, very good! But would you have known it was me if Kristen hadn’t told you I was going to be calling?”

Truth be told, she had forgotten all about that.

“Are you in New York, Aurora?” she asked, remembering what Kristen had said about their friend’s travel plans. That conversation seemed so long ago.

“Yup, we just got here. Gosh, it’s huge. I’ve wanted to see it all my life, and now here I am. I just wish Eddie could have come, too.”

“Why didn’t he?”

Aurora launched into a brief description of her husband’s duties back home, holding down the fort and shuttling their other kids to their activities.

“He complains, but he’s a great daddy. He’s loved every minute of it. He cried harder than anyone at Tina’s wedding.”

“I’ll bet.” Lindsay found herself thinking of Wyatt again.

She’d never even given him a chance to be a great daddy. And he might very well have been.

But it was too late now.

Their son was grown.

Wyatt had been robbed.

“So when can we get together?” Aurora asked. “Are you busy tonight?”

“Actually, I’m supposed to be somewhere right now.”

“Hmm…tomorrow, then? Or Saturday? We wanted to see a Broadway show, but we don’t have tickets yet. Everything we want to see is sold out.”

“This is a busy time of year,” Lindsay told her. “But what did you want to see? Maybe I can pull some strings.”

“Are you serious?”

Lindsay grinned, noting that Aurora sounded like her old animated self. “Sure. Just tell me which shows you’re interested in, and I’ll try to get a pair of tickets. They might not be the greatest seats, but-”

“Are you kidding, Linds? Any seats would be great. You’re such a doll to do this.”

Linds.

There it was again-the affectionate old nickname that was such a stark reminder of the girl she used to be.

Nobody called her that now. Strange, because shortening somebody’s name was a natural thing to do when you were close to someone.

Then again, nobody was as close to her as those girls-her high-school friends-had once been. You didn’t bond that intensely with others as a grown woman; there wasn’t enough time in the day as it was. And anyway, you weren’t in a phase of your life where you were insecure and dependent on other people.

But you still needed friends.

And Lindsay was more conscious now than ever of the loneliness in her life.

Maybe it’s not just about longing for friends.

Maybe what you need is a different kind of companionship. Something more lasting. More…

Passionate.

Again, Wyatt Goddard popped into her head.

No, he had never really left. Thoughts of him were always there now, lurking just beyond her consciousness, ready to intrude at any given moment.

Hmm…it was really turning out to be quite a week for Lindsay Farrell when it came to catching up with old friends, the killer thought.

First Kristen, then Wyatt, and now Lindsay had just agreed to a Friday night dinner date with Aurora.

She’d even sounded enthusiastic when she agreed with Aurora’s request that they dine at Sardi’s, one of the most touristy restaurants in town, over in the theater district.

But then, she always was a fake and a liar, so what do you expect?

She checked her watch, wondering where Lindsay was off to now. She’d said she was meeting an old friend.

It couldn’t be Wyatt, could it?

No. She’d had Lindsay’s phone tapped all week, and as far as she knew, the only contact she’d had with him had been in messages. They weren’t supposed to see each other until Saturday, when they had their little family reunion up in Connecticut.

A plan was already forming in her mind for that special occasion.

A daring plan, and one that deviated pretty drastically from her vow not to harm anyone other than the targets on her original list.

But now that the idea had sparked, it was pretty hard to ignore.

It was the perfect way to get to Lindsay, to make her suffer what people-some people, anyway-considered to be “a fate worse than death.”

That had been Caroline Marcott’s pathetically wailed phrasing at her son’s wake on that long-ago February day.

Was losing a child really a fate worse than death?

She wouldn’t know.

Maybe she’d soon find out, though. Through Lindsay.

Yes, she’d see that Lindsay suffered that so-called fate worse then death-and then she would suffer death itself.

And then we’ll decide which was worse, she thought.

Oh, wait a minute, Lindsay…you won’t be around for that part.

I guess I’ll just have to decide on my own, won’t I?

Her lips curved into a wicked smile as she hurried out of the hotel room and onto the street, hoping to get to Lindsay’s building in time to tail her to wherever she was going.

“You don’t seem like yourself tonight,” Isaac observed, setting down his margarita glass and studying Lindsay from across the small table, which held an untouched basket of chips and a bowl of salsa.

Lindsay blinked. “I don’t?”

“No. Normally, you would scarf down those chips in a hurry and ask for more. I’d assume it was because you had eaten dinner before you came, if you weren’t so quiet.”

“Sorry,” she said, and made an effort to smile at him. “I guess I’m just thinking about work.”

“No, you aren’t.” Isaac’s gaze was intent. “Who is he?”

She frowned. “What makes you think there’s a he?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Is it a she?”

“No.”

He swung his arm and snapped his fingers in feigned disappointment. “I was convinced for a second there that the only reason you dumped me was because you played for the other team.”

She winced even as she grinned. “I didn’t dump you, Isaac. It was mutual.”

“I’d have kept it going if you wanted to.”

Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn’t.

It didn’t matter now.

He had moved on to Kylah…but not, by the sounds of it, past Rachel.

Oh, well.

That was somebody else’s problem now.

And you have enough of your own, she reminded herself, her mind clouding over again at the thought of Wyatt. And Leo.

She was almost tempted to confide in Isaac. He, after all, was far removed from the world she’d left behind twenty years ago. There was no danger that he’d spill her secret.

But you don’t have to worry about that anymore, anyway. Wyatt knows.

Yes, and he was the reason she had kept it so carefully hidden all these years. Because she didn’t want it to get back to him.

Now that he knew what she had done…

Well, there really wasn’t a compelling reason to protect her past so adamantly.

Sure, her parents would be disappointed. But they had mellowed through the years, and anyway, their approval didn’t carry the weight it had when she was living under their roof, dependent on their bank account.

Her old friends would be shocked.

Jake would have been, too.

But his imagined reaction was moot. He had been dead for two decades. And even if he had lived, she wouldn’t possibly still be trying to shield him from the evidence of her fling with somebody else, would she?

Not unless they were married or something…

And she and Jake Marcott never in a million years would have gotten married.

She knew that now.

Jake didn’t have the qualities she’d want in a husband.

Jake didn’t even have the qualities she wanted in a boyfriend.

But she never let on about that-about what kind of person he had really turned out to be. You didn’t speak ill of the dead.

“So who is he?” Isaac asked again, thoughtfully nibbling the curved triangular edge of a tortilla chip.

“He’s just someone I used to know, back in Portland,” she heard herself admit.

Must be the tequila.

“Old boyfriend?”

“Not really.”

“Did he get back in touch with you?”

“I did, actually.”

“Have you seen him, or just talked to him?”

“Seen him.”

“And you wish you hadn’t, right? Because things have fizzled?”

“No, that’s not it at all.”

“I didn’t think so.” Isaac nodded. “There was still something there, right? And it scared the hell out of you?”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“There always is. Is he married?”

“No!”

“In prison?”

“No!” She shifted her weight uncomfortably. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“I can tell. Let me just say one thing, and then I swear I’ll change the subject. You haven’t seen this person in years, and he was someone you once cared about. You’re not married, he’s not married…or in jail. An added bonus.”

She barely cracked a smile at his weak joke.

“All I’m saying is that I can see how someone like you would get scared off and walk away. And you shouldn’t do it. Take it from me, Lindsay. You don’t want to have regrets. If I ever had another chance with Rachel-”

“It isn’t like that at all,” she cut in.

“In some ways, it is. We all lose people we love, Lindsay. Not all of us are lucky enough to find them again. If we do, we shouldn’t let go that easily.”

“You’re talking about you and Rachel, not me and-”

“You’re right,” he said, his dark features having taken on the potent expression he always wore when Rachel’s name came up. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just-”

“Obsessed?”

She meant it lightly, but his scowl told her this wasn’t a joking matter. Not to him.

Not any more than Wyatt was to her, but for far different reasons.

“Let’s just drop it,” she said. “Okay?”

“Definitely.”

And they tried to talk about other things. Her job, his work as a computer-software engineer, his new girlfriend, the Yankees, the weather.

But none of it banished the ghosts of the past that swirled around their table, and Lindsay was grateful to call it a night.

Isaac offered to walk her home, but she declined. She lived only a few blocks east of here, and it was hardly on his way; he had to go west to take the subway downtown.

They parted with a promise to get together again soon, but she wasn’t entirely sure that they would.

As she made her way along the narrow block leading east from Lexington Avenue, a vaguely uneasy feeling crept over her.

The street wasn’t deserted; not in this neighborhood at this hour on a beautiful night in May. The block was lined with luxury apartment high-rises and a smattering of older brick buildings, some with security-gated storefronts on the ground floor. Colorful annuals tumbled from stray planters and the occasional windowbox, and every so often the sidewalk blocks were broken by a carefully tended young tree.

A few people were out and about: an elderly man leaning heavily on a cane, a young couple strolling holding hands, a stout middle-aged woman walking a pair of impossibly small dogs joined by a single leash.

Lindsay snuck a glance over her shoulder and glimpsed a dark figure about a third of the way down the block behind her. It seemed to dart into a doorway abruptly…

Almost as if the person didn’t want me to see him.

But it was probably just her imagination.

Whoever it was must have happened to arrive at his destination just as she looked back. Paranoia made her think he was trying to hide from her.

She turned her head forward again and walked on, much more quickly, looking over her shoulder all the way home.

That was a close call.

The killer crouched in the shadows beside a tall yellow brick apartment building, trying not to breathe in too deeply. A foul-smelling garbage can was just a few feet away.

What if she had seen you?

Relax. Even if she did, she wouldn’t recognize me.

The wig, the thick glasses, the padding…

It was an apt disguise. Such an apt disguise that she didn’t even recognize herself whenever she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a plate-glass window as she passed.

That was a strange feeling-being invisible right in plain sight.

But it shouldn’t have been.

Not for her.

Wasn’t that the reason all this had started in the first place?

Yes. And now it was almost time to bring it full circle.

What goes around comes around…

Hearing the voice echoing in her head, bringing with it a vague memory of something painful, she tried to remember who it was who’d said that to her.

One of her teachers?

Sister Neva?

Oh.

It was Jake, she realized. Well, wasn’t that a coincidence.

“What goes around comes around,” he’d said, laughing at her as she’d cried.

Now, looking back, she couldn’t remember what she was crying about-only that he’d hurt her, in return for some perceived injury she’d supposedly inflicted on him.

Trembling, hiding in the building’s shadows beside the smelly garbage can, she closed her eyes and saw Jake Marcott’s smirking face.

What goes around comes around.

Yes, it sure does, Jake, she told him now, remembering the satisfying whiz and thwack of the arrow as it slammed into him, pinning him against the tree. Remembering the look of shock on his face as he glanced in horror at the slowly spreading red stain on the front of his shirt, then up at her.

He asked why, in a voice that was almost too weak to discern.

Why, indeed.

She didn’t bother to answer his pathetic question.

There wasn’t time; she had to get away, back to the others. She had to prepare herself to react to the shocking, so-called tragedy that was about to strike them all.

And anyway, there was no reason to explain it to Jake. He should have known why.

It was his own fault. His, and theirs-the girls whose lives had, in some way or other, been intertwined with Jake’s, and, fatefully, with her own.

Jake had paid the price for his sins.

Haylie had, too.

And one by one, the others would join them, forever becoming part of the legend of St. Elizabeth’s school.

Oh, yes, what goes around comes around, she thought gleefully, brazenly stepping out of the shadows after all, into the pool of light from a street lamp.

She gazed down the block, hoping to see Lindsay scuttling off like a frightened child.

She was already gone.

Oh, well. It was enough, for now, to know that she was poised at the perimeter of Lindsay Farrell’s charmed life.

Poised like the wrecking ball that would soon claim the old school where it had all begun.

And when it came time for release, she would swing in with all her might, destroying everything in her path.

Chapter 20

Lindsay would have known Aurora Zephyr anywhere.

Spotting her old friend perusing the wall of famous caricatures just inside the entrance at Sardi’s on Forty-fourth Street just off Broadway, she stopped short and took in the sight of her.

She had the same dark curly hair, the same crinkly hazel eyes that widened in delight when she turned and saw Lindsay.

“Oh my God! Look at you!” she squealed, hurrying over to embrace her. “You’re so sophisticated!”

“I am?” Lindsay looked down at the trim black suit she still wore from a long day at the office. There had been no time to run home and change.

“God, yes! Especially standing next to me!” Aurora had a point, but Lindsay would never admit it to her.

Slightly overweight in a bright colored dress, sheer tan panty hose, and a pair of low-heeled white pumps that were at least a few years old, her friend fit right in with the hordes of tourists crowding the lobby area of the famous restaurant.

“You look terrific, Aurora,” Lindsay told her. Maybe not sophisticated, but who cared about that? Her old friend truly was a breath of fresh air, and Lord knew she needed one tonight.

“Oh, come on, I’m an old frump. I’m going to be a grandmother before the year is out, you know. I never thought I’d live to see the day, but here it comes.”

“I know-congratulations! Where’s Tina?” Lindsay looked around for Aurora’s daughter. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“She couldn’t come at the last minute. Poor thing. She was absolutely wiped out after all the shopping we did today. Neither of us are used to so much walking, but it really did Tina in. When you’re pregnant, you’re pretty much exhausted through the whole first trimester,” she added unnecessarily.

How well Lindsay knew that.

She remembered how hard it was to get out of bed for school when her alarm went off on weekday mornings as their senior year dragged on, and the numbing fatigue that often nearly caused her to fall asleep in class.

But of course, Aurora didn’t know about any of that.

And she appeared to feel sorry for poor, childless Lindsay now, as they waited for their table. She sounded almost apologetic as she chatted about her impending grandchild.

They were seated more quickly than Lindsay expected, thanks to changing their existing reservation from three people to two. She had been prepared to slip a big tip to someone if necessary to secure a good table, but they landed one anyway.

“Look at this place!” Aurora marveled, spreading her napkin in her lap and gazing at the portraits that lined the walls of the large main-floor dining room. “I’ve always wanted to eat here. Is the food good?”

“I’m not sure,” admitted Lindsay, who favored out-of-the-way restaurants in the Village and Tribeca.

“You must eat out all the time, though,” Aurora said a little wistfully, “living here in Manhattan, being in your business.”

“I do eat out a lot,” she said just as wistfully, imagining Aurora presiding over cozy family dinners in a suburban kitchen back in Oregon.

She wondered what it would be like to be married to someone you had loved for all those years, to have a family and grow old with him…

Could there be anything more precious in the whole wide world?

No, there couldn’t.

Lindsay just hoped Aurora knew how lucky she was.

Grimly, she cast aside the thought of Wyatt and Leo. Again.

They’d been haunting her all day, but she had already decided she wasn’t going to let tomorrow’s looming confrontation intrude upon her evening with Aurora.

They ordered white wine, chatted amiably, and studied their menus.

“What do you think prix fixe is?” Aurora asked, pronouncing the French phrase as if it rhymed.

When Lindsay gently corrected her, hoping she wouldn’t be embarrassed, Aurora burst out laughing at herself.

“Do you think anybody overheard me?” she asked, sneaking a peek at the diners occupying adjacent tables.

Lindsay took a quick look around. “Nah.” They were mostly older couples and families of tourists, all engrossed in conversations of their own. A large blond woman was dining solo at the next table over and had her back to them, but who cared if she, or anyone else, had been privy to Aurora’s gaffe?

“God, I’m such a bumpkin. I don’t know how you managed to move here and fit in so well, Lindsay.”

“I’ve been here twenty years, and you are not a bumpkin. You’re a sweetheart who happens not to speak French.”

Aurora grinned. “Or who tries, and ends up talking about pricks in a fancy restaurant.”

Yes, she really was a breath of fresh air, Lindsay thought, glad she had made time to meet her old friend. As she nibbled her smoked salmon appetizer, she found that she didn’t even have to do much talking, as was always the case in Aurora’s company.

Aurora munched and chatted her way through her tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, talking animatedly about her family. Then, as they sipped their Merlot, waiting for the entrees to arrive, she changed the subject to the upcoming reunion-and Haylie’s death.

“I heard about it from Kristen,” Lindsay said, twirling the stem of her glass back and forth in her fingers. “I can’t believe it.”

“Nobody can. Eddie told me when I called home this morning that they arrested someone last night,” Aurora said unexpectedly.

Lindsay lowered her goblet. “Who was it?”

“Do you remember Louie Blake?”

She shook her head. “Should I? Did he go to school with us?”

“No!” Aurora wrinkled her nose. “Please, he’s got to be in his late forties, at least. He’s a bum, basically. He’s been hanging around the streets for years, getting into trouble. I guess you must have been gone by the time he showed up, though.”

“He killed Haylie?” Lindsay asked, relieved not just that they had someone in custody but that it was no one connected to high school, or Jake.

“They think so. He was caught trying to use one of her credit cards at a liquor store, and they found out that he had a bunch of stuff he must have stolen from her apartment.”

“Poor Haylie.”

“I know…I feel guilty that I didn’t go after her with Kristen the night she freaked out and ran out of the reunion meeting. Not that Kristen managed to catch up with her and calm her down anyway. Did she tell you what happened?”

“Kristen? She just said that Haylie was still really upset over Ian and Jake after all these years.”

“Right. She made a big scene, accusing us all of ridiculous things, and took off. It was awful. And I feel so sorry for her, really. I mean, felt.”

They were both silent as they realized, again, that they could only refer to Haylie in past tense from now on.

Aurora added, “She never got over what happened to Ian.”

“I know. Poor Haylie.”

“What about you, Lindsay?”

“What about me?”

“Did you ever get over what happened to Jake?”

About to sip her wine, Lindsay found herself taking a gulp instead. She looked around, wishing the waiter would show up with their meals.

“I don’t like to talk about that, really, Aurora,” she said. “It was so traumatic.”

“Of course it was. God, I’m so sorry I even brought it up. I guess I just wanted to know that you were okay. You know, that you had moved on. Because you moved away right after and you never really came back, and I figured that was why.”

Right. That was probably what everyone thought, that she had left for New York because she was distraught over Jake’s murder. And who would blame her?

They were broken up, but she was still widely regarded as the bereaved girlfriend, much to Kristen’s dismay-and barely concealed resentment.

“It was hard to get over what happened,” she told Aurora now. “But you move on, you know? You have to get on with your life.”

“I know.” Aurora reached over and squeezed her hand. “I didn’t mean to drag all that out tonight, Linds. Let’s talk about something more upbeat.”

Lindsay forced a smile. “Good idea. And I have just the topic. I got those Jersey Boys tickets you and Tina wanted. A matinee tomorrow afternoon.”

“Ooh!” Aurora hugged her across the table. “You’re the best, Lindsay. How can I ever repay you?”

“You don’t have to. What are friends for?”

“This is Lindsay. I’m not in; please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

Wyatt disconnected the call in the midst of the answering machine’s beep.

A message?

What was he supposed to say?

If you don’t know, then why did you call her?

That was a good question.

He didn’t know the answer. He had simply found himself walking restlessly around the house with his cell phone in hand; her number was programmed into it.

He still didn’t even know why he had done that. Why not just keep it jotted on a slip of paper tucked into the kitchen drawer where he kept stray business cards and receipts and order numbers? That was what he did with most women’s phone numbers. Very few were eventually programmed into his phone. And those he did program in were always eventually removed.

Allison’s was the most recent.

He hadn’t heard from her since she’d moved out; he didn’t expect to.

As for Lindsay…

After tomorrow, he wouldn’t be in touch with her again. There would be no reason to.

In fact, if he had any way of meeting his son without her present, he would have arranged to do so.

Oh, come on, Wyatt, who are you kidding?

You don’t need her here tomorrow. You could have just gotten the kid’s contact info from her and met him on your own.

So why didn’t he?

Why had he gone ahead and arranged this little family reunion?

Anyone would be furious with Lindsay for what she’d done.

And he was. Absolutely.

But there was a part of him, deep down, that was also, maybe, just a little…

Grateful.

If she had come to him, pregnant, twenty years ago, what would he have done?

He knew exactly what he’d have done.

He’d have convinced her to have the baby and marry him.

He was in love with her; knowing she was carrying his child would have put him over the moon.

And she would have either walked away from him-again-had the baby, and given it up just as she wound up doing…

Or she would have married him, and they would have tried to raise their son together.

Tried.

There wasn’t a doubt in Wyatt’s mind that if they had married and become parents at eighteen, they couldn’t have made it work. The odds would have been stacked tremendously against them. Yes, he’d loved Lindsay back then, but was he really equipped to be a husband and father?

Not in the least.

So, being Catholic, they would have ended up either bitterly married, merely sticking it out, as his parents had…

Or divorced, and riddled with guilt-Catholic and otherwise. And their son would have come from a broken home-which he does anyway, Wyatt reminded himself. But still, that wasn’t Wyatt’s fault. It was some other man who had walked out on his wife and kid.

My kid.

Every single time he thought of it-the miraculous fact that he had a son-his stomach was consumed by a flurry of Christmas-morning butterflies.

Yes, Lindsay’s decision had denied him the option of being a part of his son’s life until now…

But she had also denied him the chance to screw it up. And he would have.

Back then, he was ill equipped, emotionally and financially, for the responsibility.

Now?

Bring it on.

He was more than ready. He was going to wholeheartedly support his son emotionally and financially, give him whatever he needed-hell, whatever he wanted. He was going to spoil the kid rotten if he felt like it, and there was no reason not to.

What about Lindsay, though? a nagging voice intruded. What are you going to do about her?

He was going to try to forgive her for what she had done, knowing, intellectually, that it was probably the wisest, most selfless decision she could have made in her situation.

That was the mature and logical thing to do.

Then he was going to maturely and logically move on. Try to forget her.

Right. Just like he had before.

And look how well that turned out.

All she had to do was call and you went running to her, no questions asked. All she had to do was look at you and twenty years fell away, and you were like a teenaged boy with a one-track mind again.

Yes, and now you’re calling her number and hanging up. Perfect.

With a scowl, Wyatt tossed his cell phone onto the granite countertop and headed up to his gym to work out-and thus, work her out of his system-so that he could get a good night’s sleep in preparation for what lay ahead tomorrow.

Forty-Fourth Street was bright with neon lights and packed with people when Lindsay and Aurora emerged from Sardi’s after a long, leisurely meal. They’d had dessert at the table followed by after-dinner drinks in the upstairs bar. The time flew by, and the conversation flowed.

Now it was getting late, and the post-theater crowd packed the sidewalks.

“Uh-oh-it’s going to be hard for me to get a cab back to the hotel, isn’t it?” Aurora observed, gazing at the street clogged with honking taxis, town cars, and limousines. They were forced to creep along far more slowly than the pedestrians who moved along the sidewalks.

“It won’t be hard to get a cab. It will be impossible,” Lindsay replied. “But you’re staying right at the Grand Hyatt next to Grand Central Station, aren’t you? It’s an easy walk from here. Just a few blocks.”

“Ha, that’s what the doorman said when he told me I could walk here. I didn’t know he meant a few of those really long, long crosstown blocks,” Aurora said ruefully. “I thought he meant the short uptown-downtown kind. I can’t make it back.”

“Sure you can. It won’t be so bad. Come on, I’ll walk you there.”

“Is it on your way home?”

“More or less,” Lindsay told her.

Aurora seemed to consider her offer, but only for a minute.

“No, thanks, my feet are killing me. I did way too much walking today. I can take the subway instead.”

“The subway?” Lindsay asked dubiously, wondering if her friend could possibly negotiate the complicated network of train lines that ran beneath the city streets.

Then again, if she got on right here at Times Square, she’d only have to take the crosstown shuttle two stops to Grand Central and walk right upstairs to her hotel. Or she could take the number seven train, which traveled the same route before heading beneath the East River out to Queens.

Queens.

That made Lindsay think of Leo. And Wyatt. Again.

This time, she couldn’t seem to push them back out of her head.

“I’ve always wanted to ride the subway,” Aurora said cheerfully as they made their way across Broadway toward the station. “I’ve seen it in so many movies and TV shows. I can’t believe I actually get to ride it.”

Lindsay grinned at her friend’s giddy enthusiasm. She remembered feeling the same way when she first moved to New York. Not right away, though. She didn’t get out into the city until after the baby had been born and she had gone on to college, getting on with her life.

“Where do I get my token?” Aurora asked as they descended from the noisy neon glare of the street to the dank depths of the station below.

“We don’t use those anymore. We use Metrocards,” Lindsay told her. “I’ll help you get one before I go.”

“You’re not taking the subway home too?”

“No, I’m going to walk,” she said, anxious to be alone with her thoughts now that the evening with Aurora was drawing to a close.

Yes, it was time to try to prepare herself for what she faced tomorrow.

Standing beneath a large wall map, pretending to be studying the network of subway lines, she watched Lindsay remove a fare card from the automated machine and hand it to Aurora.

Then Lindsay pointed at the row of turnstiles, obviously explaining how to get through them, then find her way down the stairs to the right track.

The place was a zoo even at this hour of the night. And she herself was intimidated. There were so many different numbered and lettered lines coming through this station that she couldn’t imagine how people figured out where they were going. She wondered how Aurora was ever going to find her way back to the hotel.

Lindsay was obviously not planning on accompanying her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be giving such a detailed explanation. She kept emphatically indicating the overhead sign, as if trying to make sure Aurora understood exactly where she was supposed to go.

Finally, they both seemed satisfied, and they exchanged a long, tight hug.

She found herself feeling resentful, watching them.

They looked as though they cared so much about each other, even after all these years.

They never cared about me that way. They pretended to, like everyone else did, but they didn’t really care.

Nobody did. Not even Jake.

And toward the end, he didn’t even bother to pretend anymore.

Fury bubbled up inside her, and it took her a moment to realize that Lindsay had disappeared.

She looked around, trying to spot her in the crowd. No sign of her.

There, though, was Aurora, about to go through the turnstile, poking her fare card into the slot.

Ah, the turnstile failed to open.

Momentarily amused, she forgot to look for Lindsay. Instead, she watched Aurora bang on the turnstile, then kick it.

Still it didn’t open.

Aurora whirled around abruptly, as if hoping to find Lindsay still standing there.

Oh my God…

Shocked, she found herself locking eyes with Aurora despite the throng of people that bustled between them.

She sees me!

Relax, you’re wearing your disguise.

Yes, she was…but it didn’t seem to matter. There was no mistaking the flicker of recognition, then shock, in Aurora’s gaze.

Then a uniformed MTA officer materialized at Aurora’s side to check the turnstile, and she seized the opportunity to duck behind a nearby signpost.

Oh my God.

She definitely saw me.

Now what?

Peering out from behind the sign, she watched as the officer leaned in and did something to the turnstile. It immediately opened.

Aurora faltered, glancing over her shoulder.

She’s looking for me.

The officer was gesturing impatiently for Aurora to hurry up and go through the turnstile, and several impatient locals waited behind her for their turns.

Helplessly, Aurora slipped through the turnstile with one last backward glance.

She still doesn’t see me…

No, but she did. She definitely did.

And you know exactly what you need to do about that.

What on earth was she doing here, in New York, of all places? Aurora wondered uneasily as she waited on the packed, cavernous platform for the next subway train to pull into the station.

Still unsettled by the unexpectedly familiar-yet unfamiliar-person she’d glimpsed upstairs, she tried somewhat unsuccessfully to ignore the hordes of strangers surrounding her down here.

She had never been entirely comfortable in crowds, and this was extreme. So many people, some passing so close they were practically touching her, some with terrible body odor, others speaking in various languages. There were crying babies and panhandlers shaking cups of change and someone, somewhere, was playing Van Morrison’s “Moon-dance” on a clarinet.

Maybe that wasn’t her upstairs, Aurora tried to convince herself, yet again.

But that didn’t work for more than a hopeful second or two.

It was her. Definitely.

She was wearing some kind of bizarre disguise. Her body was much heavier, and she had on a blond wig.

But her face was unmistakable.

And the look in her eyes…

God, that was scary.

Never before had Aurora seen her look that way. Darkly serious, almost…

Sinister.

That was why she kept trying to convince herself that it had been somebody else, standing there, watching.

Because it didn’t make sense for a friend to be looking at Aurora that way-much less be here in New York City at all, in fact.

Aurora stared blindly into the train tracks, wondering what she should do about what she had seen.

I’ll call Eddie the second I get back to my room and run it by him, she decided.

She always shared troubling developments with him first. Shared everything with him, really. Bad, good, exciting, scary.

Suddenly, she was fiercely homesick for her husband. For her house. For Portland.

Especially when she spotted movement amid the litter strewn over the rails just below the platform and realized it was a rat.

A real live rat.

Oh, God. This was too much. Aurora wanted nothing more than to go home.

Nothing was reassuringly familiar here, not with Tina so uncharacteristically wan, with Lindsay no longer at her side-and with her, up there in the station, looking eerily like a stranger.

Except a stranger wouldn’t have returned Aurora’s gaze so intently.

She shivered at the thought of that strange stare.

No, there was nothing familiar about New York on this night at all; she felt as though she had been dropped into an exotic foreign land-a war zone or something, because she had a vague, inexplicable sense of impending peril.

That’s just because you’re alone in a big city. Thirty-eight years old and you feel like you desperately need to hold somebody’s hand.

It was kind of pathetic, really.

I really am a bumpkin. That’s all it is. A bumpkin, and a baby.

Below, on the track, the rat scurried away abruptly and she felt, then heard, a distant rumble. It scared her for a moment-was it an earthquake? A terrorist attack?

Oh my God. Eddie…I’m so scared, Eddie.

Her heart pounded as the rumble grew steadily louder.

Dear God in heaven, Blessed Mother, please, please help me.

She looked up to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

The train.

Oh.

That was all it was.

The subway train was roaring into the station.

Aurora instinctively stepped back from the edge of the platform as it approached-rather, she tried to.

Somebody was right behind her, of course-it was crowded. She felt herself being jostled. The person behind her was pressing up against her. Hard.

No.

Not pressing.

Pushing.

Panic worked its way into her throat as she realized she was too close to the edge.

She was losing her balance, and the train was coming, and she was falling, dear God, please, no, she was falling, and-

The last thing that went through Aurora Zephyr’s mind was that she wasn’t going to live to be a grandmother after all.

Chapter 21

Saturday morning, Lindsay went to the gym first thing for her usual one-hour spinning class. Whenever she was stressed, she could count on finding relief there, mindlessly riding the stationary bike over imaginary mountain roads in the dark, music blasting.

But the exercise didn’t relieve her physical tension today, and it wasn’t mindless.

She kept seeing Wyatt’s face, and Leo’s.

Rather, seeing Leo’s as a younger version of Wyatt’s. In Lindsay’s mind’s eye, her son had morphed into the Wyatt she had known back in Oregon, tall and lean with a shock of black hair, flashing black eyes, and a smile like a sunburst.

The grown-up Wyatt still had that same smile, the same dark hair and eyes. But he was more muscular now; she had been able to see the masculine changes in his body even beneath the sleeves of his suit coat.

She hated that she still, even now, days later, found herself fantasizing about his biceps, pecs, and abs-about seeing him shirtless, or in nothing at all.

Let’s face it, she told herself as she stepped from the steamy shower in the gym’s locker room and reached for a towel, you’re hopelessly overdue for some physical…release. And not the kind you get in a spinning class.

It had been months since she and Isaac broke up; there had been no one since him. A few dates here and there, nobody she wanted to see more than once.

But it wasn’t just about Lindsay needing some kind of physical release.

It was about her needing Wyatt himself.

Why? Because he had been her first? Did you always long to repeat that experience, right down to the man with whom you had shared it?

Or was it something more?

Who are you kidding? she asked herself, wrapping the towel around her waist and padding back into the main locker room. Of course it was something more.

And it wasn’t just physical.

But none of that mattered-or was supposed to, anyway. As relationships went, she and Wyatt Goddard barely shared a past, and certainly not a future.

“Hey, Lindsay, how’ve you been?”

She looked up to see Amy, a casual friend from spinning class.

“Great,” she lied, “how about you?”

As she made small talk with Amy and got into her clothes, she couldn’t help but compare this slightly stilted conversation to the effortless one she’d had with Aurora last night.

They had picked up right where they’d left off, finding so many things to talk about that she was reluctant when the evening came to an end and she had to say good-bye.

The last thing she’d told Aurora, before she sent her off on the subway, was that she would plan on going to the reunion in July.

“Oh, Lindsay, really? That would be great. Everyone would absolutely love to see you.”

“I’d absolutely love to see them, too.”

She and Aurora had shared a big hug, one that left Lindsay overcome with unexpected emotion. She found herself with tears in her eyes and, embarrassed, hurried away quickly. She didn’t want Aurora to go home and tell everyone that she was a sentimental wreck.

That, however, was exactly what she was. Last night, and today.

But today wasn’t about her old girlfriends or stepping into a familiar, nostalgic past.

It was about stepping into a role she had both willingly and reluctantly abandoned-and a decision she had both regretted and celebrated.

No wonder she was tense.

“Did you hear that we’re supposed to get a big storm later?” Amy asked conversationally as, fully dressed, they both slung their duffel bags over their shoulders and headed for the door. “I’m so bummed. I was supposed to go boating on the Hudson this afternoon with this guy I’ve been seeing.”

“Well, hopefully it won’t happen and you’ll have smooth sailing.”

“I doubt it. It’s supposed to be really bad, wind, rain, maybe even hail.”

Lindsay found that hard to believe as she stepped out into the surprisingly hot May sunshine and walked the three blocks back to her apartment.

The first thing she did was book her plane reservations back to Portland for the reunion, and a room at the new Marriott not far from the school. She arranged to be there a week early, thinking she might be able to help the committee with some last-minute details. Event planning, after all, was what she did.

At least, that was her official excuse for arranging to spend so much time in her hometown. Really, she was anxious to indulge this wave of nostalgia.

All right, that was set.

Now what? She had a few hours still to kill before Wyatt’s car arrived.

It was too early to start getting ready yet, so she wandered around the apartment, watering plants, throwing away newspapers and junk mail, emptying the dishwasher.

She realized she was famished. She opened the fridge and reached past the carton of eggs for a container of yogurt.

Then it occurred to her that she could actually cook something. That would occupy her for a while.

In class this week, they had progressed from chopping and dicing to making simple omelets.

Lindsay didn’t have on hand many ingredients they had used, but she did have onions and tomatoes.

She washed and placed them on the counter, pulled out a cutting board, and hunted through her drawer for a suitable knife.

If you’re going to take this cooking stuff seriously, you’re really going to need to be better equipped, she told herself, at last locating a knife that looked closest to the one she’d used in class.

She began dicing the onion, trying to remember to use the technique she’d learned, but it wasn’t easy with this knife. The blade was much duller.

Not entirely dull, though. She found that out the hard way when it sliced into her forefinger.

“Ow!” She grabbed a dish towel and wrapped it to stanch the blood that poured from the painful wound, but it took a while. Every time she lifted the towel to check her finger, she saw that it was still bleeding profusely.

Finally, the flow subsided, and she winced as she cleaned the cut in the bathroom. She wondered if she might need stitches…but it was a Saturday. She’d have to go to the emergency room, and that, she knew from the notorious experiences of others, could take hours.

Which would mean postponing today’s meeting.

No. No way.

Better to let the wound heal and hope for the best.

Her finger bandaged, she returned to the kitchen, where she tossed partially chopped onion into the garbage and put away the eggs, tomatoes, and butter.

Then she opened a container of yogurt, flopped on the couch, and turned on the television.

It was tuned to the twenty-four-hour local news channel-pretty much the only thing she ever watched when she did bother to turn on the TV at night.

Whoa, Amy was right. Severe thunderstorms were expected late in the day.

Lindsay hoped it wasn’t an omen that this afternoon wouldn’t be smooth sailing for her meeting with Wyatt and Leo.

Come on…Do you really expect it to go off without a hitch?

There were too many emotions involved all around. Leo might be her own flesh and blood, but he was a stranger.

Wyatt might as well be a stranger, too.

She sighed, spooned some yogurt into her mouth glumly, and stared at the television. Above the news anchor’s left shoulder, an ominous graphic showed the black outline of a human figure and a train, with a red splotch between the two.

“A tragic accident last night-”

She’d had more than her fill of bloody injuries for one morning. She reached for the remote, deciding to find something a little more uplifting to watch before she got ready to go to Wyatt’s.

Maybe there was an old sitcom or a cooking show or something. Anything to take her mind off the day ahead.

“-beneath the streets of Manhattan as an unidentified woman was struck and killed by a-”

Lindsay aimed the remote and curtailed the anchor’s grim report, then channel-surfed until she came across a Steve Martin movie that was a few years old. She’d seen it and knew it had a happy ending.

Good. At least something would today.

She surveyed the array of items spread before her on the hotel desk.

A wallet filled with old pictures, some of family, but others of her friends. A small bottle of Aurora’s favorite perfume. A date book filled with notes pertaining to the upcoming reunion. Vanilla-flavored lip balm-not lipstick-the kind she had used back in high school. A brush that held strands of curly black hair.

She couldn’t wait to get it all back to Aurora’s locker beneath St. Elizabeth’s; what a wonderful and unexpected treasure trove to add to the collection.

There had been considerable cash in the wallet, which would come in handy today. She had, as usual, found someone who was willing to accommodate her request and keep his mouth shut about it. But he wanted a hell of a lot of money for his compliance.

So much money that she thought it would almost be easier to just steal a damned town car-or hire one and ask the driver to take her to a remote spot, then catch him off guard and get him out of the way.

Easier, perhaps, but far riskier.

She stashed Aurora’s cash in her purse. She had more than enough to pay the driver for the use of his car. She just hated to keep spending it this way. Life would be easier when she was back home, back in her element, not having to rely on strange people in a strange city.

Using a pair of nail scissors, she carefully snipped Aurora’s Oregon driver’s license, credit cards, and plastic hotel key into tiny pieces. She tucked those into a small plastic bag and put that in her purse, too. She would have to remember to toss it into a garbage can on the street when she left the hotel.

Those identifying items were the reason she’d grabbed Aurora’s purse from her shoulder as she fell. The longer it took to identify her, the more time she would buy for all that needed to be accomplished.

Shoving Aurora in front of an oncoming train wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it had been hacking into Haylie’s body, but it achieved a far more important goal.

Aurora had seen her, recognized her. She had to be stopped before she told someone-and the perfect opportunity had presented itself, which was a sign from God that this was meant to be.

The platform had been so jammed that it took a few seconds for anyone to realize someone had fallen in front of the train.

By the time she heard the inevitable commotion, she was halfway up the stairs. From there, it was easy to get out, lost in the crowd. She heard sirens wailing in the distance and saw uniformed transit authorities rushing for the track, but by that time, she was halfway to the street.

This morning on the news, she had seen coverage of the incident.

In a city like New York, it was eclipsed by other stories: the masked rapist who had been terrorizing women on the East Side, the mayor’s latest ribbon-cutting ceremony in Harlem, even the weather forecast.

Little airtime was devoted to the report about an unidentified woman who had fallen from a crowded subway platform at the Times Square station. Witnesses said it had been crowded down there, as always; Times Square was, after all, “the crossroads of the world,” as the reporter pointed out.

Nobody seemed to have seen anything suspicious; it was assumed that the poor woman, whoever she was, had simply lost her balance.

Perfect. Everything was just humming along, nobody piecing anything together yet. That would buy her some time.

She wondered how long it would take before Aurora’s daughter, who must have reported her mother missing by now, heard about the subway accident. How long before the police connected the missing tourist with the dead woman?

With any luck, it would be at least another day or two.

Just long enough to let me do what I have to do and get back home to Portland.

Of course, her work was cut out for her there as well.

Hopefully, there wouldn’t be further complications.

Wearily-she hadn’t slept well last night-she reached for the sunglasses she had picked up in Central Park the other day.

She put them on and studied her reflection in the mirror above the desk.

They were meant for a man; they masked most of her face.

Perfect, she thought again.

Looking out the fourth-story master bedroom window above Queens Boulevard, Leo reminded himself that he still had twenty minutes before the car was supposed to arrive.

He couldn’t help it, though; he was anxious to get moving.

He had been ready for over an hour, pacing the small apartment wearing his best suit-his only suit, purchased when he was a pallbearer for his grandmother’s funeral last year. The pants were too short now; about an inch of black sock was visible above his scuffed dress shoes. He had tried to polish those with little success; he had donned them to go to Saint Luke’s School every day of his senior year, then again for Grandma’s funeral-they were all but worn out. Tight, too, at a size twelve and a half.

Were your feet supposed to keep growing as you headed into your twenties?

He wondered if his father had big feet. His real father.

He’d be able to ask him today.

Come on, move, he thought, glancing at the hands of the clock on the bedside table. They seemed to be glued down.

It was an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock he had won at a street fair a few years ago. It used to be beside his own bed, but he gave it to his mother for the master bedroom when his father-his adoptive father-moved out and took the digital one.

He found himself wishing that his father knew what he was doing today…and glad his mother did not.

She had taken his brother, Mario, into the city to visit Aunt Rose and Uncle Paul. She wanted Leo to go, too, but he told her he had to work.

He felt guilty about that-and even guiltier knowing she wouldn’t check up on him. Uncle Joe, who owned the pizzeria, was her ex-husband’s brother. She didn’t talk to that side of the family anymore.

But she didn’t stop Leo from working there. He needed the job, the money. And anyway, Uncle Joe was good to him. Better to him than his father had been.

He paced across the bedroom, then back again, coming to a halt before the window air-conditioning unit. He probably should turn it on, actually. It was pretty hot out today. Ma would appreciate coming home later to a nice, cool bedroom.

As he reached out to adjust the knob, he glanced down to the street again.

Hey, what do you know!

A sleek black town car had just pulled up to the curb.

Those were a rare sight in this neighborhood, especially on a Saturday.

And the car was early. But there was no reason not to head right out now, since it was here.

Leo had forgotten all about the air-conditioning and about his mother-his adopted one, anyway.

He hurried to the door, scarcely able to believe it was time to meet his birth parents at last.

He wondered, as he bolted down three flights of stairs, if they were going to live up to his expectations-and, more importantly, whether he would live up to theirs.

Unlike him, they’d had twenty years to imagine what he was like.

What if they don’t love me?

Love you? an inner voice scoffed. They don’t even know you.

And they don’t even love each other.

If they did, they’d be together now.

So much for that fantasy family you always dreamed of, he thought dismally as he hurried out onto the boulevard and the waiting car.

To his surprise, the driver was a woman.

He didn’t know why that caught him off guard; it shouldn’t have. But somehow, he had pictured an elegant male chauffeur, not a dumpy-looking lady in a black suit, cap, and almost ridiculously oversized sunglasses.

“How are you today?” she asked pleasantly, opening the back door for him.

“Good,” he said briefly, and slid into the backseat, trying to act as though he did this sort of thing every day.

As they headed north toward the Triborough Bridge, Leo didn’t give the driver, or the route she was taking, another thought.

He had no way of knowing that later, he would regret it.

Wyatt heard the crunch of car tires on the driveway and looked up from the New York Times he had been reading-rather, trying to read-in his recliner.

Through the tall window overlooking the manicured front lawn with its towering shade trees, he could see a shiny black town car pulling toward the house.

Lindsay should be first to arrive. He’d told her driver to get to her house a bit early and had scheduled the other driver to get to Queens a little later than expected.

He didn’t want to spend a lot of time alone with Lindsay before Leo arrived, but he did think it would only be right for them to face their son for the first time as a united front.

And, perhaps, to discuss just what it was that they hoped to get out of this meeting today.

He set the paper aside, rose from the door, and walked to the front entry hall. He caught sight of his reflection in a long mirror as he passed and was glad he had opted for casual clothing today.

He was wearing loafers, jeans, and a polo shirt. He looked comfortable and unintimidating, like any other suburban dad.

Funny, because that wasn’t what he was at all.

It’s just what I wish I could be.

But maybe…

No. No expectations. Whatever is meant to be will be.

Steeling himself, he opened the door and stepped out onto the covered porch. For a fleeting moment, he wondered what he would do if his son had somehow arrived first.

But it was Lindsay who emerged from the backseat of the town car.

Unaware that he was there watching her, she smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her pale green sleeveless dress and patted her dark hair, which was worn pulled back in a simple ponytail.

She’s nervous, he realized.

Somehow, that fact helped to put him more at ease.

She thanked the driver, turned toward the house, and stopped short, spotting Wyatt.

“Hi,” he said, wishing he had sunglasses on. He tried not to look her up and down, but there went those teenaged-boy hormones again.

“Hi.” She walked hesitantly toward him as the town car pulled away, and he remembered that he was the host.

“How was the drive up?” he asked cordially, as though he were greeting a new client.

“Fine. Was that your, um, driver?”

“No,” he said with a laugh. “That was a car service I hire sometimes, though. For clients, or when I have to go to the airport or something.”

“Oh.” She glanced up at the three-story white Colonial, with its black shutters and majestic pillars. “I thought maybe you ride around in a limo all the time.”

“Nope. I do my own driving.” He wasn’t about to tell her that his four-car garage held four luxury cars that, along with the others he kept in storage near his winter place near Daytona, were worth almost as much as he’d paid for this house.

He could see that she was impressed as it was by his surroundings-not because she wasn’t accustomed to such things, but more likely because she was. This was her world, and now he was a part of it.

But not in the ways that count, he thought as he held the door open and ushered her inside.

She looked around the entryway, with its sweeping staircase, framed artwork, and hardwood floors. “This is nice.”

“We can wait for him in the living room.”

“So he’s not here yet, then?” She looked relieved.

“No. But he should be soon.”

He…him…

So neither of them could bring themselves to say their son’s name.

Or even just the word son.

He felt an unexpected bond with Lindsay as they sat down, somewhat stiffly, on the couch.

They both took care to keep a physical distance between them, but they were unmistakably in this together, whether they liked it or not.

“Thanks-what happened to your hand?” he asked, breaking a near silence punctuated by the ticking grandfather clock in the hall.

“Oh, this?” She lifted her bandaged finger. “I sliced into it with a dull knife this morning, trying to dice an onion.”

He winced. “Ouch. Why were you using a dull knife?”

“It was the only one I could find. I just started taking these cooking classes, and I thought I would give it a whirl at home, but I’m not exactly stocked up on the latest gourmet cutlery.”

“What kind of cooking classes are you taking?”

“Just the very basics. That’s right-you said you cook.”

“I do. Do you want anything to eat?” he remembered to ask belatedly.

“No, I’m good, thanks.”

“How about something to drink? Iced tea? Coffee? A shot of tequila?”

She looked up at him, startled, and he grinned. “Just kidding. Sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

She smiled back, to his surprise. “Too bad. I was going to take you up on it.”

“Really?”

“No…but it was tempting for a second there. I guess I’m a nervous wreck. How about you?”

“Me, too,” he admitted. “How are we going to handle this?”

We.

The forbidden pronoun had popped out of him with surprising ease.

Which was interesting, because in all the time Allison had lived here-and in all the relationships that had preceded her-he’d had a hard time referring to himself as one half of a we.

“I don’t know,” Lindsay said slowly, and he couldn’t tell whether she was fazed by the we or the question itself.

“Have you talked to his mother? I mean, his adoptive mother.”

“I knew what you meant,” she said wryly. “No. I didn’t think it was my place. He’s over eighteen. And anyway, he asked me not to.”

“When?”

“When I called him back to set up today’s meeting.”

“Oh.” For a moment there, he had thought she might have already met Leo on her own, without him.

But he knew instinctively that she wouldn’t do a thing like that.

He trusted her.

Which was ironic, considering what she had already gone and done behind his back, then kept from him all these years.

Wyatt was surprised to realize that he held no deep well of resentment about that. What he had felt had faded considerably these last few days.

That was because he not only trusted her, he ultimately understood her motives.

She had believed she was making the right choice, the unselfish choice, for their baby. In doing so, she had shown more strength than he had known she had.

More strength-more selflessness-than he would have had himself.

Admiration was slipping in to replace his anger, and he didn’t know how he felt about that.

Anger made it easier to keep her at arm’s length.

Now that she was, quite literally, at arm’s length, it was all he could do not to turn to her and pull her closer, if only in a comforting hug.

Instead, he said, “We should decide what we’re going to say when he gets here. You know…what each of us wants to come out of this.”

The each of us was meant to defuse the we. To show her that he didn’t expect them to be a we after today; that they would meet their son, then go their separate ways as they forged their own relationships with him. Not with each other.

“I don’t really know what I want,” Lindsay told him quietly. “Do you?”

“I guess it isn’t about what we want or need,” he replied. “It’s more about what he wants and needs. Right?”

“Absolutely.”

“In that case, I guess all we can do is wait until he gets here.”

She nodded and settled back stiffly, arms folded.

So did Wyatt.

In the backseat of the town car, Leo was increasingly apprehensive.

According to the clock on the dash, it was almost three-thirty. They should have been there by now…shouldn’t they?

Maybe not. He didn’t know, after all, exactly where his father lived. But he was pretty sure it was supposed to be in Connecticut, and he didn’t think Connecticut was supposed to be in the middle of nowhere.

Which was pretty much where they were now.

They had gone from the interstate to a series of two-lane highways to what seemed like rutted back roads to him. He had expected fancy suburbs, not dumpy little towns that were increasingly few and far between, with mostly rural countryside separating them.

Now the driver made another turn and the rutted back road gave way to a wooded dirt road.

“Is this it?” Leo asked her, leaning forward over the seat.

“This is it,” she replied, and he found himself trying to catch a glimpse of her face in the rearview mirror.

He couldn’t see her eyes behind those big dark glasses, but her jaw seemed to be set resolutely.

He leaned back uneasily in the seat and glanced out the window.

Nothing but trees.

This couldn’t be right.

Could it?

He looked again at the driver, who appeared to be searching for something. Maybe she thought they were lost, too.

He watched her turn her head again, and that was when he saw it.

The wisp of hair at her temple.

It was darker than the rest of her blond hair…

Oddly so.

Fixated on it, he realized, in the moment before she turned her head toward the windshield again, that the rest of her hair wasn’t hers at all.

She was wearing a wig.

Heart pounding, he stared at the blond waves beneath the back of her cap, noting that they were, indeed, synthetic. Now he recognized the unnatural uniformity of the strands; his aunt Rose had worn a wig when she was going through chemo a few months ago.

But Aunt Rose had been bald beneath her wig. She had a good reason to wear it.

This person wasn’t bald. Her own hair was right there, sticking out.

What reason would a woman have to hide her own hair? It wasn’t as though she were all dressed up for a fancy party, or Halloween, or something.

Leo realized the car was slowing.

“Where are we?” he asked, and he heard the panic that was beginning to edge into his own voice.

This time, she didn’t answer.

That was ominous.

So was the fact that the car had come to a stop in a desolate spot, with nothing in sight but deep forest on either side of the road.

“Shouldn’t he have been here by now?” Lindsay asked-again.

Wyatt looked at his watch. “Definitely.” He didn’t sound-or look-as reassuring as he had the last time she had asked.

In between wondering about Leo’s arrival, they had been talking with almost surprising ease about where their lives had taken them since high school. They’d covered everything but their romantic relationships-assuming he must have had at least a few.

But he had said he wasn’t married now and had never been divorced. She wondered why he was still single after all these years but didn’t dare ask.

She was afraid of the answer.

She wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he was still the ladies’ man he’d been back in the old days.

“What time is it?” she asked him, her thoughts still on Leo.

“About three-forty.”

“He should have been here almost an hour ago, shouldn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think…I mean, what if there was an accident or something?”

“Right, maybe there was. That happens all the time on 95. Especially in bad weather.”

They both looked toward the window. A steady rain was now falling, and the sky hung low and gray.

“Maybe they just got stuck in some kind of rubbernecking traffic behind an accident,” Wyatt said.

Or maybe, Lindsay thought uneasily, they were actually in the accident, if there was one.

Was Leo okay?

Had he been hurt?

So this was what it felt like to be a mother.

Now she knew what the expression worried sick meant.

No, you don’t, she corrected herself. You’ve dealt with this for only an hour. His adoptive mother is the one who’s borne the brunt of the maternal worry.

She felt a twinge of guilt. She shouldn’t have agreed to keep this a secret from Leo’s mother. She deserved to know what her son was doing, even if he was almost a grown man.

That’s the first thing I’m going to tell him when he shows up, Lindsay decided. I’m going to insist that he let her know he’s made contact with us.

“I’ll go call the car service and see what’s going on,” Wyatt said, grim faced, going to the next room.

She nodded, walking to the window and staring bleakly at the falling rain, wishing the car would appear in the driveway.

But it didn’t.

And Wyatt was back, wearing a troubled expression.

“What is it?” she asked.

“They said he was waiting right out front of the building when the driver got there a little after two. They got almost all the way here, and then he suddenly jumped out of the car at an intersection and took off.”

“Took off?” she echoed incredulously. “What do you mean, took off?”

“The driver said he just ran away. He waited for a while and he drove around looking for him, but he couldn’t find him.”

“What?” Lindsay shook her head. “Why would he do that?”

“I guess he just chickened out,” Wyatt told her with a shrug. “It was probably too much for him.”

“I guess we can’t blame him.”

“No. I guess we can’t. He’s just a kid, really.”

They stared at each other.

Lindsay wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was.

What now?

“Dammit! Where are you, you brat?”

As if the kid was going to answer her.

He was probably a mile from here already. It had been fifteen minutes, at least, since Leo had jumped out of the car just as she was about to get out and deal with him.

It was almost as if he knew…

She could tell he was getting suspicious back there. She should have thought this through better, the way she had thought through the rest of the plan. She’d even had the foresight to hire that neighborhood kid to get into the other town car-the one Wyatt Goddard was sending-and pass himself off as Leo.

That way, nobody would realize right away that he was missing.

She’d told the kid to ride up to Connecticut, then get out of the car before he got to Goddard’s house. She’d given him two hundred bucks.

“But how am I supposed to get back home again?” he’d whined.

“I don’t know. Isn’t there a train you can take from there?”

“How am I supposed to get to the train?”

She’d given him another hundred, told him to take a cab, and crossed her fingers that he wouldn’t screw it up.

No, but Leo Cellamino sure had.

He had disappeared into the underbrush in a flash.

He must have realized he was in trouble.

Okay, so he was smart.

But not smarter than I am.

Chapter 22

“Here you go.” Wyatt handed Lindsay a goblet of Pinot Grigio and settled on the couch beside her again with his Pepsi.

“Thanks, Wyatt.”

Had he ever heard her say his name before? He must have.

But not like this. Not in casual conversation, as though they did this all the time.

Intrigued, he snuck a peek at her and saw her take a cautious sip of her wine.

“I have other bottles,” he offered, “if you don’t like that one.”

“Oh, it’s fine. I’m not a wine connoisseur.” She motioned at the glass in his hand. “Why aren’t you having any?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Ever?”

He shook his head. “My parents did,” he said, as if that explained everything.

For him, in fact, it did.

“Oh, right. I knew that,” Lindsay said sympathetically-then looked as though she wished she hadn’t.

“It’s okay. I knew people talked about them back then. About me, my family…”

“They talked about me and mine, too.” She shrugged. “It might as well have been a small town in some ways, you know?”

“Yeah.” He paused, reflecting on the past. And on the present. “The funny thing is, this is a small town, and I know nothing at all about the people who live here.”

“That’s how it is in the city. It’s kind of…lonely sometimes, don’t you think?”

Her candid question surprised him.

He met it with one of his own. “You’re lonely?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes. Usually I’m too busy to be, but…well, sometimes.”

“What about…I mean…don’t you have anyone in your life?”

“I’ve got friends, and I visit my parents out west a few times a year, so…”

“No,” he said, “that’s not what I meant.”

“You mean am I involved with anyone?” She refused to meet his eye. “No. Not really.”

“Not really? What does that mean?”

“I should have just said no.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “No, I’m not involved with anyone. What about you?”

“No. I’m not involved with anyone, either.” He slid a little closer on the couch, wondering what the hell he was doing.

Still, she refused to look at him.

Why was he trying so hard to make her?

That wasn’t all he wanted-eye contact. He wanted to touch her.

Outside, in the distance, thunder rumbled.

It seemed to startle her. She looked up at the window, then, at last, at him.

The look in her eyes told him everything he needed to know-for now, anyway.

She was feeling it, too.

He dared to reach out a hand and let it rest on her forearm. Her skin was soft, cool to his touch.

He heard her breath catch in her throat.

“Don’t,” she said, but she didn’t flinch or pull away.

“Why not?”

“It’s not a good idea.”

“You’re right,” he said, “but you and I were never known for common sense when we were together.”

A faint smile touched her lips. “You make it sound like we were together, together.”

“I know. That’s because somehow I keep forgetting that we weren’t.”

“You know what? I keep feeling like that, too. Do you think it’s because of…you know, him?”

Our son.

She still couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“No,” he said, “because I felt that way even before I knew he existed. He’s not the only connection we have. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I think I do.”

He kissed her, then…

Later, looking back, he would wonder where he found the nerve.

But he didn’t think about it, couldn’t think at all as his mouth brushed hers lightly, then boldly, then claimed it with a hunger too long denied.

Yes, she was smart.

Smart enough to know better than to waste too much time trying to hunt the kid down in this weather.

It was raining like hell, thundering, lightning. It wasn’t safe to be out there, poking around in the woods, looking for Lindsay and Wyatt’s son.

Anyway, he was really just a little detour from the main journey. An added means of making Lindsay Farrell suffer.

She didn’t really believe losing a child was a fate worse than death.

What could be worse than death?

Particularly the death she had in store for Lindsay Farrell.

It had taken her well over ninety minutes to get back to the city. Traffic was horrendous, accidents everywhere, flooding, trees down in a few places, too.

She could only hope that if Lindsay had left Wyatt’s place when Leo failed to show up, she hadn’t yet made it home.

I have to stay a few steps ahead of her. That’s the key. A few steps ahead, and everything will work out just fine.

For the second time in her life, Lindsay Farrell found herself lying naked in Wyatt Goddard’s arms.

This time, though, the sheets that entangled them were soft, imported white cotton rather than worn, nubby blue polyester. The mattress was a luxurious king-sized pillow-top, not a lumpy twin bunk.

Only the rain that steadily pelted the roof overhead was the same.

The setting didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered but how he made her feel when he made love to her.

And afterward.

Even now, when she should be utterly spent, lingering ripples of pleasure refused to ebb entirely.

Propped on his elbow, the naked length of his body stretched alongside her own, he ran a fingertip down her bare rib cage.

“Stop,” she said, not meaning it.

“Why?”

“Because when you touch me like that, you get my hopes up all over again.”

“Really.” He did it again, and his hand came to rest on her hip.

“Really. And you can’t possibly follow through…again.”

He grinned wickedly. “You don’t think so?”

She shook her head, and he took her into his arms and kissed her again. And again.

This time, his lovemaking was languid, as opposed to the last, when they had fervently found their way up here, pent-up passion erupting like a volcano.

Now, she felt as though she were filled with molten lava as he trailed a lazy tongue across the taut slope of her belly. She moaned when it dipped lower, lower still, clutching his hair and gasping his name as he brought her to the brink, then beyond.

“You don’t have to get home tonight, do you?” he asked with a grin.

“No,” she said, still panting. “I definitely don’t.”

“Leo? Is that you?”

“Yeah, Ma,” he said, and shoved the soggy tissue into the pocket of the jeans he’d changed into when he arrived home. He grabbed the latest issue of Sports Illustrated from the floor and hurriedly opened it. “It’s me.”

He heard footsteps, then she poked her head into his bedroom and saw him lying there on his bed. “You’re done working early tonight.”

“Yeah.” He tried to remember where he’d stashed his sodden suit when he stripped it off. On the floor by the closet? At the foot of the bed?

“How come?”

“Slow night.” He forced himself to look at her. Her graying hair looked damp from the rain, and her round face was accentuated with make-up. She was wearing a pair of dress slacks and the comfortable shoes she liked to wear when she went to Manhattan. It was an eight-block walk from the subway to Aunt Rose’s apartment. “How was your day, Ma?”

“Good. Aunt Rose is feeling great. She looks great. She’s putting everything behind her and she and Uncle Paul are planning a trip to Myrtle Beach next month.”

Leo did his best to muster some enthusiasm. “That’s good. Where’s Mario?”

“He ran into Jose downstairs and went over there to play PlayStation.” Betty Cellamino fixed her older son with a worried gaze. “Are you okay, Leo?”

“Yeah, just tired.”

“Did you eat? Aunt Rose sent some manicotti for you.”

“I’ll have it later.”

His mother hesitated in the doorway, then shrugged and went to her own room.

Alone again, Leo tossed the magazine aside and rolled morosely onto his back again, wondering what to do.

He couldn’t tell his mother what had happened-that was for sure.

Nor could he tell the police, because they would tell Ma, and she would be devastated.

Why hadn’t he stopped to think about that before he agreed to meet his birth parents?

Because he was carried away by the fantasy, that was why.

Because he believed that he was actually going to meet them.

How could he have been so stupid? How could he have fallen for such an obvious Internet hoax? You read about stuff like that all the time-on-line predators who preyed on teenagers.

He’d never thought it could happen to him, at his age. He’d never thought he could be so recklessly idiotic.

But how did she know about me? About the adoption?

You moron. How do you think?

People could find out anything on the Internet.

But that hadn’t occurred to him then. No, he had actually thought he was talking to his biological mother-not some fraud who had conned him with a picture of some woman who happened to look a lot like him.

What was she going to do to him when she drove him up to the boondocks on the pretense of taking him to meet his birth parents?

Rob him? Rape him?

What would have happened if he hadn’t gotten away? There he was, soaked to the skin in his good suit, pathetic, hitchhiking his way back to the Bronx, where he managed to get the subway home.

The whole time, he fought back tears, telling himself that he was a man, and men didn’t cry.

But once he got home, the floodgates opened. He couldn’t help it.

It was sick.

Sick, sick, sick, and he had fallen for it like a gullible little kid being offered a lollipop by some pervert.

No, he couldn’t tell the police. He couldn’t tell a soul.

He just wanted to forget that any of it had ever happened.

“Are you hungry?”

“Hmm?” Lindsay lifted her head from Wyatt’s chest. She had been on the verge of dozing again, more relaxed than she had been in days.

She felt as though she could lie here indefinitely in his arms, her head pressed against his chest so that she could hear the steady beating of his heart, seemingly in rhythm with the rain that dripped from the eaves outside the window.

“I can make us something,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’m starved.”

“So am I.”

“Come on, then.”

He pulled on a pair of shorts and gave her one of his T-shirts to wear. As she pulled it over her head, she was enveloped in the scent of him, and it was all she could do not to bury her nose in the fabric.

In the hall outside his bedroom, he flipped a wall switch.

Nothing happened. The hallway remained dark.

“A power line must be down somewhere,” he said. “That happens a lot when it storms like this.”

He took her hand and led her through the darkened house to the kitchen, where he lit several candles.

In the flickering light, he rummaged through the fridge and cupboards.

“I’ve got steaks, potatoes, and stuff for a salad,” he told her.

“You don’t have to make a big meal.”

“We’ve got to eat the stuff. It’ll go bad, and anyway, I’m leaving tomorrow for a week.”

She watched him assemble the ingredients on the counter, along with a large wooden cutting board and a couple of knives he removed from their special sleeves.

“I’ll chop the stuff for the salad,” she volunteered.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. That’s about all I know how to do.”

“What about your finger?”

“You know what they say. You’ve got to get right back up on the bike if you fall off.”

“I thought it was the horse.”

She grinned. “Whatever.”

They worked companionably in the candlelit kitchen, Wyatt seasoning the steaks and getting them under the gas broiler as she sliced and diced the vegetables.

“I can’t believe what a difference a great knife makes,” she commented. “I’ve got to get a couple of these. Where did you buy them?”

“In France,” he said. “They’re actually hard to find here.”

“I’ll make a note to pick some up the next time I go to Paris, then,” she said wryly, and he laughed.

“That’s not where you’re going on this trip tomorrow morning,” she asked, “is it?”

“No. Italy this time.”

“Do you travel to Europe a lot?”

He nodded and checked the steaks. “Have you ever been?”

“No,” she said. “I’d love to go, though, someday.”

“Maybe you can come with me.”

She clenched the knife handle, hoping he didn’t think she was hinting around.

“What do you think?” he asked, his back to her as he shook some kind of seasoning over the steaks.

“Maybe,” she said noncommittally, when what she really longed to do was give him a fervent yes.

There was no guarantee, really, that they were going to see each other after tonight.

And if their son didn’t want them to be a part of his life, there was really no logical reason to reconnect.

But there was nothing logical about what Lindsay was feeling right now. Nothing logical at all.

Wyatt watched Lindsay sleep, the room illuminated by the candles he had lit earlier. The power had been back on for some time, but he kept the candles burning downstairs as they ate, and up here in the bedroom, where they returned immediately afterward.

He had worn her out, he supposed, with a voracious appetite that couldn’t be sated by food. She’d been sleeping for a while now, her breath whisper soft, stirring the hair on his forearm as he held her.

He never wanted to let go, but he was going to have to. For a while, at least. It was past three a.m., and he had to pack for his business trip to Italy. A car was picking him up here in a little over an hour to take him down to JFK Airport.

If he could have canceled the trip, he would have, but he was handling a car for a new client who happened to be one of the most well-connected financiers in the world. He could probably retire on the eventual word of mouth this was going to generate.

He took one long, last look, relishing the sight of Lindsay, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. He kissed them gently, then gingerly slipped his arm out from under her.

She stirred, opened her eyes.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

She blinked.

She doesn’t know where she is, he realized. She was looking at him as though she was wondering what he was doing there.

He smiled. “Remember me?”

“Definitely.” She stretched. “What time is it?”

“It’s the middle of the night. You don’t have to get up, but I do. I’ve got to leave for the airport. You can stay here and sleep, and I’ll arrange for you to be driven home in the morning…or whenever you want. You can stay here, use the pool…”

Wait for me to come home next week…

Please stay, Lindsay. Don’t ever leave.

She shook her head and sat up, running her fingers through her passion-tousled hair. “No, thanks-I mean, that’s so sweet of you, but I’ve got to go home.”

“Now?”

“When you leave.”

“If you want, my driver can drop you on the way to the airport.”

“That would be good-if it’s not a problem.”

“It’s not.” And that way, he would have another hour to spend with her. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough to last him until next weekend.

You’re assuming you’re going to see her again.

What if she doesn’t want to?

What if this is it?

“Lindsay,” he said, glancing at the clock, hating that he had to worry about the time, “we need to talk when I get back.”

“About Leo?”

She had actually said it.

Hearing their son’s name on her lips was bittersweet now.

“About Leo,” he echoed, “of course. And about…us.”

Us, like we, was a foreign word on Wyatt’s tongue. Yet it, as we had earlier, now managed to roll off with ease.

He held his breath, waiting for Lindsay to dispute it.

To tell him that there was no us.

She merely smiled.

It was a smile that spoke volumes, so that she didn’t have to.

“I’ll be here when you get back,” she told him simply.

And for the first time in his life, Wyatt found himself wholeheartedly looking forward to the rest of it.

Whore.

That’s what you are, Lindsay. You’re a whore.

She paced across the now-familiar living room like a caged panther, then back again, and looked at her watch.

5:21.

A little over sixty seconds had passed since the last time she’d checked.

There was no telling when Lindsay was going to show up. She had obviously rekindled her old flame with Wyatt Goddard.

For all I know, she’ll spend the rest of the weekend with him.

She couldn’t stay here waiting for her indefinitely. She had already arranged to check out on Sunday, and she was scheduled to fly back to Oregon in about twelve hours.

I can’t leave New York without taking care of Lindsay.

No, but she couldn’t take care of Lindsay until she resurfaced.

She yawned deeply and realized she was on the verge of exhaustion. Her shoulders burned with fatigue and her legs ached from standing. She should go back to her hotel room, arrange to stay at least another night, and get some sleep.

She could try again tom-

She froze, hearing a sound at the door.

It was a key in the lock.

Lindsay.

Her gloved hand closed around the handle of the butcher knife she’d stolen from Lindsay’s kitchen drawer.

Heart beating in anticipation, she hurried back to the hiding spot she’d chosen hours earlier.

Lindsay was smiling as she stepped over the threshold into her apartment, her thoughts on the good-bye kiss Wyatt had just given her in the backseat of the limo, along with a sweet, unexpected parting gift.

“I’ll call you when I land,” he promised as she tucked it into her purse. “And I’ll see you the second I get back.”

It was a promise, and she met it with one of her own.

“Good. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Now, at last, exhaustion was beginning to steal in to meld with her dreamy afterglow.

She started to reach for the light switch just inside the door, then changed her mind. The sky beyond the large window above the couch was already pink, and the first light of dawn that seeped into the room was enough for her to see her way through to the bedroom.

All she wanted to do was fall into bed and think about all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours-then sleep.

Yawning, she kicked off her sandals and left them where they landed, under a table by the door. Her purse still over her shoulder, she walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face.

Then she thought better of that.

She’d rather fall asleep still tasting Wyatt’s last kiss, her skin, slightly raw from his razor stubble, still smelling faintly of his aftershave.

She was about to hang her purse on the knob, strip off her dress, and put on the nightie that hung on the back of the door…

Then she was struck by something odd.

The bathroom was dark.

There was no familiar glow from the night-light she kept plugged into an outlet above the sink and never turned off.

She had changed the bulb just the other day.

It couldn’t have burned out again so soon.

Frowning, she reached for the switch and flicked it.

The light turned on.

Huh.

That was strange.

Had she flipped it off without thinking yesterday?

She doubted it; she had never done that before.

She looked at herself in the mirror, noticing the apprehension in her own expression.

Okay, don’t get carried away. You’re just being paranoid. Maybe the power went out because of the storm. And maybe that tripped something in the outlet, and the light turned itself off.

A reach, but she was willing to believe it, because what else could possibly have-

Lindsay froze.

Behind her, in the mirror, she could swear she had just seen a human shadow pass along the wall beyond the bathroom door.

Leo waited until dawn, when he heard his mother moving around in the kitchen.

Then, after an entirely sleepless night, he quietly sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

Ma always got up early on Sunday mornings.

By the time Leo and his brother woke up to the scent of frying eggs and bacon, she would have drunk her coffee, read the paper, walked to seven o’clock Mass and back, and mixed the meatballs for the homemade spaghetti sauce they’d have for dinner.

Never, until this particular Sunday morning, had Leo appreciated the comforting ritual. Nor had he fully appreciated his mother.

A wave of sentiment swept through him when he spotted her from the kitchen doorway, standing at the sink in her faded pink terry cloth housecoat, filling the old coffee percolator with cold water.

He had to force his voice past a lump in his throat to say, “Ma?”

She gasped and jumped, spinning around. “Leo! You scared me!”

“Sorry, Ma.”

“What are you doing up? Are you sick?” she asked worriedly.

“No.”

He hesitated. He had lain awake all night, shaken to the core and riddled with guilt. Now, he wondered if he had made the right decision.

But his mother wore an expectant look, and it was too late to change his mind now.

Anyway, he felt like a frightened little boy who needed his mommy.

Thank God she’s here for me. Right here, where she’s been all along.

He took a deep breath and plunged in. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Her back flattened to the wall, her hand gripping the handle of the knife, she sent up a silent prayer.

Now there was nothing to do but wait, barely breathing, for her prey to step across the threshold.

And when you do, you won’t have a chance, she promised, knowing she had the element of surprise in her favor.

She waited for what seemed like endless hours, holding her breath.

Then, at last, she poised the knife as she heard movement from the other side of the wall.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure move stealthily into view.

In that instant, she leapt into action, attacking with a vengeance, and blindly. She could feel the knife sinking into flesh, heard the high-pitched cry of pain.

She saw that the blade had caught her in the side just below her rib cage; blood was pouring from the wound.

Yet suddenly, shockingly, she somehow found herself on the defensive, fending off a violent retaliatory assault. Her enemy was a force to be reckoned with-now her only thought was getting the hell out of here, hoping she was going to escape with her life.

They wrestled on the bathroom floor and she struggled to hang on to the knife, to reposition it so that she could use it again. She was enraged now, hell-bent on doing whatever she had to do to survive.

I can’t die now. Not when everything is coming together for me at last. Please, God…

They rolled over on the hard tile, rolled over again and she found herself on top. She seized her chance, knowing that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t get another.

With a primal grunt and a mighty arc of her arm, she shoved the blade as hard as she could.

Again, it found its target, and she could feel it sink sickeningly into flesh and bone, until it hit something more unforgiving than either.

Wallboard, she realized…she had just pinned a human hand to the wall like that arrow had, twenty years ago, pinned Jake Marcott to the tree.

Her ears rang with the terrible howl of agony that erupted, echoing through the tiled bathroom.

For a moment she was frozen in sheer horror at what had just happened-at what she had just inflicted upon another human being.

Then she bolted from the apartment, spattered with blood, leaving her assailant pinned to the wall with Wyatt’s Parisian chef’s knife, bestowed upon her as a parting gift.

“Take it,” he’d said with a smile. “I don’t want to come home next weekend to find that you’ve chopped off a finger with your dull one.”

She had thanked him, never knowing, as she tucked it into her purse, that it was about to save her life.

There was no traffic on the FDR Drive at this hour on a Sunday morning. Wyatt would be at JFK Airport with plenty of time to spare before his flight. Too much time.

Wyatt was wistful as he gazed out the window at a barge on the East River, realizing that he could have lingered at least another fifteen, twenty minutes, with Lindsay.

Yeah, but so? What’s fifteen minutes? he asked himself, feeling vaguely foolish.

It’s damned significant, he answered his own question. Particularly when you hadn’t seen someone in twenty years and weren’t going to see her again for an entire week.

There were plenty of things he could have told Lindsay in fifteen minutes.

Yeah, and you probably would have regretted all of them the second you left.

Wyatt Goddard was no stranger to morning-after ardor. It had led to his moving in with Allison and making doomed commitments to a couple of other women in the past.

Maybe it was better that their good-bye had been so hurried.

He’d kissed her, at least, and given her that chef’s knife she had coveted in his kitchen.

Someday soon, I’ll take her to Paris and buy her a whole set, he vowed-then shook his head.

Morning-after ardor again. Making plans, making promises. Good thing they were only to himself this time.

It was a good thing he was going to be an ocean away from Lindsay for the next six days.

That would keep him from saying or doing anything rash, would give him enough space to figure out whether his feelings for Lindsay were rekindled infatuation…or something more enduring.

“Stay back,” the burly NYPD officer cautioned Lindsay as he and his partner, guns at the ready, prepared to enter her apartment with the key they’d quickly retrieved from Bob, the building super.

The door had swung shut and locked after her when she bolted. Ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, had passed since the ordeal in her bathroom, but her heart was still racing, every breath painful in a constricted chest.

She had insisted on coming back up here with the cops, needing to face her incapacitated attacker.

I have to get a glimpse of her face.

That it had been a woman had caught her entirely off guard, but there had been no mistaking the feminine pitch of the voice as it screeched in agony.

The sound still echoed chillingly in Lindsay’s head.

This wasn’t a typical crime. She knew that, even before she had seen the passing expressions of surprise on the officers’ faces when she told them.

They asked if she was positive that it hadn’t been a man lying in wait for her in the darkened apartment. She knew what they were thinking: that the notorious masked East Side rapist had ventured a dozen or so blocks south, into new territory.

She assured the police that she was a hundred percent certain it had been a woman.

She could tell they weren’t convinced, even now.

Weapons poised, they crept into the apartment as Lindsay and Bob hung back a safe distance down the hall.

Lindsay hugged her aching rib cage, still trying to catch her breath, beginning to feel the physical evidence of the struggle. Her head throbbed where it had slammed against the tile floor, her elbows stung where the skin had been scraped away, and she suspected that her face, which felt raw, was covered with scratches. But she’d survived.

Thanks to Wyatt.

From inside the apartment, she heard one of the police officers curse loudly.

They reappeared in the hall moments later.

“What is it?” Lindsay asked, but she already knew. It was obvious from their disheartened expressions.

“There was blood all over the bathroom, and on the wall where you said you left him-I mean, her. But whoever it was got away.”

“Are you upset with me, Mom?”

Betty Cellamino looked up at Leo, startled, as though she had been lost in thought. She had spoken very little as he spilled his story, and her expression had been impossible to read.

“Am I upset with you?” She leaned across the kitchen table and pulled Leo close to her, stroking his head as she held it against the soft terry cloth of her robe. “Oh, honey, no. I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me what was going on. When I think of what could have happened-”

“I’m fine,” he pointed out quickly. “No harm done.”

“We should call the police.”

“I knew you were going to say that.” He shook his head. “No, Ma.”

“This woman might go after somebody else-and who knows what’s going to happen then? Maybe the next person won’t be as lucky.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how the police would find her anyway. It’s not like I had a license plate for the car or anything. And I didn’t even get a good look at her face. Plus she was wearing a disguise.”

“What about the phone number you called? And the e-mail? She can be tracked that way.”

“No,” he said, realizing he had done something stupid. Really stupid. “When I got home yesterday I deleted the number from my phone’s incoming calls log, and I deleted her e-mails, too. I was just so…disgusted with myself.”

“Don’t be disgusted with yourself. Be disgusted with her. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I was trying to meet my biological mother behind your back. And father, too.”

“I know, but I don’t blame you. Maybe we shouldn’t have kept you in the dark about all that for as long as we did. Maybe we should have been more open about it.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t.” She took a deep breath, sipped her coffee. Then she said, “Listen, I’m going to help you find your birth parents if that’s what you want.”

Was it?

He wasn’t so sure now.

“Can I think about it?” he asked.

“Sure you can.” She looked at the clock. “I’ve got to go get ready for church.”

“Mind if I go with you?” he asked, and she looked at him in surprise. “I owe someone up there a big thank-you,” he explained.

His mother grinned, leaned over, and kissed him on the head.

He found himself inhaling her familiar scent: coffee and talcum powder and…

Her.

That was what it was.

Just her. His mom.

She might not have given birth to him, but she had been there for everything else. Everything that mattered most.

“I’m making extra sauce tonight,” she said, patting his arm, “if you wanted to invite anyone over for dinner.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Did you see the message I left for you the other day? From someone named Sarah Rose?”

He had seen it-and ignored it, too caught up in everything else in his life.

Now he grinned.

“Maybe I will invite someone over for dinner. Thanks, Ma.”

“And what can I get for you, ma’am?” asked the flight attendant, smiling as she looked right through the passenger in seat 15F.

“I’ll have a ginger ale, please.”

Her stomach was still roiling from this morning’s ordeal, but nausea was the least of it.

Thank God the wound in her side had been superficial, nothing more than an agonizingly deep cut. Another fraction of an inch over, and she’d have been in serious trouble.

The same was true with her hand. The blade had stabbed through the fleshy skin and tendon between her thumb and forefinger, and it hurt like hell. It was all she could do not to pass out on the spot when she pulled out the blade, but she managed to keep her cool.

And she got away.

Bloodied, disheveled, in terrible pain…

But she got away.

“Here you go, ma’am.” The flight attendant handed over a clear plastic cup filled with ice and soda, still not making eye contact.

She accepted it with her right hand, keeping her wounded left carefully concealed at her side.

“Enjoy the flight.”

She smiled. “Oh, I definitely will.”

In a little over five hours, she would land in Portland, where she’d be able to get medical attention for the wounds she’d temporarily cleaned and bandaged herself.

There, nobody would connect her to the seemingly random Manhattan attack.

There, she could get on with her plans.

But I haven’t forgotten you, she told Lindsay Farrell silently. Not for a second. And I’ll see you in Portland at the reunion.