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  Michael had been exhilarated that morning, his heart pumping adrenaline. He’d spent the night with Emmie, loving her until his entire body was taut with energy, and he wanted to burn that energy serving at Gallard’s side.

  “It’s going to be as easy as one-two-three,” Gallard had insisted. “You introduce me to Cortez, I start talking business, and then, the instant he lets his guard down, I take him. If anything starts getting hairy, you just duck. I’ll take care of you.”

  Michael hadn’t wanted to think about how hairy anything could get. That Cortez dealt in illegal arms should have frightened him, but he’d never been frightened by anything in his life, at least not for himself. He’d been frightened by his parents’ constant fights and his brother’s bad choices. But for himself, no. He’d always figured out what he wanted and gone after it. And most of the time he’d gotten it, whether it was a scholarship for college or a job or the beautiful blond woman he’d spotted in the village square.

  He’d done his best to put Emmie out of his mind that morning. He’d needed to stay focused on what he and Gallard were doing, on Cortez. He’d had to keep his head clear so that if anything started getting hairy, he’d remember to duck.

  It had gotten hairy, and Michael had ducked. So had Gallard. They’d raced into the forest surrounding Cortez’s retreat, but the undergrowth had been dense and the low branches had reached out to snag them like greedy arms. Maybe that was why he associated the sound of gunshots with snapping trees....

  And then Gallard was hit.

  In the actual living of it, Michael had scarcely been aware of what he was doing. Hoisting Gallard up, dragging him along, babbling to him like a raving lunatic. Dodging bullets. Eluding the man who was chasing them through the jungle-dense woods; tripping over vines; ignoring Gallard, who kept saying, “Put me down, leave me behind. Save yourself.”

  They’d reached a ravine and descended into it, Michael stumbling but managing to keep Gallard upright. He’d seen blood. He’d felt a searing pain in his shoulder, and Gallard had slid to the ground, groaning and clasping his hands against the wound just above his hip. Someone had charged down the ravine toward them. Cortez, Michael had later learned, though at the time he couldn’t see the man’s face. All he’d been able to see was Gallard’s gun, tucked into the waist of his bloodstained slacks.

  Michael had grabbed the gun, swung it toward the man chasing them and squeezed the trigger.

  The nightmare he’d lived hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes, but when he’d finally awakened from it, days had gone by and he was back in California, in a bed, his arm bandaged and his memory hazy. How had he gotten out of San Pablo? Why couldn’t he recall what had happened? Why couldn’t he get it clear in his mind?

  More important, where was Emmie? Did she know where he was? Did she know what he’d done? Would she ever forgive him for lying to her and—worse—for killing a man? He had killed someone. That was the only lucid thought he owned: he’d killed a man.

  He doubted he would ever forgive himself. He couldn’t imagine begging Emmie to forgive him.

  HE’D BEEN DREAM FREE for a long time now. He thought he was finally healed. But some scars never faded, he supposed. Or else seeing Emmie had torn the scar tissue away.

  He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded by black. He didn’t recognize the smell of the room, the texture of the sheets or the hum of the ventilation system. As his vision clarified, he noticed a thin white line under the door—hallway light seeping through the crack.

  The Wilborough Holiday Inn, he remembered.

  He sat up, his heart pounding wildly, his skin damp with sweat. If he could have spent the night with Emmie, maybe she would have warded off his demons. Maybe that was why he’d gone to the effort of searching for her—because he’d always felt safe with her.

  No. He’d found her because he had believed himself cured, completely over the past. And if he sat long enough in the darkened room, the sheets tangled around his naked legs and his hair damp and matted against his nape, he would calm down and feel cured again. What had occurred five years ago had ended five years ago. Michael had done what he’d had to do. Some folks considered him a hero. He considered himself lucky to be alive and out of San Pablo, and he wanted to believe finding Emmie was further evidence of his good luck.

  He groped at the lamp on the night table until he located the switch, and clicked it on. His eyes burned in the sudden glare, and he blinked until they stopped hurting. After throwing back the covers, he swung out of bed, padded barefoot across the industrial-strength carpet to the bathroom and cranked on the shower faucet to a stinging, tepid spray. Then he climbed in and let the water sluice down his body, washing away the perspiration, washing away the dream.

  “TOMMY CANTRELL! Will Simon! Joshua Kaye! You have to the count of five to get into your seats or come up with a creative reason you’re not in them!” Emmie hollered above the din of twenty-three eight-and nine-year-old voices. Most of her students were at their desks, but Tommy, Will and Joshua were a trio of hellions. Although she adored their spunk, they could really disrupt a class, and she had to rein them in when they got to behaving the way they were now—Josh and Tommy tossing a tennis ball back and forth while Will attempted to swat it with a ruler.

  It was another warm, sunny day, and her class was restless. She considered whether taking the students outside for a nature walk around the schoolyard would settle them down or rev them up. She liked leading her class on impromptu nature walks, finding fascinating insects and unusual weeds for the children to study. Last week she’d dug up a chunk of lawn so they could see the webbed root system of the grass and the earthworms aerating the soil underneath.

  Frequently the walks helped the children to unwind, but sometimes it made them want to stay outside and play, and then they were even crankier when she brought them back into the classroom. This morning, she herself was so keyed up she wasn’t sure whether stepping outside would inspire her to keep walking, to walk and walk until she was miles from all her problems.

  But she couldn’t walk away, either from her problems or her class. Her students needed and loved her as much as she needed and loved her job. Her problems—housing and Michael Molina—weren’t likely to let her escape, no matter how far she walked.

  She hadn’t slept well last night. More accurately, she hadn’t slept at all. She’d lain awake, gripped by a vague fear that Michael would steal Jeffrey from her. She couldn’t imagine a logical reason he would want to. He hadn’t raised Jeffrey; he hadn’t even known of the boy’s existence until yesterday. For five years he’d shown no interest in Emmie or anything that might have happened to her—including her bearing a child. He hadn’t come to Wilborough looking for his son.

  But she couldn’t shake her dread. What she and Jeffrey had was perfect just as it was. She’d constructed that perfection herself, after discovering her pregnancy and returning home to Richmond once the school term in San Pablo ended. She’d been demoralized that the man she’d given herself to, body and soul, had gone and left her pregnant. But she’d believed her parents would accept her choices—the choice to have loved Michael Molina and the choice to keep and raise their child.

  Her parents hadn’t. “Who was he?” her mother had fumed. “Just some local peasant you picked up?”

  “He was an American,” she’d retorted, as if that mattered. “A college professor from California.”

  “A son of a bitch is what he was,” her father had railed. “And you! We raised you with morals. We let you go down to that godforsaken country only because you were going with a church group! And now you’ve come back to us like this!”

  She’d refrained from arguing that as a twenty-five-year-old woman with a master’s degree she was long past the point in her life where her parents could let her do anything. But she’d hoped they would respect her new situation and welcome the prospect of a grandchild.

  There had been no welcome, no respect. Only condemnation.
r />   So she’d left Virginia and moved to New England. She’d given birth to Jeffrey, spent two years on the substitute-teacher lists of schools in three towns and landed a permanent job at the Oak Hill Elementary School in Wilborough. She’d been a good mother, loving Jeffrey, raising him and nurturing him, disciplining and doting on him. She understood that no matter how much she despised Michael Molina, she was grateful for the weeks she’d known him in San Pablo because those weeks had given her this precious little boy.

  No one was going to upset the balance she’d established with her child. Not even Jeffrey’s father. Especially not Jeffrey’s father.

  Josh, Will and Tommy were still playing stickball with the tennis ball. “One,” Emmie counted ominously, watching the three rascals scramble to their seats. “Two...” And all three slumped into their chairs and grinned. “I guess none of you are feeling creative today,” she teased. “Julie, I bet you’re feeling creative. Why don’t you start us off by reading the poem you wrote during free writing yesterday.”

  Julie Markowitz stood, giggled, blushed, held her paper up in front of her face and began to read. Emmie sat atop her desk, listening to Julie’s tremulous voice as she recited a charming poem about a dog who longed to climb trees. Emmie loved these children—not the way she loved Jeffrey, of course, but with genuine, loyal affection. She’d watched them grow since last September, and she’d grown along with them. Teaching brought her joy, and teaching at Oak Hill, where the classes were small enough to be manageable and the children came to school well fed and ready to learn, was a pleasure. She’d taught in schools where the mere idea of asking nine-year-olds to write their own poems would be laughable, but here she could take chances with her students, stretch their minds, give them challenges.

  She’d loved her students in San Pablo, too. Although they didn’t always come to school well fed, they were willing to meet challenges. For some of them, simply getting to school was a challenge greater than anything her Wilborough students had ever had to face.

  Julie finished her poem and, in a welter of giggles, sat down. Josh shouted, “I wanna read mine next!”

  “You’ll have to wait your turn,” Emmie chided, then called on Kyle Dante. His was a gruesome rhyme about explosions and monsters. Emmie remembered the imaginary monster Jeffrey had found in their backyard yesterday. Jeffrey’s monster wasn’t violent, she thought proudly, recalling how earnestly her son had carried out the carrot shavings to feed the beast.

  He couldn’t help the fact that his father was a heartless, selfish creep, a man who could tell a woman he loved her one day and vanish the next. It wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that the man who’d impregnated his mother was a liar who for five years hadn’t bothered to find out what had become of the woman he’d made love to in San Pablo. Jeffrey couldn’t be blamed for his father’s absence during his birth, during the first weeks of his life, when he and Emmie were up every two hours for feedings, when he learned to focus his eyes, learned to smile, learned that as long as Emmie was with him he would be hugged and adored and cared for. Michael hadn’t been there when Jeffrey had caught a rubber ball for the first time, or when he’d caught the chicken pox. Michael had missed Jeffrey’s first tooth, his first step, his first day of preschool. How could she even think of Michael as Jeffrey’s father? He might have contributed half of Jeffrey’s genes, but Emmie had worked hard to make sure the genes she’d contributed were the ones that counted.

  Midway through Kyle’s poem, the classroom intercom buzzed. “Excuse me,” Emmie said, crossing to the wall by the door where the wall phone hung. She lifted it and said, “This is Emmie Kenyon.”

  “Emmie? It’s Gwyn at the front desk. Someone just dropped off a delivery for you. Can I bring it down to your class?”

  “Sure.” Emmie wasn’t expecting anything, but it was possible someone’s mother had delivered a tray of cupcakes or a forgotten lunch. She turned from the intercom in time for the climax of Kyle’s poem, a depiction of gory mayhem in ragged meter. Kyle bowed, the boys cheered and clapped, and the girls whined, “Gross!” and grimaced in disgust.

  “Before we all shriek ‘gross,’” she instructed the class, “let’s think a little about the imagery Kyle used in his poem. Poetry is supposed to touch your emotions. So if Kyle managed to gross you out—and I’ll admit he grossed me out—can we see this as a successful poem?”

  “It’s too gross to be successful,” Amber Laughton complained.

  “Yeah, but he did what he set out to do,” Tommy argued. “So that means it was successful.”

  Debate on poetry and the nature of success erupted throughout the room, almost loud enough to drown out the knock on the door. Emmie opened it and fell back a step at the sight of a bouquet of flowers so large it hid Gwyn’s face. “Here’s your delivery,” the school secretary announced cheerfully, peering out from behind the flowers as she handed the heavy glass vase to Emmie. She was grinning curiously. “I wonder who they’re from.”

  Emmie could guess—and her guess made her queasy. Her discomfort increased as the class lost interest in their discussion of successful poetry and turned their attention to the enormous bouquet. “Wow!” Amber bellowed. “They’re beautiful!”

  “They’re gross!” Kyle disputed her. His comment prompted a chorus of smooching sounds and snickers from the boys.

  “Okay, quiet down,” Emmie said, gritting her teeth and carrying the flowers to the windowsill. She plucked the card from its plastic holder and tucked it into the pocket of her denim skirt. “Let’s get back to our discussion—”

  “Aren’t you gonna open the card?” Shawna Sikorski asked. Shawna was a tiny girl with huge eyeglasses, and she had such a plaintive voice Emmie couldn’t ignore her. She glanced toward the door, to see that Gwyn was still perched there, waiting to learn whom the flowers were from.

  “Is it your birthday?” Nicole Evigan asked. “My grandma sends me flowers on my birthday.”

  “Yuck,” one of the boys muttered.

  Undeterred, Nicole added, “Maybe those are from your grandma.”

  Highly unlikely, Emmie thought, pulling the card back out of her pocket and opening it. “Please talk to me,” it said. “Michael.” A local telephone number was printed below his name.

  It took her a moment to realize that the classroom was as close to silent as a gathering of twenty-three third-graders could be. She swallowed the knot of distress in her throat and squared her shoulders against the chill that ran down her spine. Her students mustn’t know she was upset. They mustn’t know that her personal life was currently under assault from several directions at once.

  “They’re from an old...friend,” she said, forcing out the word. “And they’re pretty, aren’t they? Now, let’s get back to our poetry.”

  She made it through the rest of the school day without letting on how distracted she was. Even if she hadn’t already been preoccupied with thoughts of Michael Molina, she smelled those accursed flowers and thought of him every time she inhaled. The card that had come with them felt stiff in her skirt pocket. When she walked and the denim swirled around her legs, she could feel his message against her left thigh.

  At least he hadn’t sent red roses. If he’d intended the flowers as an unambiguous love offering, she would have been twice as distracted—and twice as angry. She knew what a profession of love meant coming from Michael—absolutely nothing. Surely five years after telling her he loved her and then disappearing he couldn’t have tracked her down and expected her to believe him if he told her he loved her again.

  Five years was a long time. Things must have happened to him during the interval. Women must have happened to him. Maybe he’d gotten burned a few times and didn’t like his odds with the female population as a whole. Maybe he figured old Emmie Kenyon was a pushover, someone he could con as easily a second time as he’d conned the first.

  By three o’clock, she was fatigued from the effort of teaching while thoughts of Michael were weighing her down like a leaded
belt. Her head ached and her neck was stiff. She sent the children out of the room to their buses and let out a long, weary breath.

  Ordinarily she loitered in her classroom for a while after the children were dismissed. Jeffrey could stay at the preschool until a quarter to four, and she liked a few minutes of quiet to assemble her materials and her agenda for the following day.

  Today, though, she wanted to get to Jeffrey as quickly as she could. She wanted him with her, just in case...she didn’t know what. She just knew she needed to have her son close by.

  She stuffed the day’s spelling tests and her lesson plans into her tote bag and reached into her pocket for her key ring. Her fingers grazed the card Michael had sent with the flowers. She stared at the bouquet standing on the windowsill, a festive array of daisies and carnations, pink baby roses, ferns and Queen Anne’s Lace, and shuddered. Of all the times in the world for Michael to show up, now—when she was facing something akin to an eviction—had to be one of the worst.

  Then again, any time he’d shown up would have been bad. She didn’t want to see him. It was too late for them to repair the damage, too late for her to care anymore.

  She tossed the card into the trash and left the flowers behind in the classroom when she headed outside to her car. At the preschool she found Jeffrey navigating a traffic jam of toy cars in the center of his group’s play area. He sent her a smile and then went back to his game, making race-car vroom-vrooms and screeching brake noises with his mouth.

  “I guess I’m a little early,” Emmie said apologetically to the teacher.

  “No problem. Do you want him now?”

  “Let him finish his game.” Emmie retreated to a chair and watched as Jeffrey and two of his buddies maniacally steered their toy vehicles across the floor. Eventually the three cars collided, and the boys whooped and vocalized booming explosions. Finally, the carnage complete, Jeffrey was ready to leave.