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  “Oh no, sweetheart, no. You’ll both come to live with me.”

  “No.” The word, expelled vehemently, came from Andrea.

  Elisha turned to look at her, stunned by the force of Andrea’s rejection. Was this part of the grief she was experiencing or was there something more behind it? She couldn’t deal with this, Elisha thought. She wasn’t equipped to become an instant parent.

  “Don’t you want to live with me?” she heard herself asking.

  “Not in the city,” Andrea retorted heatedly. “All my friends are here.”

  And “here” was where she intended to stay, if body language was any indication.

  “Mine, too,” Beth piped up. The next moment, she began to cry all over again.

  Overwhelmed, Elisha sank down on the sofa in a heap. It felt as if she were a balloon and someone had let all the air out of her. With what seemed like her last bit of energy, she covered her face with her hands, completely at a loss as to how to handle this. All of “this.”

  “Oh, God.”

  She hadn’t thought about the girls needing to transfer schools, needing to transfer their lives in order to move to the city with her. Everything seemed to have so many repercussions, so many strings that ran out like plant runners. How had Henry managed to keep all the strings untangled?

  More important, how was she going to manage keeping them separated?

  She didn’t think she could.

  This isn’t fair, Henry. They need you. I can’t do this.

  Both girls stared at her, waiting for some kind of answer. She could feel Andrea’s hostility. Andrea was never hostile toward her.

  She did the only thing she could at a time like this. She stalled.

  “Okay,” Elisha announced. “It’s too soon to talk about moving or not moving. Right now, we need to get through this funeral, then we’ll talk about the rest of it.”

  Anne Nguyen had purposely let Elisha have some time with the girls when she walked in. She’d made herself useful by tidying up the kitchen, where Henry had collapsed, knocking over some things on the counter. She peered into the living room now, sympathy emanating from every pore.

  “I can have the girls stay at my place tonight if you need a little time to yourself.”

  Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that very much, thank you. It would have been the easiest way to go, so that she could have some time to grieve once she got the phone calls over with. Phone calls to people she didn’t know to come pay their respects to a brother who no longer had any need for things like that.

  But the living did, she thought.

  She looked at the girls. Beth had her arms around her as far as they would extend, her small body drooping into hers. She squeezed even harder when Anne made her offer. Elisha slipped her arm around Beth. Andrea moved farther away from her. In the blink of an eye, life had become impossibly difficult.

  “No, that’s all right, Anne. I think the girls want to sleep in their own beds tonight.” In response, Beth nodded her head vehemently, still not loosening her hold. “But if you don’t mind, you can help me spread the word around here.”

  “Of course.” Anne sat down beside her for a moment. “Where will the funeral services be held?”

  Her mind went blank. She’d just come from there, she upbraided herself. How could she have forgotten? She reached into her pocket to take out the pastor’s card.

  Andrea beat her to it. “St. Theresa’s. My dad insisted we go every Sunday. A lot of good that did him, huh?”

  When they became adults, Elisha thought, Henry was always the more religious one. He seemed to be able to find serenity by attending the weekly services. A serenity that had eluded her.

  “Actually, I think it probably did.” Elisha forced herself to return Anne’s smile. “It’ll be there.” As if a cloud lifted from her brain, she remembered the address and recited it. “The service will be on Saturday at ten. Until then, he’ll be at Amos Brothers Funeral Parlor.”

  Getting up, Anne nodded. “I’ll let people know.” Taking her hand, Anne squeezed it. “And you let me know if you need anything. I’m just next door.”

  “You’ve been very kind,” Elisha told her.

  “It’s the least I can do. Henry was a great guy.”

  “Yes,” Elisha whispered. “I know.”

  The front door closed as Anne let herself out after saying goodbye to the girls.

  Busy, she had to get busy, Elisha thought. She couldn’t just sit here, letting the depression sink into her soul any further than it already had.

  “Andrea, if you could turn on the computer for me, I’ll get started.”

  Andrea looked as if she was going to say something cryptic, then nodded. “Sure.”

  Elisha rose to her feet with Beth still holding on to her like a baby possum holding on to its mother for dear life. Elisha put her arm around the child, drawing her closer.

  “It’s going to be all right, baby.” Elisha wasn’t entirely sure if she said the words to comfort herself or the girls, but neither of them answered.

  Her ear hurt. For the last hour she’d been holding the receiver to it, saying the same awful words over and over again, letting people know that Henry had died. She’d fielded the questions as best she could, congratulating herself each time for not breaking down the way she sorely wanted to.

  But now she was finally finished with the calls, finally finished holding herself together. She glanced over to the battered old sofa that had once been in her parents’ living room and that Henry had claimed for his den, citing sentimental value. The leather was cracked in at least half a dozen places, but Henry wouldn’t hear talk about getting rid of it.

  She could remember sitting there with him when they were children. Right now, Beth was curled up on it and Andrea was beside her. Both had fallen asleep. She was torn between just leaving them there or herding them off to their beds. She didn’t want to wake them, but their necks were going to ache tomorrow.

  It would match their hearts.

  Her cell phone began to ring. Startled, she pulled the phone from her pocket and looked at the incoming number. It wasn’t one that she recognized. Getting up, she went outside the den to keep from waking the girls.

  She flipped open the phone. “Hello?”

  “I knew you’d lose your nerve at the last minute.”

  She recognized the voice instantly.

  CHAPTER 23

  “I knew you’d lose your nerve at the last minute,” Ryan repeated when she failed to respond. “But I thought you’d at least have the decency to call and make up some lame excuse why you couldn’t cancel. Something like the dog swallowed your car keys, or there was a power failure in the building where you live and you were afraid to climb down twenty-two flights of stairs in the dark without a flashlight, which you couldn’t find because it was too dark.”

  She heard the words, but it was difficult for her to process them. Beyond exhaustion, her brain was completely disoriented. Every thought she possessed seemed to be existing on its own island, just out of range of any other thought.

  Unable to give him an answer immediately as to why she’d never showed up at his apartment, Elisha focused on the last thing Sutherland said. The word how? rose up in her head.

  “How do you know I live on the twenty-second floor?”

  She heard him make an annoyed sound on the other end of the line. “I make it my business to know things and don’t change the subject.”

  She was far beyond being bullied, or trying to make nice for the sake of the firm or because some egotistical writer needed to have his self-esteem stroked.

  A sentence fragment he’d uttered some time in the past replayed itself in her head. Making him a liar. “When I said we should get to know each other, you said you weren’t interested.”

  She heard a slight dry laugh, as if he was telling her that he knew where she was going with this even if she wasn’t all too clear about the path herself. “In anything you might have wanted to vol
unteer. I have my own set of questions and I like finding things out on my own, not by hearsay or through secondhand information.”

  What did that mean? Had he followed her? Or was he just trying to perpetuate some aura of mystery? She had no time for games or for men who hadn’t grown up and still wanted to play spy.

  “And you’re not going to move me off the track,” Ryan said. “You forfeited the bet by not showing up. I’m sending over a fresh copy of my manuscript by messenger. Forward it to whoever does your printing. I know how damn confused they get if there’s anything on the page to distract them.” And then he issued his warning. “You’re not to put one mark on this copy. Nothing. It’s my story and I tell it my way. If you don’t like it, then our so-called association, such as it is, is terminated.”

  Her head hurt. Elisha began to massage it. She made no response to his statement.

  “Nothing to say?” he queried. “All right, then I’ll just—”

  “My brother died.” The words, festering in her chest all this time like a fast-growing tumor, just suddenly exploded from her lips. At the same time that the tears materialized. She angrily wiped them away with the back of her hand. She wasn’t sure she was going to be able to recover, be able to meet the challenges in front of her, immediate and down the road, large and small. She just wanted to run somewhere and hide.

  “What did you say?”

  The man was probably good at torture, she caught herself thinking. When she opened her mouth to answer, the hostility that suddenly materialized was hard to suppress. “My brother, Henry, he died. Today. I’m sorry if I didn’t remember our bet, Mr. Sutherland.” Her voice rose and she struggled to contain the hysteria that rose with it. “But when the hospital called me, I forgot about everything else, including your illustrious poker game.” She paused for just a second to drag air into her lungs. “Now, if that wounds your pride, I’m sorry, but working for an inside straight so that I can jump through the hoop you’re holding just in order to do my job didn’t seem to be all that important at the time.”

  He seemed not to hear her tirade, or notice the anger that had flowed his way. Instead, he asked, “Was it sudden?”

  The question threw her. She had to stop to think, to try to pull together the threads that were unraveling so quickly.

  “He had some warning, but all in all, yes, it was sudden. Henry never had a sick day in his life. At least none that he ever mentioned,” she qualified because Henry always kept his problems to himself. It was the one thing about Henry that drove her crazy. “We used to kid him that germs thought he was too nice to attack.”

  Stopping suddenly, Elisha pressed her lips together. Her voice felt as if it was going to crack and the last thing in the world she wanted to do was break down in front of Sutherland. Even if it was over the telephone.

  “He was too nice,” she finally concluded.

  “Did he have a family?”

  “His wife died five years ago. Henry has—had,” she corrected herself, hating the way the past tense tasted, “two daughters.”

  “Young?”

  “Fifteen and ten,” she recited automatically. Her patience frayed, she couldn’t take it any longer. “Why are you asking me all these questions?” Elisha demanded angrily.

  Ryan didn’t answer her question. Instead, he asked another one of his own. “What’s going to happen to your brother’s daughters?”

  Did he care? No, that wasn’t possible. Then was he just pretending to be polite? No, that wasn’t the Ryan Sutherland she was acquainted with. Besides, the tone behind his questions wasn’t polite. He was shooting them out at her like rubber bullets. They weren’t harmful, but they still stung.

  “I’m going to take care of them,” she informed him tersely. Not that it’s any business of yours, she added silently.

  Only then did his voice soften ever so slightly and lose some of its accusatory tone. She had to admit that to her ear, he also sounded a little skeptical. He probably didn’t think she could do it.

  That made two of them.

  “That’s a big responsibility,” he said to her.

  Oh God, yes.

  But aloud, she kept her doubts to herself, kept her emotions so tightly wrapped that she sounded almost monotone as she answered. “I don’t see as how I have much of a choice. I’m all they have.”

  “There’s another choice,” he told her. His voice was distant, as if the wires in their connection had just gotten frayed.

  “Social services.”

  Her first thought was of the woman in the tiny little office. Jennifer. The one who’d helped her at the hospital. But then she realized that he meant a different branch. The branch that concerned itself with children who had no one to care for them.

  “Foster care?” she cried incredulously. How could he even think that? Just what kind of callow, selfish bastard was this man?

  “Yes.” He said it as if it was a final verdict handed down by a judge. “Then the responsibility wouldn’t be yours anymore.”

  She felt a flash of temper. Who the hell did he think he was? He could play God with the characters who littered the pages of his book, but he had no business butting his nose into her life.

  “But the heartbreak, not to mention the guilt, would be my responsibility,” she shot back. “Look, Mr. Sutherland, you don’t seem to think much of me as an editor and you seem to think even less of me as a person.” She dragged her hand through her hair, trying desperately to bank down the growing helplessness she felt. “God knows I’m not going to be up for the award of Mother of the Year anytime soon, but these girls need me and I love them. And somehow, I’ll find a way to do right by them.” Even though I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do next.

  There was silence, and then he finally spoke. “Very impressive.”

  Damn him, he was the spawn of the devil. “I wasn’t trying to impress you.”

  “I know.”

  All right, she was willing to admit that she had to be hearing things. Because she could have sworn she heard a smile in the man’s voice. The man didn’t smile. Not physically and certainly not emotionally. She was overwrought, that’s what it was. Thinking she heard a smile in his voice was just the result of her nerves being stretched to the very limit and then pulled five inches farther.

  “You need anything?”

  She scrubbed her hand over her face. Okay, now she knew she was hearing things. To prove it to herself, she asked him to repeat what she knew she couldn’t have heard. “What did you say?”

  “Do you need anything?” He enunciated every syllable slowly, as if she was mentally impaired.

  And maybe she was, Elisha thought, struggling not to come unglued.

  I need a million things. Someone to take over my life and make it run right. Or, better yet, someone to give me back my life the way it was two months ago.

  “No, but thanks for the offer.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. So long that she thought he’d hung up and for some reason, the dial tone hadn’t kicked in.

  And then she heard him say, “We can reschedule the poker game if you’d like.”

  He was rescinding his mandate about his manuscript, going back to square one of their so-called agreement. Elisha passed the back of her hand over her forehead, checking to see if she had a fever. When she could detect none, she wondered if she was asleep on the sofa. Had she dropped off beside the girls? Was this some dream she was having?

  No, she thought, she ached too damn much for this to be a dream.

  Blowing out an emotion-laden breath, she answered, “I’d like.”

  “Good.”

  She wasn’t sure if the connection gave out at that moment, or if the man had hung up. Most likely the latter. Sutherland had clearly been raised by wolves, but one of those wolves must have had a heart and passed it on to him. She didn’t have time to contemplate what made his train run. She had nieces to see to. Closing her cell phone, she slipped it back into her pocke
t. She glanced into the den.

  Beth and Andrea were just where she’d left them. Asleep and leaning against each other.

  As it should be in life, Elisha thought.

  With a sigh that was way past weary, she went off in search of blankets. She was going to cover the girls and leave them where they were. They looked too peaceful to move and God knew they needed the rest.

  CHAPTER 24

  The next few days kept her far too busy to sit down in a corner and cry. From the morning following Henry’s death until the day of the funeral, Elisha found that every spare moment of her life was crammed with activity.

  People came from the area and from the law firm where Henry was a partner just to pay their respects and to tell her what she had known all along: what a wonderful man her brother had been. Henry’s neighbors invaded the house, to cook, to talk, to let her know that there were other life-forms close by who shared her grief and were available to trade stories about Henry at any given time.

  She hardly knew any of them but she was grateful to them nonetheless. As a group, they kept her from sinking into herself. From giving in to the darkness that wanted to possess her.

  They also took the edge off focusing on the girls. She didn’t have to worry how they were bearing up to the wake. There were always at least several younger people who she took to be Andrea’s friends at the funeral parlor.

  She was concerned about Andrea.

  Though the girl maintained a stoic expression, Andrea looked as if she was sleepwalking through everything. When her friends spoke to her, she hardly answered. Andrea was alone in the midst of everything.

  In contrast to the girl’s big sister, Beth clung to her. Even when the little girl wasn’t hanging on to her for dear life, she was watching Elisha’s every movement. Everywhere she went, she could feel Beth’s eyes on her. She wasn’t accustomed to this kind of restriction. It made her feel almost claustrophobic. At the same time, she felt guilty for harboring the feeling that she just wanted to flee.