“You know those big bouquets you see in department stores and hotel lobbies and what-not?”
He hadn’t. But he nodded, anyway.
“Well, that’s what I do.”
“You make them?”
“I make them.”
He came around to her side of the counter, sat on the stool beside hers. “So, you’re artistic, then.”
“Maybe.” She held her thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “Just a little.”
But wait just a minute here…. What had she said her last name was? Something French. No, Irish. De-something. Devaney.
Delaney.
His pulse raced and his mouth went dry. She couldn’t be that Kasey Delaney, could she? But then, how many Kasey Delaneys could there be in the Baltimore area? “’Scuse me a sec, will you?”
She blew a stream of air across the soup in her spoon. “Sure, but don’t be gone too long. Might not be anything left when you get back.”
He hadn’t prepared the meal to satisfy his own hunger, anyway. The main reason he’d made a sandwich for himself was so she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable eating alone. But now Adam was the uncomfortable one. Because what if…what if she was—
Only one way to find out.
He’d carried the photograph in his wallet for fifteen years, to the day, almost. He’d cut it out of The Baltimore Sun the morning after Halloween that wretched year. For a few years after that, he’d carried it as is, but as it yellowed and turned up at the edges, Adam began to worry it might disintegrate. And he couldn’t have that. He needed the article to remind him who and what he’d been, who and what he could become if he didn’t force himself to remember what he’d done that night. It had been encased in plastic since his eighteenth birthday.
In the bright overhead light of the bathroom, he slid his wallet out of his back pocket. It required no hunting to find the article; he’d read it numerous times since…since the night that stupid, stupid prank went so wrong.
He looked at it now, reminding himself that the girl in the black-and-white photo had been twelve when the picture was taken. She wore braces, a ponytail, one of those dark-plaid, private-school–type uniforms. One look at those big, smiling eyes cinched it. The Kasey pictured here and the one in his kitchen, who’d made him laugh and smile—and mean it for the first time in years—were one and the same.
Why did life have to be so full of bitter irony? he wondered.
How much should he tell her, if indeed he told her anything at all? Was her visit here truly an accident? Or had she shown up for a reason?
He doubted that. He’d always been very careful to keep his identity a secret from the Delaneys, hand-delivering cash payments in the middle of the night, never at the same time of the month, so he wouldn’t risk having Kasey or her mother catch him making “deposits” in their mailbox.
It had started small, just ten dollars that first month, earned from his part-time job changing oil filters at the local lube center. Remorse-ridden that his cowardly silence had been partly responsible for a man’s death, for a woman’s widowhood, for a child losing her father, Adam had taken a second part-time job, upping the amount to twenty dollars the next month. And although the amount in the last envelope had increased to nearly a thousand dollars, the guilt hadn’t decreased.
“Hey,” she called, “you okay in there? Should I send up a 9-1-1 smoke signal?”
Adam slid the article back into his wallet and tucked the wallet into his jeans pocket. Heart beating against his rib cage, Adam did the breathing exercise that always calmed him before surgery. Smiling, he headed back to the counter.
“So,” he said, forcing a brightness into his voice that he didn’t feel, “did you save me any soup?”
She insisted he let her do the dishes, and he insisted right back. “Okay. All right,” she conceded. “But I’ll wash, you dry, since you know where everything goes…more or less….” And that’s how they ended up side by side in his tiny L-shaped kitchen.
Sharing this everyday chore with a virtual stranger felt good, felt natural, making Kasey wonder if she’d lost her mind somewhere between that field of flowers and this isolated cabin. In an attempt at rational balance, she tried to rouse some of the fear she’d felt earlier, when thoughts of murderers and robbers had her heart beating double time.
But it was no use. Rational or not, she felt safe with Dr. Adam Thorne. It didn’t seem to bother him, either, that as the minutes passed, neither of them had said a word. Kasey added “comfortable” to the things he made her feel.
“So tell me, what kind of medicine do you practice?”
“Cardiology.”
“In Baltimore?”
“I’m affiliated with several area hospitals—GBMC, St. Joseph’s, Sinai, Ellicott General—but my office is in Ellicott City.”
She looked up at him. “You sound like a TV commercial.”
He laughed at that.
“I live in Ellicott City, too. Small world, huh?”
Adam looked away suddenly. “Yeah. Real small.”
Kasey didn’t know what to make of the dark expression that accompanied what should have been an innocuous agreement. “So why cardiology instead of—”
The plate he’d been drying shattered on the floor.
“Careful,” she said, squatting beside him, “you don’t want to cut yourself.”
But he didn’t seem to have heard her. And his hands shook slightly as he reached for the fragmented ceramic.
She grabbed his wrists. “I’ll do that. You probably have surgery scheduled bright and early Monday morning. I’d feel terrible if you had to cancel, get your partner to do the operation, because you cut your finger on my sandwich plate.”
One side of his mouth lifted in a wry grin. “How do you know it was your plate? Could have been mine.”
“True, but it’d still be in the cupboard now if I hadn’t shown up. Now really, let me clean this up,” she repeated. “It’ll make me feel better about all the trouble I’ve put you to.”
When he hesitated, she put on her best “do as I say” look, hoping it would have more effect on Adam than it did on Aleesha.
Amazingly, it did.
“Do you have a dustpan?” she asked as he stood.
He pointed to a narrow door.
She pulled out a hand broom, too, then proceeded to sweep up the remnants of the plate. “What would you be doing if I wasn’t here?” she asked, eye-level with his worn hiking shoes.
“Watching something on TV, I guess.”
It was just a broken plate; the miserable way he sounded, a person would think he’d killed someone! “Then go watch something on TV. Pretend I’m not even here.”
The shoes—and their owner—hiked into the living room, and seconds later, the theme from the Channel 13 news filled the air.
When she joined him after cleaning up, he was in his recliner, TV listings in one hand, clicker in the other. Kasey sat on the end of the couch nearest his chair and hugged a quilted toss pillow to her chest. “Anything positive happening tonight?”
“Nah. Typical news day.” He brightened slightly to add, “The Dow Jones is up a couple of points, though.”
Yippee, she thought. Kasey knew as much about the stock market as she knew about cardiology. “Have they said anything about the