Crimson Rain. Meg O'Brien

in its grip, it had to be a sickness. He just didn’t know how to cure it—nor, at this moment, did he honestly want to. He simply wanted it to go on and on, and for nothing bad to ever happen in his life again.

      Three days after Christmas, Gina sat with Rachel at the kitchen breakfast bar. They had barely touched their coffee, even though it was a new blend they’d picked up at a café down the street and had looked forward to trying out.

      “I’m just saying you’re living in a dream world,” Rachel argued. “You don’t see things the way they really are.”

      Gina felt attacked, and responded in kind. “Well, my dear, everyone’s reality is different. That’s something you’ll learn, perhaps, as you grow older—and, hopefully, wiser.”

      “Mom, don’t give me that ‘different reality’ thing. I know we all see things from our own perspective. I just think yours is really skewed.”

      Gina sighed. “And just what brought all this up?”

      Rachel shook her head and didn’t answer.

      Gina picked up her coffee cup and took it to the sink, rinsing it out. “If you’re not going to answer me, we can hardly have an intelligent discussion, Rachel.”

      And why the hell couldn’t this visit of her daughter’s just have been fun? Why was she trying to stir things up this time?

      It reminded her of a period when Rachel was sixteen, and seemed intent on ruining the good spirits of everyone around her. The Spoiler, they had called her then, though not in a mean way, and not to her face. Paul and Gina would lie in bed at night and try to figure out what was bothering their daughter, and why she had to cast a negative light on everything.

      Gina frowned. Her daughter was no longer a teenager. It was time to grow up.

      “I’m going upstairs to collect the laundry,” she said, drying her hands.

      “The laundry can wait,” Rachel snapped. “Mom, I’m talking about Dad.”

      Carefully Gina hung the dish towel on the decorative cherry-wood rod affixed to the upper cabinet, next to the sink. She had put it there the day they moved in, rather than have towels all over the counters, gathering bacteria and looking messy.

      Sometimes she thought that she liked a neat house because it was the only control she still had over her life.

      “Your father?” she said, keeping her back to Rachel. “I thought we already went through all that.”

      “Not quite,” Rachel said. She rubbed her face the same way she’d seen her father do for years when irritated, as if the source of the irritation could be rubbed away. “Mom, what if he’s seeing somebody?”

      “Seeing—” Gina’s expression went from an incredulous smile to a glare in a matter of seconds. “If you mean another woman, Rachel, that’s ridiculous. Your father is much too busy to have time for that, in the first place. And in the second place, he just isn’t the type.”

      She was hearing her mother’s words, however—All men are the type—and that took some of the force from her tone.

      Rachel just looked at her, and after a moment, Gina said, “I’m going upstairs to get the laundry now.”

      Rachel stared into her coffee cup, making swirls in the cool, creamy liquid with a finger. Round and round, round and round, down and down…like life, she thought. Round and round…then, at the last dizzying moment, down and down.

      Rachel dumped her jacket and purse onto the chair in Victoria Lessing’s office, then asked to use her bathroom. Victoria was on the phone but waved to her, whispering, “Sure. I’ll be off in a minute.”

      The psychiatrist’s bathroom was as elegant as her office, both of which had recently been redecorated. There were gold fixtures and an ornate mirror, trimmed in gold.

      Looks like an expensive antique, Rachel thought. I wonder if she got it from Dad. Towels were in a soft lilac, the only color in the room except for a five-foot-high plant in the palm family. Now, that—that’s more like Mom’s style.

      Standing before the mirror, Rachel thought she looked older than her twenty-one years. Fine lines were already beginning at the corners of her eyes, and there were dark circles that no amount of concealer had been able to cover.

      Well, the past few weeks hadn’t been easy. Add to that the accident the other night and the egg-sized lump on her noggin, it was a wonder she hadn’t turned gray.

      She washed her hands for a full twenty seconds, hoping to ward off the many germs and new viruses that were all about these days. It seemed she was forever trying to wash them away, and God only knew what she might have picked up in the coffee shop that she and Gina had stopped at on the way here.

      Vicki must be worried about germs, too, she thought, because there were plastic disposable gloves in her wastebasket. Rachel smiled. Vicky had beautiful hands that didn’t show her age. She probably wore gloves to bed, too, the way hand models did.

      When Rachel walked back into the office, Vicky was still on the phone. “All right, all right,” she was saying. “I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything. Listen, I have to go.”

      Victoria hung up the phone and smoothed her blond hair, which hung straight to her shoulders today. Golly, Rachel thought, she looks almost sexy. Idly she wondered who the boyfriend was. There must be one. When she sat at her antique desk like that, she looked so…pure, was the only word that came to Rachel. Like someone in a painting.

      Victoria’s personal life, however, had always been a mystery. On one slender finger glittered a diamond and sapphire ring that she had worn ever since Rachel could remember. It wasn’t on her engagement finger, though, and so far as Rachel knew, she had never married.

      Rachel took a seat and settled her jacket over her shoulders to ward off the nervous chill she was feeling. Opening up to Victoria wasn’t as bad as trying to communicate with her parents, but even so, it wasn’t something she looked forward to.

      She waited as Victoria took a stack of papers from her desk and slipped them into a drawer. Her attention was caught by something new on Victoria’s desk—a bronze statue of a frog with a golden coin on its tongue. The tongue, too, was made of gold.