“Only because they’ll be related to the baby,” he added when she didn’t immediately reply. He’d learned one thing about Caroline Prater in the two weeks since she’d arrived in Shelter Valley. The more uncomfortable she was, the quieter she became. He wished he could tell her that she wasn’t a kid in a family that didn’t understand her anymore. She could speak up for herself without fear of standing out or being deserted.

  John paid as they reached the entrance and ushered her inside.

  “You really didn’t need to do this,” she said. “I don’t have to visit all the state’s outdoor museums.”

  “It’s good exercise.”

  “And outside Shelter Valley.”

  There was no point in arguing the obvious. She was right. He didn’t want to be seen with her in town. He’d already explained all that. He had Lauren to think of.

  And his own answers to find and come to terms with before he could share them with his friends.

  “Welcome to the museum.” A young man in a park ranger uniform, carrying a hairy tarantula about the size of a small orange on his arm, approached them.

  John wondered at the guy’s choice of welcoming committee.

  “Does he have a name?” Caroline asked, moving in for a closer look.

  “Tammy.”

  “It’s a she.” She reached a finger out to entice movement from the lethal-looking spider.

  “She’s here to serve as an ambassador for her wild relations,” the ranger said. He told them where they could find more spiders and scorpions within the confines of the outdoor zoo and museum, encompassing more than one hundred acres of natural desert. “Enjoy your visit.”

  Eyes taking in everything around them, Caroline moved forward, John following. “I had no idea this place was so big,” he said, pleasantly surprised. He’d really just intended to keep her company while she got some exercise for their baby, and planned to be home in time for an afternoon round of golf. He was heading out of town the next day to drop in at his Chicago office and then go for a site visit or two. He’d wanted to do his part before he left.

  “They have over forty thousand plants, more than fourteen thousand fossil and mineral specimens, seventeen hundred animals and six thousand catalogued books to read about it all.”

  John glanced down at her, enjoying the color in her cheeks, the light in her eyes. “I only told you about this place a couple of hours ago,” he said. “How do you know so much?”

  “I went on the Internet while I was waiting for you.”

  Over the next hour, they saw everything from rattlesnakes to mountain lions, an impressive tortoise collection, more fish than he’d seen in any aquarium back east and a botanical garden that was every bit as impressive as the one they’d visited in Phoenix the week before.

  “How’s school going?” he asked as they veered toward the fish and amphibians. The toe of her boot caught on a crack in the blacktop and she stumbled. With an arm around her waist, John steadied her.

  She pulled quickly away from him. “Fine.” She was looking at a map she’d picked up at the entrance. For all the attention she was paying him, he might as well not have been there.

  Which was fine. This was about exercise for her. Nothing more.

  “Do you have a favorite class?” He followed as she moved toward an enclosure, happy to tag along.

  “Psychology.”

  “You’re interested in psychoanalyzing people?”

  “I like the teacher.”

  Caroline didn’t seem the type to prefer one class over the rest just because of a teacher. He wondered what she wasn’t telling him. Or if, perhaps, she was telling him in Caroline-speak to mind his own business.

  He was stepping dangerously close to boundaries that he needed to keep intact. “Who is it? Maybe I know him.”

  “Her. Phyllis Langford, and it’s not like she knows me. I’m a little dot in a very big classroom. She doesn’t even do roll call.”

  And he’d bet his life’s savings that Caroline Prater didn’t ever speak out in class. Any class.

  “She’s good friends with Becca, Will’s wife,” he said. “Nice woman.”

  She shrugged.

  Yep, he was pretty much being held at arm’s length. For a second, John considered challenging her on that. Until he remembered that he was the first one to establish that distance.

  In any event, she’d entered the lizard enclosure and started asking questions of the ranger there, and that was that.

  A ROADRUNNER STREAKED BY the path and John stopped abruptly. He reached for her arm, to get her attention, and pulled back in the nick of time. Her reaction to him when she’d stumbled earlier had been very clear—and he agreed with her. If he and Caroline were to get through this, they had to enforce a hands-off rule.

  “Did you see that?” he asked, pointing in the direction the desert bird had run.

  “Yeah, but I can’t believe it! Other than the drab color, he looked exactly like the character in the old cartoon I used to watch. He was really running that fast!”

  The cartoon she was referring to had played a prominent part in his Saturday mornings as a kid. There was satisfaction in knowing she’d liked it, too.

  “I’ve been in Arizona on and off for more than four years and I’ve never seen one.”

  She turned, grinning. “Then you’re either blind or completely unobservant, John, because I’ve been here two weeks and I’ve seen one.”

  He might have responded to her teasing if, in that moment, her face hadn’t been so strikingly beautiful.

  “YOU STILL HAVEN’T TOLD ME about your family,” he said later, heading with her toward the bighorn sheep.

  “I told you before, I’m adopted,” she said after an obvious hesitation. “Their bloodlines aren’t going to have any effect on the baby.” Her voice wasn’t sharp, but it wasn’t as calm as he was used to, either.

  “But their relationship with him will.”

  She sighed, pausing to watch the sheep—and to read about them. And then it was on to the otters.

  “My parents still live on the small farm in Grainville where I grew up.” She was leaning over, smiling at a beaver swimming toward them in the stream. “Their parents are dead. I have one uncle on my father’s side whom I barely know. My mother had an older sister who died of kidney failure a couple of years ago.”

  She entered a circular enclosure housing some colorful parrots.

  She didn’t ask about his family. “My parents are divorced,” he told her after she’d read about the parrots and moved on to macaws. “My mother remarried several years ago and lives in Paris. I haven’t seen my father in years. I have one sister, younger, who’s married to a Parisian and lives down the street from my mother. She has a couple of kids. There’re a few aunts and uncles I haven’t seen in years. No history of disease.”

  The jaguarundi and ocelot were both endangered species. They’d circled around to the magnificent cats. John wondered if there was someplace he could send money to help save the lives of these lithe beasts. He decided to look into it.

  “My father’s an alcoholic.”

  He did a double take, not sure Caroline had even spoken. She was watching a bobcat sniff the air. “You grew up with a drunk?” The thought angered him. She deserved better than that.

  “He was dry for years.” She reached back to tuck a strand of hair back into the ponytail he’d never seen her without.

  Except the first night he’d met her, when that long auburn hair was tangled around his hands…

  “Was he violent when he drank?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did he ever hit you?”

  “Once.”

  He wanted to ask if that was when the man had quit drinking. But he’d already crossed the personal line. He only needed to know things that would affect the baby.

  “And now?”

  “He’s drinking again.”

  Back in Grainville. Which she’d left to have her baby.

  There seemed no end to the depths he saw in this woman.

  Javelinas, lizards, the walk-in aviary—they did it all. He’d assumed that pregnant women got tired easily, but Caroline sure didn’t seem to.

  “Do you drink a lot?” Her question came out of the blue as they stood in front of a woodpecker.

  “Define a lot.”

  “I saw you with a beer the other night. To me, more than one or two is a lot.”

  “I’ve had occasion to have more than one or two, but generally, no, I don’t drink a lot.” He supposed it was a fair question, considering what she’d told him earlier about her father.

  “Randy was drinking when he was killed. He was drunk, actually.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “About Randy.”

  She nodded. “The accident wasn’t his fault—if it had been, his life insurance probably wouldn’t have paid. It was a tractor-engine default. But he lay out there for a couple of hours before he died. I hope the alcohol made those hours more bearable.”

  She was a strong woman.

  John had to get her back to Shelter Valley before he started liking her—too much.

  Monday, December 6, 2004

  I can’t stop thinking about what I did. Or thinking about him. What’s wrong with me? I’ve only been a widow for six months! And only EVER did it with Randy. I never even liked it all that much. Before. It’s like I’m a different woman. I don’t even recognize me. Or the way he made me feel.

  Maybe it was that sparkling wine he had me order at the bar.

  I want so desperately to believe that. To blame the wine. But I only had one glass. I’m not even sure I finished it!

  It’s partly that I’ve never been to Frankfort at Christmastime. And there were decorations lining the streets and the building being dedicated was strung with the most beautiful lights. I heard a little boy ask his mother if they were going to see Santa Claus after the ceremony.

  I’ve never felt as alone as I did at that moment, knowing I was going home to Grainville and Daddy’s problem and no Jesse to go to the Christmas pageant with or cut down a tree with or hide presents from. He’s not coming home until the day before Christmas! It’ll all be done by then.

  I just wanted to feel like I belonged, even if it was only for an evening. All I could think about was grasping a brief escape from the dark and lonely future that stretches before me. I’m afraid of what I’ve done. I’m afraid of what I’m going to become. I’m afraid I’m going insane….

  THE PROBLEM WITH JEANS was that they didn’t have a lot of give for an expanding stomach. Especially when the stomach they’d been purchased to cover had been flat and firm. Still, she wasn’t big enough yet to fit into the elasticized denim pants that had seen her through most of her pregnancy with Jesse. Caroline sucked in a deep breath every morning and squeezed until she could fit the metal clasp into the stiff denim hole and, inch by inch, coax the zipper to close. A process that worked relatively well—and saved Caroline the expense of purchasing new maternity slacks.

  At least, it worked relatively well—until the last Wednesday in January. Right after lunch, Caroline took her seat in Psychology 101, and the light meal she’d forced herself to eat for the baby’s sake began to make its presence known. Phyllis—no, Dr. Langford, she reminded herself—wasn’t even there yet and Caroline was so nauseous she was afraid to stand up.

  She couldn’t miss this class. She just couldn’t. It was only the fourth time in her entire life that she’d get to watch and listen to her sister. An amazing and completely intimidating woman.

  With some very deep breaths and a lot of willpower, Caroline managed to stay in her seat and not embarrass herself. Then Phyllis came in from the door at the top of the room, walked down the steps to the podium and began to speak.

  Caroline’s awareness of any morning sickness vanished. She’d done all the reading for the class. She always did. But every word Dr. Langford uttered was fascinating. At least to her two-minutes-younger fraternal twin.

  “Today we’re going to talk about John B. Watson,” Phyllis said after a couple of minutes of friendly dialogue with her students. Dialogue to which Caroline loved to listen. Her sister not only had intelligence, but she had an engaging wit and warmth, too. She wondered why, with her obvious compassion and people skills, Phyllis wasn’t in private practice.

  “He wasn’t covered in the assigned text, but is certainly pertinent to today’s discussion. Does anyone know who he is?”

  The founder of the behaviorist movement. Caroline’s heart sped up. She’d been reading voraciously about the man and his beliefs since discovering him from the syllabus of suggested readings. Montford’s library had become, next to her computer, her best friend.

  “No one?” Phyllis said, the clicking of her heels on the tile floor resounding around the cavernous hall. “Come on, someone at least take a guess.”

  “Someone to do with Sherlock Holmes?” suggested a young man who wore his confidence with ease.

  Phyllis grinned, slid one hand into the pocket of her short, tailored navy suit jacket. “Good try, Sean, but no.” The hem of her skirt moved against her knees as she walked to the other side of the room. “Anyone else?”

  Phyllis’s gaze traveled around, and Caroline looked down, careful to be unobtrusive from her place in the middle of the hall, surrounded by more than a hundred other faces. It wasn’t as if Phyllis was ever going to notice her—or know her. She just didn’t trust herself not to say something foolish.

  “Anyone ever hear of the behaviorists?” she asked next.

  They believed people became what they were programmed to become. That human beings were the products of their environments. Their theories sounded logical to Caroline, but she couldn’t entirely believe them. And yet, look at her. She was a country bumpkin because of the environment in which she’d grown up.

  With a series of questions meant to provoke thoughtful replies from her students, Phyllis taught the class a lot of what Caroline had read over the weekend.

  “Later in the year we’re going to have a nurture versus nature debate,” Phyllis was saying toward the end of class. “Are we products of our environment or of genetics? Or both?”

  The mass of cells that was slowly becoming Baby Prater took that moment to wage war against its own environment, and Caroline stared at the floor, trying to relax.

  “You’ll all be assigned different research projects that’ll be presented to the class. You will wage the debate that has been keeping scientists and psychologists active for centuries.”

  In the front of the room, a dark-haired girl with olive skin raised her hand. “Will we get to choose our areas of research?”

  “To some extent,” Phyllis nodded, gathering papers and books and pens and putting them back into the satchel she always carried. “We’ll be focusing on various twin studies—”

  Shoving her notebook into her homemade bag, Caroline put her head between her knees. And stayed that way until most of the class, including the teacher, had cleared out.

  Then she stumbled to the bathroom and threw up for the first time in years.

  JOHN CALLED THAT NIGHT. Caroline recognized his cell-phone number on the LED screen of her cell phone. She didn’t pick up—precisely because she wanted to. He’d been in Atlanta since Sunday and hadn’t known for sure when he’d be home. She watched the phone where it lay on her desk beside her, counting the rings until voice mail picked up and took a message.

  Was he back in town? Or calling to say he wasn’t coming back? Or just calling to make certain he wasn’t shirking any unknown responsibilities?

  The ringing stopped. Caroline stared at the half-written five-hundred-word descriptive essay on the computer screen. And almost came up with a topic sentence for the new paragraph she was starting. She was writing about a pebble. One paragraph for each of the five senses. What did a pebble smell like?

  The phone rang again. Without moving anything but her eye muscles, she glanced at the little lit-up screen.

  It was John again. Guilt—because she’d already ignored him once—had her picking up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Caroline? I was worried when you didn’t answer. Are you okay?”

  She was having a little trouble breathing at the moment, but it would pass. “Fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  “My room.” She didn’t ask where he was—it wasn’t her business. She knew his number if she had problems with the baby.

  “Doing homework?”

  She hated being so predictable. And boring. “Yes.” He was probably on his way to some fancy cocktail party to schmooze with politicians and wealthy people.

  “Are you always so talkative?” His voice was soft, teasing, and her stomach melted.

  A reaction that was nothing to worry about. John was the only person she could talk to about the baby, and that was the only reason his attention meant anything to her.

  “Sometimes less.”

  “Getting smart with me, are you?”

  Boring as she was, she could make him chuckle. “Maybe.”

  “I like that.”

  She liked that he liked it. Until she remembered who she was. Who he was. And what they weren’t.

  “Are you in town?”

  “I’m supposed to be, but no.” His sigh was deep. “I’m stuck in an airport hotel in Minneapolis, grounded due to weather.”

  Minneapolis. Two hours later than Arizona’s eight o’clock. Caroline looked away from the blinking cursor that reminded her she had something else she should be doing. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why should you be sorry? You don’t control the weather.”

  “I’m sorry for you.”

  “And I’m just tired and frustrated enough to accept your pity.”

  She smiled. “Long week?”

  “The longest and it’s only Wednesday.” He went on to describe the power struggle that had held up final approval of his designs for a new art museum. Approval he hadn’t yet attained.

  And then he told her how he’d won the bid in the first place. About members of the investors’ group in Atlanta who’d been family to Meredith—family torn apart by a divorce that had taken place since Meredith’s death.