“Two!” His voice cracked. “You’re a twin?” She almost smiled. It hadn’t taken long for her genius son to figure that out.

  “Yes.”

  She really should go inside where it was warm. But it was so empty. Unless she counted the memories that wouldn’t leave her alone.

  “Cool! Two Mas.” He sounded like he was grinning. Caroline was grateful for the diversion, even knowing it would be short-lived. “Wait. Was the other kid a girl or a boy?”

  “A girl.”

  “Were you identical?”

  “No.” Not that the letter had said one way or the other. Caroline had found out for herself, from pictures in newspaper articles on the Internet about her very successful twin. Her mother had given her the box at the end of September and within a week she’d joined a couple of Internet tracking services and had a folder on her computer filled with information.

  “Damn!” Jesse said, quickly adding, “Uh, darn—sorry, Ma.”

  “You’re a freshman in college, Jess,” Caroline said, walking over to the porch rail, wondering how many more years it would stand up to Kentucky’s weather. “Certainly old enough to make your own vocabulary choices.”

  “It’s just so fantastic.” His voice was more that of her intense little boy than the man he was quickly becoming. “I wonder how they chose which one of you to keep.”

  “Birth order,” she told him. “They kept the first. I was born second.”

  Silence fell on the line.

  “This had to be pretty hard on you, huh?” he asked a moment later. “Here I am, going on like some kind of jerk, not even thinking how this must’ve made you feel. Being the one given away and all.”

  “It’s okay, Jess,” she told him, hoping that someday the words would be true. “I’ve always known I was given away.”

  “Yeah, but knowing that one was kept—”

  A chill swept through Caroline. She brushed some twigs off the top of the chipped porch rail and wrapped her arms around her midriff.

  “And there I go again, putting my foot right in it,” Jesse said, bringing a slow grin to his mother’s face.

  “So…does this, uh, talk about Shelter whatever have to do with the letter?”

  “Yes.” With the thumb of her left hand she reached for the sapphire on her ring finger. According to the letter from Caroline’s birth mother, her twin had been given a ring, too. An opal. Apparently their mother had liked jewelry. “Her name is Phyllis Langford Sheffield. She’s a professor of Psychology at Montford University in Shelter Valley.”

  “She married?”

  “Yes. To a man named Matt Sheffield, Fine Arts Technical Coordinator at Montford.” She wasn’t too sure about her brother-in-law. She’d found an article about him, too. A disturbing one. Several years before Mr. Sheffield had taken the job at Montford, he’d been charged with statutory rape and sentenced to prison. He’d allegedly impregnated one of his students. That was a piece of news she was definitely not going to share with her son.

  “They have any kids?”

  “Two.” She thought of the grainy newspaper photo she had in her wallet. “Twins. A boy and a girl. They’re three.”

  “Damn!” Jesse said again. “Must run in the genes, huh?”

  Her heart gave a little flip at his mention of genetics. “Yeah.”

  “Okay, I can see why a trip to Shelter Valley’s important,” Jesse said, almost magnanimously. “I’ll be home for spring recess the last week of March. We can go then.”

  Pulling open the buttons on her coat, Caroline went inside, letting the screen door fall shut behind her. Randy had bought her year-round windows for the door a few Christmases ago, so she could leave the big old wooden door open, even in winter, and see out into the yard.

  “I’m moving to Shelter Valley, Jess. This weekend.”

  “No way, Ma! You can’t! You’re being ridiculous. I get it about wanting to see your sister. Hell, I even get that you’re feeling lonely, what with Dad dying and me gone almost right after, but you can’t just up and move! What about the farm?”

  “I’m going to hang on to it for a while. At least until I see how I like Shelter Valley. It’s all paid for and the taxes are practically nothing….”

  “We have cattle, Ma,” Jesse said, as though speaking to a child. “They aren’t just gonna wait around to see how you like life on the other side of the country. And we sure as hell can’t afford to pay someone to look after them for us.”

  Us. It sounded so good. Too good. Because it wasn’t true anymore. Jesse was off starting a life of his own. And Caroline had her own life to tend to. Whether she wanted to or not. She had some consequences to pay.

  “I sold the cattle.”

  “You what?”

  Even with the phone at arm’s length, she could hear Jesse’s yelp. She’d wanted to talk to him about the cattle—had thought he deserved to be a part of the decision—but she knew he’d talk her out of selling. And going.

  And sister aside, she had to go. There was more reason to go to Shelter Valley than she could tell her son. He’d have to know eventually, her saner side kept reminding her.

  But there was only so much she could handle at a time. And right now, that didn’t include Jesse’s likely reaction to her other news.

  “I sold the cattle to give me enough money to live off until I get settled.”

  “I can’t believe this!” He was sighing and whining and groaning all at once. “How do you expect to support yourself?” he asked. “You never even graduated from high school!”

  “I got my equivalency years ago, you know that.”

  “And that’ll get you a great career for sure,” he said sarcastically.

  In the tiny kitchen she’d lived in her entire adult life, Caroline poured a cup of coffee into her favorite mug, careful to miss the chipped part of the rim as she took a gulp.

  “I’m planning to enroll in college,” she said quietly, trying to control the fear and the doubts clutching at her heart. There was no one else on earth she’d have dared tell. “The semester doesn’t start for another two weeks.”

  “You have to apply, Ma.” Jesse’s voice was equally soft. And loving.

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve been accepted, Jess.”

  This time the silence was almost unbearable. With a shaking hand, Caroline lifted the mug again, took another sip of coffee that had been kept too hot by the old warming plate she’d been using with the old metal pot since high school. And burned her mouth.

  She poured the stuff out. She shouldn’t be drinking it, anyway. Not for the next eight months, at least. Although she’d drunk coffee when she’d been pregnant with Jesse.

  “Congratulations, Ma.” The pride in Jesse’s voice was her undoing.

  “AH, MERI, HERE I AM AGAIN…”

  With an embarrassed look, John Strickland slid into the bubbling spa in his professionally landscaped private and walled yard. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It wasn’t late, just dark. He’d had a long day. But his inner vision wasn’t restful. Meri was there, her memory filling his mind. She was dressed in his favorite red gown, diamonds glittering at her throat and wrist, laughing.

  And then not.

  Now the glittering came from the lights of the fire truck, police cars, the ambulance. Meri was lying inside the ambulance, wearing the red gown. But she wasn’t laughing.

  “Breathe,” he said aloud. “Breathe.” He could almost feel her struggle for air.

  And then he opened his eyes. As long as he opened his eyes, she’d still be breathing.

  “I know I promised we’d quit meeting like this.” His words fell into the not-quite-freezing Shelter Valley January night, becoming part of the air around him, floating aimlessly in space. Just as he was.

  “I’m supposed to be at dinner at Will’s,” he told his wife, as he imagined her sitting across from him. “Instead, here I am again, forgoing life to sit and talk to a dead woman.”

  A cold breeze wafted over the water. And his face.

  “I need a drink.”

  He hoped to God his neighbors couldn’t hear him over the bubbling water. Not that there was much chance anyone would be lounging around a backyard in what, for Shelter Valley, was considered a major cold front. Any time you could see your breath, it made the news.

  “I’m still traveling more than you liked.” He squinted at the empty space across from him, an idiot who was weak and disappointing himself even as he gave in to the overwhelming need to connect with the woman who’d left his life more than six years before.

  He wiped at a trickle of sweat making its way from his forehead down between his eyes.

  “Business is good. Finished another signature Strickland design last week.”

  The water was hot, but it didn’t warm the blood in his veins. Nothing was going to do that. He’d resigned himself to the truth.

  He hadn’t told Meri about the capitol building dedication he’d attended in Kentucky the first week of December. Hadn’t talked to her at all over the holidays, keeping his promise to her—and to himself.

  “I’m still working on my own,” he reported aloud. “I have to commission some of the menial stuff, but I’ve been able to hang tough and not give in to the pressure to commercialize the Strickland trademark.”

  She’d cautioned him about that often. Said the world would be better off with fewer Strickland buildings if the ones it had were pure Strickland and not some watered-down version.

  He currently had a small office in Shelter Valley with draftspeople and clerical staff, and another in Chicago. Most of his work he did out of his home.

  “I have two state capitol buildings coming up in the next year. One on the East Coast, one on the West.”

  She’d want the details. So, as his butt turned numb, buffeted by jets while he sat on a cement bench, John gave them to her.

  His backyard was really quite something. On one side was an arboretum shaded by a couple of olive trees that he’d paid a bundle to have brought in mature. From there, desert landscaping stones led down to a brick divider and then grass lush and green enough to have been on a tournament golf course. The grass led around to the wall in the back, where flowering bougainvillea climbed randomly, covering every available inch. In front of the grass was a negative-edge pool that appeared to be fed by a waterfall from the big boulder that flanked it. Off to the right was a gazebo with wet bar and stools and a gas barbecue. He’d had them put in when he bought the house.

  He’d never used them.

  “I broke off my engagement.” He’d meant to tell her that right off. But he’d needed some time alone with Meri before he brought another woman between them. Even if it was only to tell her there was no other woman between them.

  John took a deep breath, ducked under the water, blew out the breath and came up for air. Pushing the hair off his forehead, he blinked and sat on the other side of the spa. There was still time to get inside, take a quick shower and get over to Will’s before Becca served dinner. He could make some excuse for having missed the appetizer and drinks portion of the evening.

  “I’ve tried, Meri.” The pain and hopelessness in his voice scared him. Glancing at the star-filled blackness above him, he searched, as he had countless times, for some sign that he was being heard. That there was meaning to his existence, guidance from something stronger than his weak and pathetic self. “I just don’t know how to live without you.”

  Oh, he had his moments. Times when his mind was preoccupied with other things and he actually behaved like a fully functioning, relatively normal human being. But they were only moments.

  “I hurt Lauren.”

  But not as much as he would’ve hurt her if he’d married her and then remained committed to Meredith.

  “You’d have liked her.” John had liked her.

  Pressure built in his head. He was getting too hot. He’d move inside. Soon. Get himself a drink. And maybe throw a frozen dinner in the microwave. Though he was relatively skilled in the kitchen, he didn’t feel like cooking. Too much trouble for too little benefit.

  “Martha Moore got married.”

  She was the first woman John had dated after Meri’s death. He’d had a lot of talks with his wife about that. The day he’d met Martha. Whenever he’d passed her on the street. After the time—the only time—he’d been intimate with her.

  And on the night last year, when he’d heard that the young woman who’d been raped in Shelter Valley was Martha’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Ellen.

  “Shot a thirty on the back nine today. Not my best, but still under par.”

  The spa, operating on an automatic timer, shut off. John got out, cooling off while he walked over to push the button again, then slid back into the dark depths, watching as his body slowly disappeared from sight. He needed a little more time before he rejoined the living.

  Even if it was in name only.

  He fought the urge to close his eyes and rest. He couldn’t risk picking up the inner vision where it had left off. He wasn’t going to let Meri stop breathing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT TOOK HER two and a half days to get to the Arizona border. And another five and a half hours to reach Shelter Valley. Or, at any rate, to take the turnoff for the town she couldn’t wait to see. She passed Wal-Mart. Remembered reading about the kidnapping and subsequent rape that had taken place nearby the year before.

  Felt again the tug at her heart as she pictured the town ahead, almost as though these people were already part of her. She wondered if Phyllis knew the girl who’d been raped. Or if John Strickland did…

  That was when Caroline yanked the car onto a deserted-looking dirt track, turned off the ten-year-old half-size pickup with its brand-new locking bed cover—under which she’d packed most of her cherished possessions and the few articles of clothing she’d thought the least offensive—and sat.

  Was it legal to sit on the side of the road in a nonemergency situation in Arizona? That was something she could check as soon as she got settled someplace and was able to hook up her computer. The cobbled-together piece of equipment was buckled into the seat next to her. Next to Jesse, that machine was the most important thing in the world to her. Though she’d had different versions of it through the years as various parts grew obsolete and were replaced, either using funds saved from egg money or by begging the library to give her cast-offs, the computer had long been her very best friend. Many times, it had felt like her only friend.

  But soon she was going to be dealing with more than just a screen she could manage at will. Up ahead were real people.

  And at least one of them wasn’t going to be happy to see her. With a hand on her stomach, Caroline reached for her journal, a companion she referred to often and turned to the page she hadn’t read since the night she’d made the entry.

  Saturday, January 1, 2005

  I took the test today. It told me what I already knew….

  With a finger marking the page, she closed the book. She’d written those words only a week ago. But there were more. Another entry she hadn’t dared to look back on.

  She reached for the sapphire ring she’d put on a chain around her neck before leaving Grainville. It was there, hidden beneath her blouse, reminding her who she was.

  She wasted a few minutes staring out over the unusual plants scattered across the desert to her right. She’d come this far. She could do this. Continue on, into town. Face whatever waited there. Begin her new life.

  She deserved the chance.

  Straightening her shoulders, Caroline opened the book again, flipped back several pages.

  And forced herself to read.

  Monday, November 22, 2004

  I want to die. It would be so much more expedient to die. I went from being a child to being Randy’s wife and Jesse’s mom and now, suddenly, unexpectedly, I’m neither. Who am I, then? I ask and ask, and find there are no answers. And more frightening yet, I ask my heart who I want to be—and still can’t find answers.

  I’ve been married. Given it all I had. Imagined Randy and me in our eighties on the porch swing, smiling and trying to listen through our respective hearing aids to Jesse’s grandchildren playing around the vibrant flower beds set off by a lush green yard. In this vision, the swing is treated birch, soft and supple, the porch floor solid oak. The house newly painted pristine white with forest-green shutters. And the porch rail strong enough to withstand any kind of weather.

  Just like my real porch rail, my visions are chipped and faded, and any possibility of having them come true is lost forever. I will never, no matter what, grow old with Jesse’s father and, with him, watch Jesse’s grandchildren at play.

  And what else do I have to offer? How can I change my future? I have no money. And no training that would allow me to make money. I can run the farm by myself for now, but even I know I won’t always be able to do that.

  My heart is empty. There is no joy. No excitement or anticipation. I’ve lived my best years and

  Oh, God, what am I going to do?

  Tears fell on the page, bringing Caroline out of that heartache and into the present. She held her breath, the sobs threatening to break free. She wasn’t going to lose control now. She just couldn’t.

  She could turn the page. Travel to Frankfort, Kentucky. To the dedication of a building that had been designed by a Shelter Valley architect, and the political gathering that had been part of the proceedings. She could read what happened next.

  Instead, Caroline hid the book in her glove compartment. It would be safe there. Safe from harm. And she would be safe from it.

  Starting the truck, thanking it silently for cooperating on the first turn of the key, Caroline backed so slowly she barely kicked up any dust. She clunked the old vehicle into gear and drove toward Shelter Valley.

  Before she could worry about starting college at the age of almost thirty-five, or coming face-to-face with a twin sister she’d never met, before she looked for a new home, or a bed to sleep in that night, she had something else to do.