So what is it doing in Pat’s apartment?

  It isn’t, she realizes, staring into a drawer that’s empty, aside from a couple of pencils and an old issue ofTV Guide .

  It isn’t here at all.

  Ashley must have been imagining things.

  She slowly closes the drawer and walks back to the door, before thinking better of it.

  No.

  God, no, please…

  For an endless moment, Brynn is rooted to the floor, staring at the shocking sight that lies before her.

  Even in the dim light, she can see that her kitchen has been transformed as if for a child’s birthday party: crepe paper, balloons, paper place settings.

  Just as Fiona’s dining room was.

  In the center of the table is a cake, spiked with unlit candles. It reads Happy Birthday in expertly scrolled pink icing, and, in darker lettering, DEAR BRYNN.

  Just like Fiona’s cake.

  She’s here.

  The realization doesn’t strike Brynn like a lightning bolt; no, it painstakingly makes its way into her consciousness, seeping slowly like a pool of blood from beneath a closet door.

  She’s here, and she’s going to kill Pat…

  Then she’s going to kill me.

  My baby. Her arms cross over her stomach. No.

  And Caleb, and Jeremy, and Garth…

  They’re going to be left alone…

  Just like we were, when Mommy died.

  History is destined to repeat itself. Brynn’s children will grow up as she did, longing for maternal love snatched away far too soon. They’re younger, far younger, than Brynn was when she lost her mother.

  I can’t let it happen.

  I have to get away.

  She begins to spin on her heel—then freezes at the telltale sound of a match being struck, and a flickering, eerie light permeates the room.

  It’s not as bad as Ashley feared…being back at school.

  Not even on a gloomy day like this.

  In fact, she almost welcomes the familiar glare of overhead light banishing the gray behind the tall windows, the hiss of steam heat, the smell of wet wool, and, here in the crowded cafeteria, of hot dogs.

  She can almost pretend that her life beyond the walls of Saint Vincent’s School is the same as it always was. She can almost imagine that her mother is at work in her office a few blocks away.

  “Where do you want to sit?” Meg asks as they hesitate with their plastic lunch trays, surveying the rows of tables.

  Ashley can feel people looking up to stare at her, nudging each other, whispering.

  Look, there she is. The girl whose mother was killed.

  “I don’t care,” she tells Meg under her breath, “let’s just find a spot, fast.”

  They carry their trays to the vacant end of a table by the window and sit down.

  “So my mom said you’re going to live with your dad for good now,” Meg says.

  “How does your mom know?”

  “She talks to him a lot, I think.”

  “Really?” Ashley dully recalls how Daddy called Meg’s mom “Cyn” that day at the movies.

  “Maybe they’ll fall in love and get married after all,” Meg says.

  Ashley contemplates that for a moment. That prospect doesn’t hold the same allure it once did. She doesn’t want a stepmother. Or a new mother.

  She only wants her own mother back.

  She swallows hard over a lump in her throat and blinks away tears as she unwraps her straw.

  “Your dad told my mom he wants to move into a better place, though.”

  Ashley nods, jabbing her straw into her carton of chocolate milk.

  Daddy told her that, too.

  “He wants to go someplace where you can have your own room—a real room. And maybe even a pet.”

  “Really?” Ashley looks up. That might be kind of cool.

  Then she remembers something, and shakes her head.

  “What’s wrong?” Meg asks.

  “I don’t want a pet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I would be really upset if it ran away or something.”

  “It won’t,” says Meg, who has two dogs and a cat.

  “It might.”

  Ashley can’t help but think about poor Mrs. Josephson, who lives upstairs from Daddy. Her cat ran away a few weeks ago, and she’s still looking for her. She sounds so sad whenever Ashley hears her standing at the door, calling for her lost cat.

  “Here, kitty kitty…Come here, Agatha…”

  “What are you doing?” Brynn asks in dread as Pat’s hand—the one that isn’t holding a lit match—once again closes around her arm. Hard.

  But this time, she doesn’t mistake the iron grip as protective. This time, she sees it for what it is: a vise from which now there is no escape.

  Pat.

  Pat is the one.

  Not Rachel.

  “But…why?” she chokes out.

  Ignoring the question, he drags her across the floor to the table. There, he holds the lit match to each of the three candles as it burns perilously close to his fingers.

  “One for every decade,” he says calmly, impervious to the fire singing his skin. Sickened, she can smell it burning.

  “Why are you doing this?” Brynn whispers.

  “I think you know by now.” He waves the match to extinguish it.

  She shakes her head mutely, struggling in his grasp, knowing it’s futile to attempt escape.

  Her only hope is to keep him talking. “But Idon’t know, Pat,” she says desperately. Truthfully. “I don’t know why.”

  For the first time, she spots the gift-wrapped box on the table. The pink paper matches the one on the box she glimpsed that day in Fiona’s dining room, gripped in a pair of waxen, lifeless hands.

  “Please…I just want to have my baby. Please don’t do this.”

  Pat goes absolutely still for a moment, as if something just unexpectedly permeated his consciousness.

  Has he suddenly come to his senses?

  She dares to look at him, and sees that his dark eyes are unmistakably glittering with madness and hate.

  Hearing Kylah’s key turn in the lock, Isaac hurriedly lifts Smoochy off his lap and sets the purring cat gently on the floor.

  “Nowyou decide to like me,” he mutters, shaking his head as the cat rubs against his ankles. Brushing cat hair from his jeans, he turns toward the door as Kylah steps inside.

  “Hey,” she says, looking surprised to see him. Pleasantly surprised. “You’re here.”

  “I promised I would be when you got back.”

  “I know. I just…”

  She didn’t think he’d keep his promise.

  Wearily, she sets her purse on the floor, closes the door, and looks around. “Your stuff is gone.”

  It didn’t take her long to figure that out.

  Surprising, since there wasn’t much around here that belonged to him. He never fully moved in, so it didn’t take him long to fully move out. Just his papers, and some books and CDs, computer equipment, and clothes.

  Now it’s all back in his apartment fifteen blocks away.

  “You’re leaving,” she says heavily, not moving, just looking at him. “I thought you’d be gone before I got here, actually. I didn’t expect you to stick around and say good-bye.”

  Expect?

  Does that mean she thought this would happen—him leaving? That she’s considered how it was likely to happen?

  An unexpected swell of contrition laps at his soul.

  “I wouldn’t just run out on you, Kylah. Is that what you thought?”

  She looks him in the eye and nods.

  “My stuff is gone. I’m not. Not really.”

  What are you doing? You were going. You were outta here.

  “Just because I don’t want to live together right now doesn’t mean it’s over,” he hears himself say. “I just need some space.”

  Her blue eyes roll toward the ceiling and she sighs.

  “I know it’s a cliché. But I don’t want this to be over; I just—I should never have moved in so soon. But I still do want us to be together, I want to work on—”

  “I don’t,” Kylah reaches back abruptly and jerks the door open again.

  “You want me to leave? For good?”

  Her resolute nod slams him hard.

  That’s what you had in mind, remember? You didn’t want to work on your relationship with her, you wanted it to be over, so you could focus on…

  Rachel.

  It always comes down to that.

  No other relationship in his life can replace the one he had with her…

  Because it never ended.

  It only ebbed, like the tide, and he’s been waiting for it to sweep in again.

  “I’d tell you to come back when and if you ever find Rachel,” Kylah says, arms folded, “but you know what? I’m not so sure she’s even what you’re looking for.”

  A search of Pat’s small apartment doesn’t yield the silver sorority bracelet, or much of anything else…

  Until she gets to the locked file cabinet.

  It’s a cheap metal one, the kind you can buy in an office-supply warehouse store. The kind whose flimsy lock can be easily picked with a bobby pin, a trick she learned back in her days at Saint Vincent’s. It was the only way to keep track of what the nuns were writing in your files—and, on occasion, to change certain details you don’t necessarily want on your permanent record.

  She’s reaching up to pluck a bobby pin from her hair before she remembers there isn’t one.

  Dee doesn’t wear her hair in a chignon like her twin sister, Fiona. No, Dee’s hair is long and loose…

  And it’s driving me absolutely crazy.

  Not as crazy, though, as having given up smoking cold turkey. But maybe it won’t be much longer.

  In the kitchenette, she rummages around, looking for something to use. In the process, she comes across a prescription bottle of sleeping capsules tucked in the back of a drawer. An unfamiliar name, Esther Josephson, is on the label. Did he steal them? And why would he need sleeping pills? That lazy S.O.B. never had any trouble sleeping.

  She pockets the bottle and continues her search until she’s assembled a corn cob holder, a paper clip, a metal skewer, and assorted other potential picks.

  The corn cob holder doesn’t work; the prongs are too short.

  The paper clip does, though.

  The drawer slides open.

  She begins rifling through the files inside, not quite sure what she’s looking for…

  Until she finds it.

  “I wanted my baby, too, Brynn.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asks Pat, trying to keep her voice from giving way to shrill hysteria. “You have your baby. Ashley is—”

  “No! My other baby.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  He cuts in impatiently, “With Rachel.”

  Rachel?

  Rachel was…pregnant?

  That was her secret, Brynn realizes. That was why she was so distraught. And no wonder.

  “You were there that night,” she breathes, remembering the snapping twig in the forest, the sensation of being watched. “Why?”

  “To talk to Rachel.”

  Keep him distracted, Brynn tells herself, and asks, “What did you have to talk to her about?”

  “I needed to say I was sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For what I said.”

  Miraculously, she’s sustaining a conversation. And every second, she’s trying wildly to figure out a way to save herself, and her baby.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said…”

  She’s startled by the choked emotion in his voice, but she does her best not to react. She can’t jar him out of the past, because then he’ll remember what he means to do now, in the present.

  “I said…something terrible…But I loved Fee, and I knew if she ever found out about me and Rachel…because it was just once. I gave her a ride from the Rat, and—”

  Brynn is shaking her head in disbelief. Rachel slept with Pat? Rachel was carrying Pat’s child?

  “Why did I say it?” he asks plaintively. “I told her to get rid of it. Our own child,” he whispers, tortured.

  And in that instant, Brynn can only imagine how Rachel must have felt.

  How she herself would feel if someone told her to get rid of the tiny life that’s taken hold in her own womb.

  “Rachel was such a live wire, she was livid. She threatened to tell Fiona, and she took off. I let her go, but the more I thought about it…Well, I ended up going over to the sorority house to find Rachel and tell her I didn’t mean it.”

  No,Brynn thinks, watching him.You did mean it, and of course it made Rachel angry. You were afraid she was going to tell Fee, so you came after her, to do God only knows what, to stop her from talking .

  “You saw us leaving the house, and followed us up to the Prom, didn’t you, Pat? You saw her fall.”

  He nods. “After you left, I went down there. She was dead.”

  Like Tildy said.

  “So I carried her away,” Pat goes on in a monotone. “I buried her way up in the woods. I didn’t want her to be found. I was afraid…”

  Afraid that if her body ever turned up, her pregnancy would have been revealed. And connected to him. And Fiona would have found out.

  Now the pieces are falling into place.

  Oh, God.

  “It all would have been okay, Brynn, if Fee had just loved me the way I loved her. But she robbed me. She stole my baby.”

  “No, Pat, Fee gave you Ashley.”

  “She destroyed my babies,” Pat roars.

  “You mean the one Rachel was carrying? But Rachel fell, Pat. You said yourself she was dead when you—”

  “She was…but maybe the baby wasn’t yet. If the four of you had gotten help right away, the baby might have survived.”