Dani couldn’t remember. Or she just didn’t know.

Twenty-five years tonight.

What happened to you, Mama? Are you alive? Are you dead?

Why did you leave me?

She dropped in more peaches, burning her fingers. She knew she might as well peel peaches until dawn, do up the whole lot of them, because there was no way she’d get any sleep tonight.

Eight

Zeke drove back into Saratoga too fast for his own comfort. It wasn’t the speed in and of itself that bothered him. It was how much he’d let Dani distract him. She could easily worm her way under his skin and bore a hole deep inside him before he’d ever realized he’d let down his armor.

Maybe she already had.

He slid his car to a stop across the street from the Chandler cottage on North Broadway. Kate Murtagh herself was hefting a folded table into a pickup truck, the evening’s festivities now another Saratoga memory. Zeke wasn’t sure what he was doing here. Waiting for answers to fall out of the sky?

Dani had gone after her burglar with a three-inch red high heel.

Definitely a hothead.

But she was also courageous and determined, and even now he could see her liquid black eyes shining in the darkness.

He could hear Kate speaking to her crew. “You sure we have everything? We leave so much as a gum wrapper out here, and Auntie Sara will have us back cleaning the place with a toothbrush.”

Auntie Sara.

Had Roger told his wife that Joe Cutler’s little brother was in town?

“Hell, Naomi,” he whispered to himself, “I should have just pretended I never got your letter.”

But he had never been any good at pretending, and he was here.

Kate spotted him and marched over, boldly poking her head in through the passenger window. “So you’re Zeke Cutler,” she said.

He smiled. “I know who you are, too.”

“I’m Dani’s friend is who I am. You drove her home?”

“I did. She arrived safe and sound.”

“You didn’t put that bruise on her arm?”

“I did not.”

Kate’s brow furrowed, and she looked tired. It must have been a long night for her. “I hope not, seeing how she got in your car with you. But you listen here, Mr. Cutler-I’m on the case. I may slice carrots and whip up crème fraîche for a living, but this is my town, and I’ve got friends here.” She patted the car door. “I’ll have my eye on you.”

Didn’t these women know he was licensed to carry a gun? Zeke stared out at Dani’s tall, attractive friend. “I can see why you and Ms. Pembroke are friends. You both eat nails for breakfast.”

“You hold that thought,” she said and marched back to her pickup.

In another moment, Sara Chandler Stone took her place in the passenger window. “It’s been a long time, Zeke.” Her voice was quiet and ladylike, more so than it had been twenty-five years ago.

He nodded. “Yes.”

She smiled, a cool, sad smile that didn’t reach her deep blue eyes. “Welcome to Saratoga.”

“Nice town.”

“Will you be at the Chandler Stakes tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

Color rose in her cheeks, which looked even paler in the harsh artificial glare of the streetlights. “Even at thirteen you were laconic.” She touched a hand to her hair, still perfectly in place, and he saw the manicured nails, not too long, not too radically colored. “I’d like to talk to you-not tonight. In the morning?”

“Sara-”

“I’ll be at the track for breakfast.”

She darted away as quickly and unexpectedly as a hummingbird, and it seemed to Zeke that she had become everything she’d dreaded becoming.

Maybe she should have run off with Joe and saved them both.

Zeke turned around in the entrance to Skidmore College up the street, then went back down Broadway through town, following the same route he had with Dani. He didn’t have a plan-he was still just punting-but he knew what he had to do, at least for tonight.

He parked his car in the Pembroke’s guest lot, wondering if come morning Dani would have it towed. But he’d take that risk. There was a part of him that was looking forward to having her try to toss his ass off her property-the part, he thought, that he had to keep under a very tight lid.

He followed a brick path through the darkness. In the distance he could hear an owl’s hoot. Nearby, the purr of tree toads. The grounds were quiet, the jam makers and rock climbers gone to bed or to town to party. Leaving the walk, he found his way across gardens and lawns and down the hillside to the pink, mauve and purple cottage at the edge of the woods.

He sat under a pine tree in a small meadow of wildflowers that looked as though they’d been planted there intentionally. He had a good view of the side entrance, a reasonable view of the front and an excellent view of the side-garden entrance, but none whatsoever of its rear gate. Fortunately, it squeaked. And every window in the place was open. If somebody got in, he’d hear Dani yell. Provided she wasn’t too stubborn to yell.

One day he’d discuss her attitude with Sam Lincoln Jones. Sam liked to analyze people’s attitudes. He said it helped him think he was making use of his education.

Until then Zeke would just do some thinking and keep an eye on things, in case Quint Skinner made a return visit.

Just before dawn, her last peach safely in the freezer, Dani gave up on trying to sleep. She kept seeing her mother waving to her from the basket of Mattie’s hot-air balloon and feeling herself catapulting across her own bedroom, feeling the terror of not knowing who’d pushed her, who’d burglarized her house.

And she kept seeing Zeke’s dark eyes and thinking about what great shoulders and thighs he had. He was the kind of man who could make a woman melt.

Could make her melt.

She’d tried listening to the tree toads. Sometimes yoga helped, or a hot bath, or hot milk. But she knew nothing would work tonight. She threw on a sweatshirt and jeans and headed outside with a simple multicolored flat kite made of nonconductive plastic, slipping quietly into her meadow. The sounds and smells of the night and the cool, damp grass on her bare feet, between her toes, eased her tension.

She estimated the wind speed at five or six miles per hour. Fine for kite flying.

With the wind at her back, she tossed the kite into the air a few times, until finally she felt it pulling and let out some line. It rose above the usual ground-air turbulence, higher, higher. Then it was soaring.

She let out more line, grinning, not thinking about her mother, her loneliness, not even hearing the tree toads.

The sun peeked over the treetops in streaks of orange and red, edged with pale pink. In its center her kite was a bold dot of color.

Staring at the dawn, she suddenly could see her mother with more clarity than she’d been able to see her in years. Her generous mouth, her blue saucer eyes, her smile. She could smell her mother’s French perfume and hear her laugh, not her delicate Chandler-lady laugh, but the throaty, exuberant laugh of the woman she’d wanted to become. It was as if she were telling her daughter not to hold back, not to let anything or anyone stand in her way, but to dare to go after what she wanted.

But I have, she thought. She had the springs, the Pembroke, her friends.

She didn’t have intimacy. There was no lover in her life. Zeke should have been the last man to remind her of the absence of romance in her life, but he had. Yet her mother had had a husband and a child, and they hadn’t been enough.

Her kite continued to gain altitude, riding the wind from Dani’s fingertips.

She could hear herself now as a little girl, promising to keep her mother’s secret. She’d never tell anyone, she’d said, sincere, frightened as her mother towered over her, so beautiful, so frightened herself.