“Oh, gosh.” I immediately started heading for the basement door.

“Don’t worry about it. Seriously, leave it alone. It’s just T-shirts and posters and stuff.”

“Let me clean it up.” Michael DeSanto didn’t seem the type of guy who you wanted mad, and I knew that Domers (what we in the Midwest called Notre Dame grads and fans) could get pissed off quick if you messed with their school in any way.

“I put the breakable stuff up high.” Lucy waved a kettle. “Are you in for some tea? Would that be good for your stomach?”

“Absolutely.” And hopefully our tea ceremony will last through the downloading of your husband’s hard drive.

Five minutes later, Lucy and I settled onto bar stools at the granite countertop. She had set out small china cups and tiny mint cookies on a china plate. “What else can I get you? How are you feeling?” she kept asking me.

We got talking about Chicago again, and Lucy admitted how lonely she was.

“Michael is great, of course,” she said quickly, giving me the distinct impression that the opposite was true. “But he works a lot and he has a ton of friends here who always want him to golf or do guys’ dinners.”

“What about Bethany?” I remembered her friend from the playground.

“She’s the best.” Lucy sipped her tea, then stared into it with those cornflower-blue eyes, as if trying to glean answers in the tea leaves. “But she works, and so she’s got a lot on her plate. Really, my best friends are my sisters, and we’re on the phone all the time, but I’d just love to be closer. What about your family?”

I decided it would be easier to talk about my real mom and brother, rather than make up some crap. I said that my mother lived in Chicago. I tried not to think about my mom, and her confessions, and my wonderings about whether she’d had anything to do with Forester’s death. I told her how we called my brother Sheets. She laughed, raising her face from her tea and throwing her blond hair back, exposing her white neck. That laugh seemed to ring through the kitchen and maybe the whole house, and in that moment I felt better than I had in weeks.

We talked for about an hour, and I kept thinking that Lucy was the kind of person I would love to be friends with. While our lunch looked like the perfect first meal shared between girlfriends, after her laugh died away, I felt horribly guilty that I was lying to her, that I was there for more than her friendship.

Then a rumbling came from the back of the house.

“What’s that?” I said.

“The garage door,” Lucy said. “Michael’s home early.”

60

“Michael is home?” I couldn’t help it. My voice came out loud.

I looked at my watch. The download had been going on for fifty-five minutes. Was it enough? And how could I get to the office? I couldn’t very well just sprint from the room without causing her to follow me. And it would take time to get the computer back together. Mayburn said that was the hardest part.

“Yeah, he is.” Lucy bit her lip, then she stood. “It’s great when he’s home. Really.” I don’t know who she was trying to convince, but she wasn’t particularly successful.

She started cleaning up the tea tray and the sweetener. Her gestures had a fast, nervous quality to them.

I stood, trying to figure out what in the hell to do. I was about to claim intestinal difficulties again, when the backdoor of the kitchen opened. And there was Michael DeSanto.

He was dressed in a black suit with a lime-green tie. I was struck by how technically handsome the man was, but how dangerous he felt.

“Hi!” My voice came out like a chirp. “I’m Izzy. We met at Prada last night.” I advanced on him and stuck out my hand, physically blocking his path to his office.

What should I do? What should I do?

“Yeah, sure.” He gave my hand a quick pump, his eyes cold and flat.

As I stood there, dumbfounded, I looked into those eyes and noticed how light they were-brown, certainly, but almost like a brown paper bag, a wet one, bordering on translucent. The effect was spooky, and the proximity of him put my nerves into overdrive.

I wanted to run down the hall, but that would be alarming and he’d follow me. I had to get him out of the house, or keep him away from the office while I got back in there. But there was nothing I could do now that wouldn’t draw attention.

I went back to the stool in front of my tea. After I’d taken a seat, I saw that Lucy was hugging her husband, yet he was staring at me over her shoulder, those light brown eyes examining me in a curious and clinical way.

Michael DeSanto remained quiet as Lucy pulled away and began chattering about the kids and how well they were playing downstairs. He glanced at her and nodded at an occasional thing she was saying, but mostly he was looking at me.

Lucy seemed not to notice. She was anxious and distracted around her husband. She continued to chatter about the kids. She cleaned up the teakettle and the box of cookies.

Michael nodded blandly at her, but he kept staring at me. It was freaking me out.

Finally, he interrupted his wife. “I’ve got to get some work done.” He took a step in the direction of his office.

The pulse in my neck banged so loudly, it was all I could hear in my head. I had to stop him.

I jumped up, blocking his path. “Kaitlyn destroyed some of your Notre Dame stuff,” I blurted. “I’m so sorry.”

I looked at Lucy, whose face had gone scared. “Oh, it’s not that bad-”

“I’m really sorry,” I said, talking over her. “She’s still down there right now. I hope she hasn’t torn up anything else.”

Michael gave Lucy a murderous glance, which made her bite her lip. I felt terrible about throwing Lucy to the wolves, in this case one wolf-her husband-but I could think of no other way to get him out of the room. And like a good Domer, Michael bolted and headed for the basement.

Lucy bit her lip and looked at me. “You shouldn’t have gotten him worked up…”

“I’m sorry.”

“I suppose we should see how it’s going?” she said with trepidation.

“I’ll be right there.” I put my hand on my stomach with one hand. “I’m not feeling so well again.”

I picked up my bag and left. When I got to the bathroom door, I stopped and strained my ears toward the kitchen. It was hard to hear over the pounding pulse in my head, but it seemed everyone was in the basement now.

I ran from the bathroom to his office, pulling on my gloves. I looked at the LCD screen on the Logicube. Download 99% complete, it said.

“Go, go, go,” I whispered to the thing. I tapped my foot, trying to ignore my ragged breathing. A minute went by, each second taking decades. Finally, the LCD screen changed and read, Download complete!

I ripped the hard drive from the Logicube, throwing the Logicube, Write Blocker and external hard drive-all still humming and attached to each other-into my bag. Now I had to get Michael’s hard drive back in his computer. I wrestled with it. No matter how I turned it, it didn’t seem to fit properly.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” I whimpered. My hands were shaking, which wasn’t helping matters.

And then I felt something horrible.

It started somewhere in my belly and it crawled its way up through my chest and into my heart and then into my neck and my arms and legs until it finally reached my face.

“Shit,” I whispered, the stop-swearing campaign completely abandoned. That little flop-sweating problem I had-the one that only showed its sad, pathetic self in the midst of public speaking-had decided to rear its ugly head. My face pulsed red with the flush, and my body started sweating hard.

I kept turning the thing and twisting the hard drive, trying to get it into place, but my hands were so clammy under my gloves I couldn’t seem to hold it straight or fit it in.