Annette couldn’t move. Her heart was racing, her eyes wouldn’t focus, and she had to will herself not to give Thomas the satisfaction of collapsing at his feet. She said, “I don’t understand…”

“I don’t want you to have control over this situation, Annette. If you’ll send Jean-Paul to me, I promise I’ll do everything I can to get him to forget about vengeance or justice and leave you alone.”

“Why should I trust you?”

He looked at her a moment. “Have I ever gone back on my word to you?”

She didn’t answer, refusing to acknowledge his honesty, but knowing he was faultlessly devoted to “his word.”

“Annette…”

Was he going to plead with her? She smiled at the prospect. But he trailed off and started back into the shadows toward the carriageway. “All right,” she said. “I’ll at least think about your idea. I’ll let you know.”

“As you wish,” he said.

“Don’t pull that sanctimonious tone on me. I never wanted any of this to happen-”

“Why not, Annette?” Thomas asked sarcastically, glancing back at her. “It’s such an adventure.”

“Goddamn you to hell, you arrogant bastard!”

He gave her a small, secret smile, satisfied, at least, that he’d gotten to her. Back out on the street, the night air was brisk and windy, the big houses aglow, and Thomas fancied them filled with laughter and people who cared about each other. It was a nice fancy. He had decided against polishing off his bottle of blueberry wine and instead had found himself on Mt. Vernon Street for the second time in twenty-six years-and in twelve hours. It hadn’t changed since morning, or, really, all that much since 1963.

Mindful of heart attacks and headlines, he nonetheless got back to West Cedar as quickly as he dared.

Twenty-Nine

By three o’clock in the morning Jared was ready to decapitate the cuckoo in Thomas Blackburn’s parlor clock and maybe strangle R.J.’s cat, Sweatshirt, who insisted on pawing his afghan and climbing over his face. Jared had counted off midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock, and every half hour in between, and now, pushing the cat off him one more time, he waited for three to sound.

There it was: “Cuckoo…cuckoo…cuckoo.”

He threw off his afghan and sat up on the couch. His mind was spinning with images and questions, with R.J.’s still-beautiful smile. They had walked past sundown, trying to sort things out, but often talking about nothing-the little old lady who used to run the chocolate shop on Charles Street, whether that was really Mrs. Caldwell’s silver in the antique shop window and had she gone broke, this year’s citrus crop in Florida, the backless dress in the Newbury Street boutique window. Rebecca had shoved the Jupiter Stones into her handbag, which she slung cavalierly over her shoulder.

“Aren’t you worried about getting mugged?” he’d asked.

“That’d solve all our problems, wouldn’t it? We could send Gerard after some poor mugger.”

Thomas was still in the garden when they’d gotten back, and Jared hadn’t liked how he’d looked: ashen-faced and a million years old, knowing things he wouldn’t tell.

Knowing things both he and Jared knew and hadn’t told anyone, including Rebecca.

Seeing her again hadn’t made the lie he’d let her believe any easier to bear. But he had felt he had no choice.

In 1975, still weakened from his weeks in the hospital in Manila and then Hawaii, Jared had come to Thomas for advice. He hadn’t known who else to go to, who else would understand Quentin and Rebecca and Tam and a man’s responsibility to an innocent child in the way Thomas would.

“Do what you feel you must,” Thomas had counseled him. “It’s all anyone can ask of you.”

So he had. And in so doing, he’d lost R.J. Already burned by two men in her life-a father who’d promised to come home and hadn’t and a grandfather who’d ruined her family’s good name-she hadn’t been easy on a lover who’d admitted he’d fathered a child by another woman.

He raked his hands through his hair. The hell with this. He pulled on his jeans and tiptoed upstairs to Rebecca’s room on the third floor, half expecting Athena to streak out of her room with a carving knife.

Light angled through her cracked door. Jared knocked, softly.

“It’s open,” she said.

Rebecca stood in her window, looking down at the street, and Jared’s stomach clenched at the sight of her, draped in a silk satin nightgown that probably had set her back as much as she’d used to make summers working in the O’Keefe citrus groves. It was cream-colored with tiny yellow flowers embroidered along the neckline, softening the stark expression on her angular face. She was tough, this woman he’d once loved. Tough on others, tougher on herself. “Cut yourself some slack,” he used to tell her during their too-short time together. “It’s okay to be human.” And let me be human, too, he’d wanted to say. Let me make mistakes.

In her book, he had.

Seeing her in the expensive, feminine nightgown highlighted how she’d changed. Fourteen years ago, every time she’d spent a nickel on herself she’d thought about her college expenses, her five younger brothers, the starving, the homeless, the poor. Jared wondered if she’d agonized over buying the nightgown or had accepted it was okay to spend a few bucks on herself.

“I thought you might be Grandfather,” she said.

“Not old enough. Mind if I come in?”

“Of course not-have a seat.” As she moved away from the window and climbed onto her childhood bed, she caught his look and laughed. “I know it’s ridiculous, my living her like an eight-year-old, but it’s been good.”

Jared pulled up a chair and sat down. He noticed the light scent of the powder she’d used after her shower and could see a dusty streak on her throat. With her hair hanging down and her cheeks flushed and that damned nightgown, she looked like a beautiful virgin princess, but he thought better of telling her so.

“Your bruise doesn’t look so bad now,” he said.

“It’s fine. You couldn’t sleep?”

“No.”

She leaned back against the headboard. “I’ve been up here pacing and thinking and-I don’t know. Sometimes I think I was too hard on you, Jared. It was easy just to blame you for what happened between us instead of looking at myself, as well. It was so long ago. We were in such different places in our lives.” She caught herself and smiled suddenly. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear this.”

“No, go on. Please.”

She talked for a long time, exposing herself to him in a way she never had before. Coming to Saigon and witnessing the collapse of South Vietnam had had an impact on her that he’d been too blind or stupid or just too convinced of her indomitability to have noticed at the time.

“I looked around that devastated country and realized my father had died there trying to do some good and it all amounted to nothing. Zero, Jared. People were still fighting and suffering and what could I do about it? I was overwhelmed. I’d set some fairly tough goals for myself. I had years of school ahead of me. I was going to set the world on fire and clear the Blackburn name-and when I was in Saigon, all that seemed so selfish and useless. There were people running scared for their lives, people without homes or food-little kids with no one to take care of them. I looked around and realized that I could work the rest of my life and maybe-maybe-make a small difference. So why bother at all?”

Her eyes were huge and glistening in the soft light, and she explained that even without Tam and Mai, she didn’t know what she’d have done when she finally came home from Saigon. Finally, she quit school, got a flunky job as a designer while taking art classes, and worked on Junk Mind.

“It took me a while,” she said, “but now I’m really glad I made my fortune coming up with a game that brings people together for a few laughs the way Junk Mind does. I’ve shot a man, Jared, and I’ve seen people suffer and die violent deaths. It doesn’t bother me a bit to know something I created entertains millions of people. And the design work I do doesn’t make any great artistic statements, but that’s okay.” She grinned at him. “Me, I appreciate a nicely designed restaurant menu.”