It choked him up, that flick-the way important movies always do, those films that give us our role models, whether it’s the first time we see them or the hundredth.

Oh yes, Joshua Nathan LeFevre-an honors English major at George Mason University, a tall young man with his father’s perfect physique and military bearing and with his mother’s brains-had a sentimental side to him thick as a mountain. (The week that students in his nineteenth-century-lit seminar were picking apart a Henry James novel like crows, LeFevre had slunk back to his apartment with a very different book hidden in a brown paper bag. He’d locked his door and read the entire novel in one sitting, crying unashamedly when he came to the last page of The Bridges of Madison County.)

Sentimental, a romantic. And accordingly, Sidney Poitier-rather than Samuel L. Jackson or Wesley Snipes-appealed to him.

So, what would Mr. Tibbs do now?

Okay, he was saying to himself, let’s analyze it. Step by step. Here’s a girl’s got a bad home life. None of that talk-show abuse, no, but it’s clearly a case of Daddy don’t care and Momma don’t care. So she drinks more than she ought and hangs with a bad crowd-until she meets LeFevre. And seems to get her act together though she falls off the normal wagon every once in a while. And then one night she climbs up to the top of a water tower (and why didn’t she call me, dammit, instead of guzzling a fifth of Comfort with Donna and Brittany, the Easy Sisters?). And once she’s up there she does a little dance on the scaffolding and the cops and fire department come to get her down.

And she goes to see this shrink…

Who tells her she’s got to break up with him.

And so she does.

“Why?” LeFevre had asked her a few weeks ago as they sat in his car, parked in front of her house, on what turned out to be their last date.

“Why?”

“It’s not the differences…“ Meaning the age, meaning the race. It was… what the hell was it? He replayed Megan’s little speech.

“It’s just that I’m not ready for the same kind of relationship you want.”

And what kind is that? I don’t remember proposing. I don’t think we’ve even talked about our relationship. We just have fun together.

“Oh, Josh, honey, don’t cry… I need to see things, do things. I feel, I don’t know, all tied down or something… Living with Bett’s like living with a roommate. You know, her date for Saturday’s the biggest deal in the world. All she worries about is her skin getting old.”

Old skin? I like your mom. She’s pretty, smart, offbeat. I don’t get it. What’s her skin got to do with breaking up? LeFevre had been very confused as he sat in his tiny car beside the woman he loved.

“Oh, honey, I just need to get away. I want to travel, see things. You know.”

Travel? Where was this coming from? I’ve got a trust fund, Mom and Dad’re loaded, I’ve lived in Jeddab, Cyprus, London and Germany. I speak three languages. I can show you more of the world than the Cunard Line.

“Okay, What it is is this therapist. Dr. Hanson? See, he thinks it’s not a good idea for me to be in a relationship with you right now.”

Then we’ll back off a bit. See each other once a week or so. How’s that?

“No, you don’t understand,” Megan had said brutally; pulling away from him as he tried to take the Southern Comfort bottle out of her hand. And she’d climbed out of the passenger seat and run into her house.

Cruising down I-66 now, LeFevre leaned over and sniffed the headrest to see if he could smell her perfume. Heartbreakingly, he couldn’t. He pushed the accelerator harder, edging up on the gray Mercedes.

‘We, you don’t understand.”

No, he sure as hell hadn’t.

Joshua LeFevre had waited a tormented three weeks then-this morning-woke up on autopilot. He hadn’t been able to take the girl’s silence and the suffocating frustration anymore. He’d driven to Hanson’s office around the time Megan’s appointment would be over. He’d parked up the street, waiting for her to come out. Josh LeFevre could bench-press 220 pounds, he could bicycle 150 miles a day. But he wasn’t going for intimidation. Oh no. He was going to Poitier the man, not Snipes him.

Why, he was going to ask the doctor, did you talk her into breaking up with me? Isn’t that unethical? Let’s sit down together. The three of us. Josh had a dozen arguments all prepared. He believed he could talk his way back into her heart.

“No, you don’t understand.”

But now he did.

God, I’m an idiot.

The doctor had her break up because he wanted to luck her

No psychobabble here. No inner child. Nope. The shrink wanted to play the two-backed beast with LeFevre’s girlfriend. Simple as a shot in the head.

From where he’d been parked near the office he hadn’t been able to see clearly but suddenly, before the appointment was supposed to be over, Megan’s Tempo was pulling out of the lot-with the shrink himself driving, it seemed, and heading north.

He’d followed the car to Manassas -to Megan’s dad’s farm-where LeFevre’d waited for about twenty minutes. Then, just when he’d been about to pull into the long drive, the car had sped out again and they’d driven to the Vienna Metro parking lot. They’d switched cars-taking the German shrinkmobile-and headed west on 1-66.

What was it all about? Had she picked up some clothes from her father’s place? Was she going away for the weekend?

LeFevre was crazed. He had to do something.

But what would Sidney Poitier do? The script had changed.

Wait till they got to the doctor’s house? The inn they were going to? Confront them there?

No, that didn’t seem right.

Oh, hell, he should just go home… Forget this crap. Be a man.

His foot eased up on the gas… Good idea, get off at the next exit. Quit acting like a lovesick loser It’s embarrassing. Go home. Read your Melville. You’ve got a presentation due a week from Monday…

The Mercedes pulled ahead.

Then the thought burst within him: Bullshit. I’m going to deconstruct motifs in some fucking story about a big-ass whale while my girlfriend's in bed whispering into her therapist’s ear?

He jammed his foot to the floor

Would Poitier do this?

You bet.

And so LeFevre kept his sweating hands on the wheel of the car, straining forward, and sped after the woman whom he loved and, he believed somewhere in a portion of his sloppy heart, who loved him still.

“She’s run away?” Bett whispered.

The four of them were in the living room, like strangers at a cocktail party, knees pointed at one another, sitting upright and waiting to become comfortable. Konnie continued, “But y’all should consider that good news. The profile is most runaways come back on their own within a month.”

Bett stared out the window at the misty darkness. “A month,” she announced, as if answering a trivia question. “No, no. She wouldn’t leave. Not without saying anything.”

Konnie glanced at Beauridge. Tate caught the look.

“I’m afraid she did say something.” Konnie handed Bett and Tate what he’d found upstairs. “Letters to both of you. Under her pillow.”

“Why there?” Bett asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“So you wouldn’t find ‘em right away,” Konnie explained. “Give her a head start. I’ve seen it before.”

Beauridge asked, “Is that her handwriting?”

Konnie added, “There’s a buddy of mine, FBI document examiner, Parker Kincaid. Lives in Fairfax. We could give him a call.”

But Bett said it was definitely Megan’s writing.

“‘Bett,’ “ she read aloud then looked up. “She called me Bett. Not Mom. Why would she do that?” She started again and read in a breathless, ghostly voice, “‘Bett-I don’t care if it hurts you to say this… I don’t care how much it hurts…’”

She looked helplessly at her ex-husband then read to herself. She finished, sat back in the couch and seemed to shrink to the size of a child herself. She whispered, “She says she hates me. She hates all the time I spent with my sister. I Mystified, hurt, she shook her head and fell silent.