“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“I wasn’t getting much here, Marilee. You’re always too tired or too stressed or-”

“You! You have the gall to complain to me about our sex life?”

“What are you saying? Are you saying I didn’t satisfy you?”

“I’m saying I’ve had better orgasms by myself!”

“Fine. Reduce the conversation to a gutter level. The bottom line is we don’t have a future together, Marilee. We don’t want the same things professionally or socially. There’s no point in going on with it.”

“Bottom line. You want to talk bottom line? Fine. Here’s a bottom line for you, Bradford. You owe me about three thousand dollars for services rendered in my professional capacity. Would you care to cough that up before you pack your toothbrush, or should I bill the firm?”

She would never see a dime of it, not that she cared so much about the money. It was the idea that burned her cookies. She felt used. He had taken advantage of their relationship while he had been struggling to get a toehold at the firm. I have to share a secretary, Marilee. Please, can’t you just type this up for me. Just this once (twice, three times, eighty-five times). Don’t you want me to look good? Couldn’t you just help out a little with those transcripts? It would make such a good impression if I could have this done… He had treated her as if she were his personal, free-of-charge legal secretary. Now that he was moving up in the world, he wouldn’t have to save pennies by literally screwing a court reporter out of her fees.

She felt like a fool. How she had ever managed to fall for a lawyer in the first place was beyond her. No. That was a lie. In her heart she knew what she had been doing with the upwardly mobile Bradford Enright, and it was so Freudian, it was depressing. Her family had approved of him. They may have seen her career as a court reporter as being a giant step down from their expectations for her, but Brad had made a nice consolation prize. They could look at him and still hold out some hope that she would settle into the life of pleasant snobbery to which they were all accustomed.

What a hypocrite she was. In her heart she knew she’d never really loved Brad. He was right: they didn’t want any of the same things-including each other. She had gone through the motions, pretended passion, lied to him and to herself time and again by saying she was happy, when the truth was a partner at Hawkins and Briggs didn’t come close to making the list of things she wanted out of life. The time had come to admit that.

She’d spent too much of her life as a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. She’d spent too much time trying to fit into the lifestyle her family thought of as normal. She wasn’t Annaliese or Lisbeth. She was Mari the Misfit. She’d spent too much time trying to atone for that. No more.

She sold her court reporter’s equipment, sublet her apartment for the summer, loaded her suits and her guitar in the back of her Honda, and headed for Montana. She had made no plans beyond summer, beyond basking in the glow of enlightenment. She was free to be herself at last. Born anew at twenty-eight.

Still, all the self-revelation of the past two weeks didn’t completely dull the sting of Brad’s betrayal. Lucy would have understood that, having won, lost, and dumped an astounding number of men herself. She and Lucy should have been sitting on Lucy’s bed right now in their nightgowns, eating junk food and trashing Brad, and then trashing men in general until they ended up laughing themselves into tears.

Dammit, Lucy.

Guilt swept through her, chasing a current of resentment. She wanted Lucy to be there for her. How selfish was that? She had a case of wounded pride and jitters over finally finding the nerve to stand up and be herself. Lucy was dead. Dead was forever.

Feeling disjointed, disembodied, Mari sank down on the edge of the bed. She reached out blindly for the guitar she had propped against a chair and pulled it into her arms like a child, hugging it against her. She held it at an angle so she could rest her cheek against its neck. The smell of the wood was familiar, welcome, a constant in a life that had too often seemed alien to her. This old guitar had been a friend for a lot of lonely years. It never found fault in her. It never cast judgment. It never abandoned her. It knew everything that was in her heart.

Her fingers moved over the strings almost of their own volition, callused fingertips of her left hand pressing down above the frets, the fingers of her right hand plucking gently at a tune that came from a private well of pain deep inside her. The emotions that fought and tangled like wrestling bears crystallized simply in the music. In just a handful of notes the feelings were expressed more eloquently than she could ever have spoken them. Sweet, sad notes, as poignant as a mourning dove’s call, filled the stale air of the room and pierced her skin like tiny daggers.

The tears came hard, almost grudgingly, as if she didn’t want to give them up without proof that her friend wasn’t going to come waltzing through the door with a smirk on her face. That would be like Lucy. To Lucy, life was just one big practical joke perpetrated on the human race by bored and cynical gods.

The joke’s on you this time, Luce.

A dry, broken sob tore Mari’s throat and then she was spent, exhausted, drained as dry as the gas tank of her Honda. She set the guitar aside and fell back across the bed, staring through her tears at the water stains on the ceiling. The silence of the night rang in her ears. The loneliness of it swelled in her chest like a balloon. Above her the moose from the starving-artist painting gazed down on her with melancholy eyes.

She’d never felt so alone.

Her dreams were a jumble of faces and places and sounds, all of it underscored by a low hum of tension and the dark, sinister sensation of falling into a deep black crevasse. J. D. Rafferty’s granite countenance loomed over her, shadowed by the brim of his hat. She felt his big, work-roughened hands on her body, touching her breasts, which were exposed because-much to her dismay-she had forgotten to wear anything but an old pair of boxer shorts and hiking boots.

Lucy lingered in the shadows, watching with wicked amusement. “Ride him, cowgirl. He’ll let you be on top.”

Rafferty ignored her. As he massaged Mari’s breasts, he murmured to her in a low, coarse voice.

“Man, Luanne, you’ve got the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”

She shivered. Her brain stumbled in confusion at the name. He pulled the revolver from the holster on his hip and fired it over his head. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Mari jolted awake in time to see the moose descending on her. She shrieked and brought her arms up to deflect the blow, knocking the painting onto the floor. The banging she had interpreted as gunshots in her dream went on without cease.

Luanne and Bob-Ray were at it again.

She tried to swing her legs over the side of the bed and discovered that in her fitful sleep she had rolled into the Grand Canyon of mattress valleys.

“I think I saw this bed on The Twilight Zone,” she grumbled, trying to rock herself into a sitting position. “People fell through it into an alternate universe.”

Wishing fleetingly she had stuck with one of the dozen aerobics classes she had signed up for in the last three years, she heaved herself out of the chasm and tumbled onto the floor. A shuddering groan vibrated through the room as the air conditioner kicked into high gear, blasting arctic air and the smell of mildew. The control knob was missing and the plug looked like something no certified electrician would touch without first shutting down power to the whole north end of town.

Rubbing her frigid hands up and down her cold, bare arms, she peered out through the separation in the drapes to see the first faint pink tints of dawn streaking behind the snow-capped peaks to the east. At the edge of the parking lot, the Paradise Motel sign buzzed and flickered. Not a creature was stirring… except Bob-Ray and Li’l Sizzler, the Amazing Human Breakfast Sausage.