“Don't you just hate that? What's this?”

Wy looked, and her hands stilled on the zipper of her jeans. “A pair of earrings, what do they look like?”

“They are beautiful. I don't generally like gold nuggets, but these are really nice.” Jo held one of the flat, heavy loops up to her ear, admiring the effect in the mirror. “Where'd you get them?”

“A friend,” Wy said. She was sure there was no inflection in her voice to give warning, but she felt Jo's eyes boring into the back of her head. Being friends with a reporter could be a pain in the ass. “What are you doing in town, Jo?”

“Liam gave them to you.”

A real pain in the ass. “Yes.”

Jo put the earring back in the box and the box back on the dresser. She regarded it for a moment, and then turned to look at Wy. Jo had newspaper eyes, a steady, unwinking, patient stare that watched and weighed and waited, waited for the answers to her questions, waited for the truth. You could dodge, evade, equivocate, you could even lie, but those newspaper eyes would wait you out every time.

Joan Dunaway was a reporter for theNews,and had been one since she and Wy had returned from Europe the year they graduated from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Wy with a degree in education and Jo with a degree in journalism. She'd built up a reputation over the years for ferreting out bad behavior on a legislative and bureaucratic level and writing pull-no-punches stories about it. One of the more delightful stories Wy remembered had exposed the invariable habit of the commissioner of the Department of Corrections in hiring longtime friends for jobs tailored to suit their special talents. One of them had been a grocer, Wy recalled. At least the Department of Corrections had made some terrific deals on fresh produce for the four and a half months of the grocer's tenure of office.

Jo's juciest story to date had concerned the then sitting governor who had vacationed, all expenses paid, in Baja, Bali and Biarritz courtesy of one of the North Slope's major oil producers. The executive responsible had made the grievous error of not recognizing Jo in the bar of the Baranof Hotel. He had compounded this error by picking her up, seducing her and afterward indulging in pillow talk that drew connections between the vacations and a revision of the state's subsurface mineral rights law being debated before the legislature the following day. This not unnaturally wound up on the front page of theNews.He was a very attractive slimeball, she explained later to Wy, with very blue eyes and an ass as firm and round as a Delicious apple. “I swear to god, I wanted to bite it,” she declared, and she was regretful when he and his ass were indicted and later convicted, fined and imprisoned for bribery of a public official. The governor narrowly escaped prison only by payment of a $330,000 fine, but when the legislature changed hands two years later, they vacated the judgment and repaid the fine to him, with interest. “Ah, Alaska,” Jo had said fondly when she heard. “Gays can't marry and you have to speak English, but you can legally smoke pot and embezzlers never go hungry. Gotta love it.”

And she did, and she wrote about it every day, not only stories of bribery and corruption in the legislature, but stories of how the state worked. She wrote profiles of the weights-and-measures man who checked to see that you got the five gallons of gas you'd paid for, the waitress at Simon and Seafort's who retired after nineteen years on the job, the Alaskan old fart who cut firewood from his lot in Talkeetna and delivered it, one cord at a time, to buyers in Anchorage. She wrote about the people who fixed the potholes and tarred the roofs and shoveled the snow and loaded luggage onto planes, about the gardeners at the Municipal Greenhouse and the clerks at City Hall, about the woman who answered the phone at Victims of Violent Crimes in Juneau and the man who ran the flight service station in Soldotna. She was on a first-name basis with just about everyone in the state, from the man who set the tracks on the cross-country ski trails at Kincaid Park to the ranger who tracked down poachers in the Gates of the Arctic. Some of them loved her. Some of them hated her. None of it stopped her.

And it didn't stop her now. “How's it going? You and Liam?”

“It's not,” Wy said, hoping that would be the end of it.

A vain hope. “Why not?”

Wy sighed. All right, then, and maybe it would help if she said the words out loud. “Jo, if he'd left Jenny and Charlie…” She stopped. It was incredible how, even now, three years later, she had to force their names out of her mouth. “Wife and child” were generic terms, without personalities, wants, demands. “Jenny and Charlie” were people, people with needs and privileges that superseded hers.

She looked at Jo. Jo looked back with an uncharacteristically solemn expression. “I've got a Puritan streak a mile wide, Jo. What I did was wrong. You don't screw around with someone else's husband, you just don't. And you don't take the attention that rightfully belongs to his child. Children need their fathers.” Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. “If he'd come to me, if we'd married, I would have spent the next fifty years trying to make it up to his son. I would have been oh so considerate and understanding, I would have relinquished my time with Liam so he could spend time with his son, I would have tried to be friends with his wife, no matter how much she hated me, and she was bound to hate me.”

“And after a while,” Jo said slowly, “you would have come to resent it.”

“Probably.”

“And to take it out on Liam.”

“Probably,” Wy repeated.

“And yourself.”

“Especially myself.” Wy stood up. “So you see, Jo, as much as it hurt, it was the right thing to do.”

“Cutting things off, never seeing him or talking to him again.”

“Yes.”

“Except that now you are.”

Wy wandered over to the window and looked out at the fascinating view of her truck and Jo's rental car parked in the driveway. “Yes.”

There was a brief silence. Jo looked at the top of Wy's dresser. There was very little clutter: the embroidered box from Greece, a few ivory carvings, one a walrus rearing up with his tusks on display and his fat sides wonderfully wrinkled, another that looked like a little knife, no more than three inches in length, with a curved blade and a mask carved into the hilt. From the right eye of the mask a tiny face looked out, laughing. “You still love him.”

“Only because NPR's Scott Simon's never given me a tumble, and that's only because I have not been afforded the opportunity to meet him, swamp him with my extensive personal charm and carry him off to my tent.”

Jo had the reporter's indispensable and extremely irritating ability to stick to the point. “Jenny and Charlie are dead.”

“I know. Convenient, isn't it?”

“Oh Jesus,” Jo said, disgusted. “Martyrdom does not become you, Wy.”

Wy turned. “What?”

“You heard me,” Jo said, the ruthless gleam back in her newspaper eyes. “You've steeled yourself to make this great sacrifice, you've even managed to round up a child of your own without having to betray the great love of your life-speaking of convenient-”

“Wait just a goddamn minute!” Wy said hotly. “Where do you get off-”

“-and now that the love of your life-we may fairly call him that, I suppose, since you haven't let anyone else within sniffing distance since, other than that wimpy little wing cover salesman-”

“He wasn't a wimp!”

“-now that the love of your life is free, due, I might add, to no fault of your own, so that the two of you can join hands and waltz off into the sunset together, you're so in love with this noble renunciation act of yours that you're willing to do it all over again.” Jo shook her head. “Shit happens, Wy. It happened here, and it had absolutely nothing to do with you.” She paused, and gave Wy a considering look. “You didn't even wish them dead, did you?”