“I want you to tell me about her. You need to, Tucker.”

She was right. He needed to. He had never told anyone the truth, not his family, not his best friend, and it had all been dammed up inside him for nearly twenty years. Once he began, the words poured out of him in a fast, jerky stream.

“We were high school sweethearts. Went steady all during our senior year. Lydia had been raised by her mother and an aunt; her father had died when she was just a baby. Her mother had invested the insurance money wisely, so there was plenty for college; we were both planning to go to UVA. We…made a lot of plans.

“A few months before graduation, her mother became ill. Very ill. Lydia was spending a lot of time at the hospital, but her mother insisted she stay in school and graduate with the class. With finals coming up, I helped her all I could. She’d go to school, then to visit at the hospital, and every night we were together at my house or hers, studying. Or trying to. We were both under a lot of stress and we…weren’t as careful as we should have been.”

“She got pregnant.”

Tucker barely heard Sarah’s quiet voice, but nodded slowly. “She told me right after graduation. And she was…so happy about it. So full of plans. We’d get married right away. She’d put off college, use the money to get a little apartment near UVA, furnish it, bank the rest for living expenses. And medical expenses. I could go on to college, maybe change my major to something a little more practical than English lit and, anyway, maybe that book I was working on would sell. Her mother might live long enough to see her first grandchild and her aunt would surely help out…Christ, she was so happy.”

“And how did you feel about it?” Sarah asked.

He looked at her and, as vividly as if it had been yesterday, felt the shock and panic, the wild urge to run. Resentment and anger rising in him like bile, choking him…

“I felt…trapped. As rosy as she painted the picture, I knew reality would be different. Neither of us had medical insurance and babies are expensive, so the money wouldn’t last long at all. I’d have to get a job before long, and even if I managed to finish college, I’d have to take some practical courses, just like she’d said, aim for a job that would support a family right away. Everybody knew writers didn’t make much money, and a degree in literature isn’t much good for anything. I could see my life laid out all neat and tidy ahead of me, a job I hated, a wife I resented, a child I didn’t want…and all my dreams in pieces behind me.”

“And Lydia knew. Saw it in your face.”

He nodded. “It had never occurred to her that I wouldn’t be as happy about it as she was. All she’d ever really wanted was to be a wife and mother, to have a little house she could take care of. She’d planned on college mostly because of me, because I wanted it, figured she’d major in child psychology or development, something like that. She didn’t want to teach. She just wanted to be a good mother.”

Tucker drew a deep breath. “I’ll never forget the shock on her face, the way she backed away from me as if I’d turned into a stranger.”

“You couldn’t let her go thinking that.”

“No. I…told her it was just surprise, that she’d imagined the rest. She believed me. She wanted to believe me.” He focused on Sarah’s face and was vaguely surprised to find no condemnation there. But she hadn’t heard the worst, of course.

Then, gazing into her eyes, he realized that she didn’t need to hear him say it. She knew. She knew what he’d done. Sarah had known for a long time. And there was still no condemnation in her face.

Hoarsely, forcing the words out because he needed to, he said, “We made plans to elope the next week. Nobody’d be surprised, with her mother so ill. We’d just do it and then come back and tell everyone.” He swallowed. “I told her everything would be fine. I promised her I wouldn’t let her down.”

Sarah waited silently.

“I meant what I said. I had every intention of meeting her at her house as planned, and going to get married.” He looked away from Sarah and fixed his unseeing gaze on a lamp. It was so hard to say the rest, admit the rest, but he had to. “Then the days passed and…and it was suddenly time to do that. And somehow, instead of packing to meet Lydia, I packed to head to Florida with a buddy for a couple of weeks of sand and sun. I didn’t tell Lydia I wasn’t going to marry her. I just didn’t show up.”

“You were eighteen,” Sarah said, not in an excusing tone, but matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, well, my father was eighteen when he married my mother, and nineteen when I was born. He was responsible, worked his ass off, and as far as I can see, never regretted any of it. I was old enough to be a father, so I was damned sure old enough to be responsible for the child I’d helped create. Some things can’t be excused by youth. I was a cruel, selfish bastard to run out on her like that. And without a word, without even telling her I was sorry or that I’d help with the baby even if I couldn’t marry her. Nothing.”

“You came back a few days later,” Sarah said.

He nodded. “I wasn’t having much fun down in Florida; all I could think about was the way I’d run out on her. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and came home. But it was too late. Lydia was gone. She’d left a note for her aunt, taken her college money and her car. Her mother was in a coma by then, and never knew what had happened. Her aunt was devastated. She showed me the note. Lydia hadn’t mentioned the baby, or blamed me in any way. She just said she couldn’t watch her mother die, that she had to get away, start a new life somewhere else. And to tell me…she was sorry, but that I’d be better off without her.”

Tucker returned his gaze to Sarah’s face. “Her mother died a few weeks later, her aunt less than a year afterward. Lydia didn’t come home for the funerals. She never came home again. I started looking for her that summer, and kept on every chance I had. I hired a couple of private detectives in those first years, but they got nowhere, so I taught myself how to search. But I got nowhere myself. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth the day she left Richmond. I spent endless hours searching birth and…death records, newspapers, tax rolls, every kind of public record I could access, beginning in Virginia and working north and south, then west. But I never found a single hint of her existence. By the time I left college the first time, I’d realized that I wasn’t going to find her that way.”

“The first time?”

“Yeah, I ended up going back. Picking up a couple more degrees in subjects that interested me.” He shrugged jerkily. “Not that any of them helped me find Lydia.”

“So you began looking for a psychic who could tell you where Lydia was.”

“I’d always been interested in the paranormal. And I had to know. What had happened to her, to the baby. I had to know they were all right. But the so-called psychics I found couldn’t tell me anything useful. It was mostly garbage, the standard you’ve-lost-your-love kind of crap they told every other customer. And even the few people I believed had genuine ability couldn’t seem to tap into anything other than my need to find her.”

“But you kept searching.”

He nodded. “More than eighteen years now. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Lydia. About our child. Lydia thought it was a boy, from the very first, when she told me. He’d probably be in his junior or senior year of high school now, planning for college—”

Sarah looked away.

Tucker swallowed hard, a dull, cold ache spreading through him. “Except he isn’t, is he?”

“No.” Sarah’s voice was almost inaudible. “He isn’t.”

Tucker closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. Steadily, he said, “Tell me. Tell me what happened to them.”

With obvious reluctance, she said, “I think…I know…the baby died very soon after birth. He just…went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Crib death, I think.”