Paige was stunned. 'You're kidding.'

'No, not at all.'

'Dad, why didn't you just tell me that? It explains so much. About you, and her.'

'Your mother didn't want to, and I went along with it. We're both to blame. Me, more so, because she was sick, at some level. I wasn't.'

Paige shook her head. 'I don't get it. Mom could have had an abortion, couldn't she? I mean, with her money, it would have been easy.'

'She wanted the baby, and I did, too.'

Paige laughed abruptly. 'She didn't want the baby, Dad. I should know, I was the baby. What she wanted was to be miserable, and blame you for ruining her life. I heard her all the time, growing up. She always said she would have had a great career, if it wasn't for you. And me.' Paige looked bitter. 'Career as what? A professional victim?'

Jack winced. 'Paige, that's not right -'

'But it is, Dad. She always blamed everybody else, for everything. She never took responsibility for anything. You should have seen her at shoots. It was the photographer's fault, or the clothes were wrong, or my lighting. Or at home. It was the maid, the accountant, my tutor. It was never her fault. Nothing was ever her fault.' Paige fell quiet, and Mary let it lie, remembering what the photographer had said about dealing with Honor and about kids being the ones who see the truth. The two of them, father and daughter, would have to sort it out someday.

The question is what do we do now,' Mary said, after a minute. 'Trevor is out there looking for Paige and maybe me. He knows he doesn't have much time. He's not going to give up, and the police don't believe that he's the killer.'

Brinkley cleared his throat, clearly uneasy. I'll cover you and Paige. Tonight we can all get some rest. Here, if that's okay. We can sleep downstairs on the floor.'

'Sure.'

Then first thing in the morning I take all of you to the Roundhouse.'

Mary shook her head. 'It won't do any good. I screwed that up so bad, the police won't believe anything I say now.'

'Anything we say,' Paige corrected. 'I'm the one who doesn't know what's on my own tummy.'

Brinkley shook his head. They'll believe us this time because we'll be bringing in Jack. And Trevor.'

Trevor? How are you gonna do that?' Mary asked, and Brinkley hunched over the table.

'Listen up,' he said, and they huddled around. 'We got the earring back but not the earring. Now, we know from Paige that Trevor lost the earring and he doesn't know where. I didn't know that before. So we use that fact. We tell him we got the earring, that I found it at the crime scene. And does he want it, come and get it.'

Jack looked doubtful. 'Why would you do that? You need a credible reason.'

'How about revenge?' Mary edged forward, certain that this was the first time a sting had been plotted at the DiNunzios' kitchen table. 'And money. You offer to sell the earring back to him. You want to get back at the police department for suspending you. But how do we catch him?'

Brinkley shrugged easily. 'I wear a wire. I get him to say what I need, then we take him in. No muss, no fuss.'

'A wire,' Mary repeated, because it sounded so cool, and Paige clapped in delight.

Only Jack looked worried. 'It sounds simple, but things can go wrong. This kid's not that stable. He's a killer.'

'I can't handle a preppie, I got no business in the business,' Brinkley said with a smile, and Mary thought he should smile more often.

'Why don't we do it tonight?' she asked. 'End this thing already?'

Brinkley shook his head. 'Can't. Take me some time to get the wire. I have to figure a way to get court approval or any admission the kid makes won't come into evidence. I should have the wire by late morning, then we'll try to get hold of our boy.'

'How do we do that?' Mary asked, and Brinkley smiled again.

'We start calling around. The boy's got to be pretty panicky right now. He reads the papers and he knows I'm on to him. If he hears my name, he'll come in.' The detective reached for the coffeepot. 'But first, we have some more of this fine coffee.'

After they made the requisite telephone calls, Mary scrounged up four blankets and pillows for everybody and arranged them carefully on the living room rug, making sure Jack was farthest from her, then Brinkley and Paige. They all lay down, exhausted, and when Mary turned out the living room lamp she thought it looked like four sausages in a frying pan. In the morning they would hatch their scheme, catch the bad guy, and be home in time for breakfast.

Paige conked out first, then Brinkley, but Mary felt safe enough even with the detective asleep. Trevor wouldn't think to look for her at her parents' house and neither would the press. She was way too old to run home, and everybody but her knew it. What Mary knew was that she loved her parents more as she got older, not less, and appreciated them in a way she hadn't when she was young and time stretched ahead of her like a shiny sliding board. There was a limit now, an end point; Mike's death

had taught Mary that. She didn't need her mother's thin skin or her father's ruptured spine to remind her. There would come a time when she couldn't go home again, not because the C bus had been rerouted, but because her parents would be gone. And when they were gone, home would be gone, too.

Mary shifted uncomfortably under her old blanket. It was a child's fear, she knew, the fear of her parents' death, and lying there she understood that every lesson her parents had taught her would be tested in surviving their passing. She didn't know how she would live after they were gone, but she knew she would, and only because they had taught her to. It would be their final, and their greatest, gift, and she thanked them for it in her dreams.

Jack heard Mary fall asleep, as he tossed and turned under the blanket. It wasn't the hardness of the floor that was keeping him awake. It was how everything had gone so wrong, not only from the night he took the blame for Honor's murder, but from the very beginning. From the moment he married Honor and started lying about their daughter, and to her.

Honor always thought it was a detail, what age the child was, but Jack was never convinced. He knew all along, even as he prevented himself from knowing, that it was profoundly wrong to lie to Paige about the circumstances of her own birth. He had taught her to lie from the cradle; she was swaddled in lies. How could he expect anything but a lie when she grew up?

Was Trevor with you, Paige?

Of course not, Daddy.

But all along, at some level, Jack had known that she was lying about Trevor. He had sensed that Trevor had been there and was responsible for Honor's murder, at least in part. In fact, if he were being completely honest with himself, it hadn't mattered to him whether Trevor was there or not. The truth was that he'd known it that

night, when he asked Paige to lie to him and she did, and when he made the deal that he would protect her fiction, even serve it. As he had with her pregnancy.

Jack faced the darkness and found the truth. He hadn't been completely surprised when Paige told him she was pregnant, over the telephone at the office. He knew she was on a collision course with her mother, acting out against her from the day she'd declared she wanted to be emancipated. He knew that somehow, someday, Paige would figure out how to hurt her mother the most. Get pregnant, like her mother, replaying a past she didn't know existed, but perhaps suspected. So it wasn't Trevor's plan that got her pregnant at all. Paige was lying to herself about that, and to all of them.

Jack shifted on the hard floor. The more he thought about Trevor, the less likely it seemed that the boy could kill Honor as part of a long-range plan to get Paige's money. Trevor was a rash, spoiled, rich boy. A fuckup; the kind of kid who sold drugs and picked up blondes who turned out to be narcs. Something didn't fit; something just smelled.