"No, honey. Just a little piece of skin. He'll give you a shot to numb the area-that means you won't feel anything else-and then he'll use a little tool called a scalpel to remove this skin, and then he'll sew a st.i.tch or two and put a bandage on it. That's all."

"It's an animal," Abrafo said. His skinny shoulders trembled against her hands.

"No, it's a...oh!" She let out a laugh. "It's not that kind of mole, the little furry animal that burrows in the ground. A mole on your skin is a dot of discolored skin. Sometimes it forms a little b.u.mp. Look-here's a mole." She extended her arm and displayed the small brown mark that had adorned the side of her wrist for as long as she could remember. "When it's in a place where it won't get inflamed, doctors leave it alone. But if it's raised, or it can get irritated, doctors sometimes remove the mole so it won't cause you any trouble."

"This mole-not an animal?"

"No, Abrafo. It's just a little dot, like this." She let him touch her wrist.

He issued a final, shuddering sob, then relaxed in her arms. She grinned at Adrian above Abrafo's head. "Let's lie down, now, so Dr. Wesker can get rid of that little dot of skin. Okay?"

Clinging to her hand, Abrafo lay on his stomach. A few hiccups emerged from him as Adrian swabbed antiseptic on the mole-larger than Ellie's, slightly raised and located near where the waistband of his trousers would likely rub it raw. The actual surgery took no more than five minutes, and while Adrian sutured Abrafo Ellie placed the excised mole into a sterile envelope to be sent to the hospital for a biopsy. It looked benign to her, but the biopsy was a routine procedure whenever a mole was removed.

Once the surgery was completed, Abrafo shook the sterile towels surrounding the surgery site from his back and jumped happily down from the table, announcing that he was going to get dressed. Ellie could barely contain him as he bounded toward the door. As he swung through it, Ellie caught him, scooped him into her arms and carried him down the hall to a waiting area where his mother sat, holding his clothes. "Everything's fine," she a.s.sured the mother as she lowered Abrafo to his feet. Her arms had developed some extra muscle over the past few months from carrying children around.

After accepting thanks from Abrafo's mother, Ellie pivoted and jogged back down the hall to the surgery, where she found Adrian peeling off his gloves. "If I didn't stink of iodine, I'd give you a hug right now," he told her as he tossed the gloves into a trash receptacle. "I intend to give you one later. Maybe your magic will rub off on me."

"I have no intention of letting you rub anything off me," she teased. They'd been working together too long, in too close quarters, not to be able to tease each other.

"I want your magic, Ellie. I don't know how you do it. But I shall sing your praises-and perhaps rub some part of you-later. Right now, I have to go and give Abrafo's mother her postop instructions."

SHE DIDN'T SEE ADRIAN AGAIN until dinner. Gerda had left k.u.masi in May, replaced by a cheerful young Canadian couple, both physician's a.s.sistants. The trio of college girls would be departing soon and a fresh batch of college volunteers arriving. Ellie would miss the girls more than she missed Gerda. They reminded her of Katie and Jessie, and they were always laughing, yammering, bubbling with enthusiasm. They'd shown Ellie the best places to shop for local handcrafted jewelry and apparel. Ellie supposed she would have to pa.s.s all that vital information along to the next crew when they arrived.

Adrian swept into the dining room at the compound five minutes later than everyone else, as usual. "There she is," he bellowed, gesturing grandly toward Ellie before he joined her and the others at the table. "All ye, sing her praises. She soothes the savage breast."

"A good bra.s.siere can do that," she joked.

"I had an hysterical little boy in the surgery today. Absolutely frantic because I was going to remove a mole from his back. It took Ellie to wrest from him the fact that he thought I was planning to cut an animal from his back."

This news was met with gentle laughter.

"I would have called it a nevus, but I thought he might find the sound of that far more alarming. So medical, that term."

"Was it cancerous?" Rose asked.

Ellie shook her head and Adrian said, "I think not. It looked innocuous, but it was raised and had the potential to become problematic. We'll get the pathology report next week, but I believe the child will be fine."

A conversation ensued about how much rarer skin cancer was in Africa than in other parts of the world, despite the intensity of the sun in equatorial regions. "Melanin protects the skin," Atu boasted, displaying his dark forearms. "Mother Nature's sunblock."

As the others discussed skin pigmentation, Adrian leaned toward Ellie. "I need to talk to you," he murmured. "Are you free tonight?"

Why wouldn't she be free? Most evenings after dinner, she and the rest of the staff saw more patients and completed paperwork for which there hadn't been time during the day, and then they retired to bed early. Their days were so full no one had the energy to carouse all night. "Sure, I'm free," she said.

After dinner, she, Adrian and the others returned to the clinic. Fortunately, it was a calm evening: a child with a splintered toenail that had to be removed, another child who'd jammed her finger and required an X-ray, a new mother worried about whether she was producing enough milk for her chronically hungry infant. No emergencies, no crises.

By nine, all the patients had been seen and the sky had faded to a canopy of black dappled with stars and tacked in one corner by a lemon-colored crescent moon. Adrian found Ellie in the clinic's modest pharmacy, where she was filling out an order form for drugs. "Come, Ellie," he beckoned. "I've finished making the evening rounds, and our overnight guests are all comfortable and cozy. I've got two very cold beers waiting for us at my house, if you're interested."

"That sounds great." Ellie smiled at him, then signed the order form and dropped it on Rose's abandoned desk before she left the building with him. The night air was hot and sticky, and fireflies danced above the dry tufts of gra.s.s lining the road.

Adrian's house was a two-room cottage a short walk from the clinic. He rarely invited his colleagues there, since he spent so much of his time at the clinic working, eating and socializing with the staff. Ellie had visited his cottage only a few times-once to drop off a file of doc.u.ments on a day when he'd been planning to meet with some of the clinic's British benefactors at one of the fancy hotels in the city, another time when he'd hosted a birthday party for a former patient of his who'd been diagnosed with leukemia four years ago but had defied the odds and remained in remission. For the most part, though, Adrian's cottage was his private refuge, and folks from the clinic stayed away. That he'd invited Ellie to have a beer with him there was an unusual privilege.

The cottage included a screened porch with a long-bladed fan in the ceiling, circulating the steamy air. He'd decorated it austerely, with a few wicker pieces and a ceramic urn on the floor in one corner, a comically glowering face painted across its curved surface.

He motioned for her to sit on one of the wicker rocking chairs, then vanished inside and emerged a minute later with two chilled bottles of beer. He lit the citronella candle that sat on the rattan table between their chairs. Dispensing with gla.s.ses, Adrian clicked his beer bottle's neck against hers in a toast, then drank. Ellie drank, too. The icy bubbles bit her tongue and cooled her entire body.

"Ellie," he said, smiling. "I have a proposition for you."

"It better not have anything to do with rubbing," she warned.

"It has to do with your magic," he told her, then leaned back and nudged his chair, starting it rocking. The motion drew her eyes to his feet. He'd left his shoes inside. She rarely went barefoot, concerned about picking up a parasite or some other skin problem, but she supposed Adrian's bare feet were reasonably protected in his own house. "I'd like you to stay," he said.

"Stay?" An undefined emotion sizzled down her spine. Apprehension? Excitement? She wasn't sure. She tried not to glance at his naked feet again. "Stay where?"

"Here at the clinic. You signed up for six months. I'd like you to stay longer. What's the word you Yankees use? Re-up, I believe that's it. I'd like you to re-up."

"Oh." Another ripple of mixed-up emotions pa.s.sed through her. She was relieved, flattered and, for no good reason, a touch disappointed.

"You're scheduled to leave us at the end of July. That's a little over a month from now. Surely you're not ready to say fare well yet."

She considered his statement. She was happy in k.u.masi, much happier than she'd been at home. Partly that was because the work was so rewarding, partly because she was too busy to mope. Partly because she'd needed to get away from Curt and from a house haunted by excruciating memories. She liked living where people knew about her only what she wished for them to know, where they didn't gaze at her with pity or treat her as if she were frail and helpless. She liked feeling that she was doing something worthwhile, making a difference in a few children's lives, healing them.

But she was merely a visitor here, a legal alien on a visa. Every morning when she woke up in her narrow bed in her barren little room, and when she ate fried bananas for breakfast and drank local coffee so strong, one cup could power her through the entire day, she knew this was not her home. She knew it when she heard the local radio station playing unfamiliar music. She knew it in her conversations with the locals, with their accented English and their Twi slang and their superst.i.tions.

"I can't," she said, shaking her head. "It's nice to be asked, Adrian, but I can't."

"Why the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l not?"

She laughed. Adrian had a tendency to a.s.sume that any opinion contradicting his own was utterly wrong. His obstinacy helped to keep the clinic functioning and funds flowing in, but it also occasionally made him seem mule-headed and unsympathetic.

"I've got a job waiting for me back in Ma.s.sachusetts," she reminded him. "I've got a home there. I miss my daughters."

"And your daughters' father? You don't miss him, then?"

She hadn't discussed her marital troubles with anyone at the clinic. They knew she had a husband, even though she'd stopped wearing her wedding band and eternity ring shortly after her arrival. She'd told herself that was for practical reasons: given her work, she was simply more comfortable without them.

Sometimes, though, she wondered whether feeling more comfortable without her rings had anything at all to do with her work.

Adrian had no right to ask her about her husband-except that everyone at the clinic formed such a tight community, and they were all always nosing around in one another's business. When their wireless Internet connection jammed and no one could e-mail home, as happened once a week on average, they would all b.i.t.c.h and moan about the people they absolutely needed to reach. The college girls all had boyfriends. Gerda had a daughter and two grandchildren. Although he was a local, Atu had friends all over the continent, and he claimed he met most of the women he socialized with through dating sites on the Web.

Ellie was as eager as anyone for news from home, and the girls always supplied her with plenty. Katie wrote delicious e-mails crammed with details about her new job in Manhattan, her efforts to furnish the apartment she shared with two roommates on a minuscule budget, her success at discovering discount theater tickets and free concerts. Jessie had landed a summer internship at a legal-aid clinic in downtown Boston, and she filled Ellie in on the clients she interviewed and the cases the clinic took on.

Curt's e-mails, unlike the girls', were generally cautious and measured. He mentioned that the lawn service had raised its prices, that her father asked him to remind her to bring home some interesting Ghanaian postage stamps, that he'd gone golfing with a few of the guys from the firm, and while he shot a respectable 110, he still thought golf was one of the most boring games ever invented.

The most romantic he ever got in his missives was, "Looking forward to seeing you," and, "I hope you're having a good time." He didn't sign his notes "love." Neither did she.

Did she miss him? Adrian was awaiting an answer he didn't deserve.

But she was five thousand miles from home-and home was a place where her son had died and her husband had broken their wedding vows.

"No," she heard herself say, even though she wasn't certain it was true. She missed the man Curt used to be, the man she'd trusted with all her heart. But she would have missed that man just as much if she'd stayed home as she did here. "I'm afraid I don't miss him."

"Ah." Adrian mulled that over in silence. Beyond the screened walls of his porch, insects peeped and chirped in the shadows. Occasionally a car or bicycle meandered down the road. Above her, the fan hummed. "Well, you aren't the first person who came here to get away from a sticky situation."

"I came here to find myself," she reminded him.

"And to lose yourself, too. I remember." He shot her a grin, his teeth glinting white in the evening's gloom. "When I took over the clinic, it was shortly after I'd endured an ugly divorce. I don't suppose there's any other kind of divorce, is there?"

She smiled wistfully. "I don't know."

"I've never heard of a beautiful divorce. Or a lovely one. Rumors exist of a few so-called friendly divorces, but surely if the involved parties were all that friendly, a divorce would be unnecessary. In any event, this is a good place to lose oneself after a divorce, be it beautiful, ugly or otherwise."

"I'm not divorced, Adrian."

"Just in a bad spot with the man, then."

"I guess." She sipped some beer. "But that's not why I came here."

"Oh, of course not," he said, sarcasm layering each word. In a blander tone, he added, "Your reasons are your own. I'm happy to share my reasons for wanting you to stay, however. You are a wonder with the children. You and I work well together, better than I've worked with Atu or most of the nurse volunteers who've been in and out over the years. When you encounter a frenzied little boy, you have the wit to figure out that he's in a state because he thinks I'm going to remove an animal from his back." Adrian leaned forward, his eyes startling in their intensity. "I need you here, Ellie. We rub along quite well together. Ah, there's that word again-rub."

"'Aye, there's the rub,'" she quoted.

Adrian chuckled. "Think about it, love. You could stay as long as you wanted. You could fly home, see your daughters and then return. All I ask is that you think about it."

"That's not all you ask, Adrian," she argued with a smile. "But okay, I'll think about it."

FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, she thought of little else. Of course, she thought about what she was doing with her patients. She thought about prescribing steroids for a boy's itchy rash, and about whether or not to urge a young girl to wear a sling to protect her fractured wrist, and about explaining the facts of life to a ten-year-old girl who'd raced to the clinic one morning afraid she was dying because blood was oozing from her private place and no one had ever told her that this was normal.

But Ellie also thought about staying in k.u.masi, and about going home. She wasn't sure what was waiting for her back in Ma.s.sachusetts. She'd been gone nearly six months. Had Curt been indulging in multiple flings in her absence? Or maybe found one special woman and started building a relationship with her?

Did Ellie really want to go back and find out?

Did she want to hide from her reality? Would remaining in Ghana be about continuing to do some good for the children of the villages bordering k.u.masi, or would it be about trying to avoid the painful truths about her life? Were those truths all wrapped up in Curt and her marriage, or were they somewhere inside her? If they were inside her, wouldn't they emerge regardless of whether she continued to work at the clinic or returned home?

"I can't stay," she finally told Adrian one evening. She'd found him in his office at 9:00 p.m., reading through some papers. He looked worn out from a typically long, demanding day, but not tired. He always seemed to have more energy than anyone else at the clinic. It radiated from him, a corona of vigor spreading around him in invisible waves.

"No need to stay," he a.s.sured her. "I'm just proofreading a grant proposal. b.l.o.o.d.y bore, but it's got to be done. I can lock up here."

"I meant, I can't stay in k.u.masi beyond the end of July."

He lowered the sheaf of papers he'd been reading, rotated in his chair and stood to face her. "I've failed to persuade you of your indispensability, then?"

"I appreciate that you think so highly of me, Adrian, but..." She sighed. "I realized that if I stayed, it would be because I was afraid of facing my problems at home. I may be a coward, but I've tried to develop some courage while I'm here."

"Good heavens, Ellie, you're one of the most courageous people I know. I've never seen you flinch from a snake or a suppurating wound. You've driven around the countryside with me in the Jeep, and I've been told by other pa.s.sengers that riding with me can be a near-death experience. Yet you've done it without a moment's hesitation."

"Riding in a Jeep with you is easy," she said with a sad laugh. "Coming to terms with an estranged husband is hard."

"Then don't do it," Adrian suggested. Ellie hadn't realized how close he stood to her until he extended his hand, snagged hers and pulled her toward him. "Forget about him for a while. Stay."

He touched his lips to hers, and she felt a strange rush of sensation, fear and desire twining through her. She'd been aware of Adrian's s.e.x appeal from the moment she'd met him-even before she'd met him, since Rose had warned her not to fall for him. And she hadn't. He was a friend, a partner, a comrade-in-arms. A brilliant doctor. A man who lavished her with praise and made her feel more confident than she had in years. A man who inspired her to do her best, to embrace new challenges-to be unafraid.

And d.a.m.n, being kissed by him felt wonderful. Even after a long day he smelled clean and fresh, of hospital soap and laundered cotton. His mouth tasted of mint. He was warm and limber and...G.o.d, it had been so long since she'd felt like a s.e.xual being.

She kissed him back. At first her lips seemed stiff, as if she'd forgotten how to kiss. She hadn't, though. What she'd forgotten was what being kissed felt like-the warmth, the pressure, the eroticism of a man's breath mingling with hers. She'd forgotten, but now Adrian was reminding her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and he wrapped his around her waist, and they swayed in a subtle dance as their mouths merged and opened and claimed. Standing in his tiny office, in the glare of a buzzing fluorescent light, surrounded by heaps of paperwork and steel file cabinets, Ellie reveled in Adrian's heat, his strength, his obvious pa.s.sion for her.

She wasn't sure how long they kissed, or who broke from whom. But eventually they leaned away from each other, both of them breathing hard. Adrian pushed her hair back from her face, his fingers long and graceful as they combed through the strands. "You could forget about him for a while," he repeated, his voice a seductive murmur. "I could make you forget."

He could. His invitation tempted her.

But as she gazed into his face, she understood that she couldn't accept it. "No. I can't do this."

"Why not?"

Because she didn't love Adrian. Because she'd given her heart to Curt and he'd broken it into pieces and flung it back at her-except that he'd clung to some of the pieces. She couldn't make love with another man as long as Curt still had a hold on her. And to her great regret, he did.

"I just can't," she said desolately. "I'm sorry." She rose on her toes to kiss his cheek, then turned and left the office....

FOURTEEN.

"I'VE ALREADY TOLD YOU about him," Ellie said, her tone flat. "He was a brilliant doctor. British. A bit monomaniacal. He had a good sense of humor. Other than that, there's nothing to tell."

Curt stared at the television, still displaying the image of the monomaniacal, humorous doctor with his arm around Ellie. What was that old slogan about Las Vegas? What Ellie had done in k.u.masi stayed in k.u.masi, right?

Yet he couldn't get past it. He couldn't look at that picture on the screen and not know.

He shoved out of the chair, crossed to the bed and lowered himself to sit on it, careful not to crowd her. She held her ground, refusing to shift away from him. "Ellie," he said, then swallowed the catch in his voice. "I know things have gone south for us. We're getting a divorce. What we had is gone, and if you want to place all the blame on me, I'm not going to fight you about that. But d.a.m.n it, I was honest with you. We always had honesty. And I can't bear the thought that we don't have that anymore."

She studied him, appearing both curious and defiant. "I haven't lied to you."

"You haven't told me the truth, either. Did you sleep with him? Did you fall in love with him?"

She shifted her gaze to the television, then back to Curt. "That's none of your business."

"Your s.e.x life isn't my business. Your honesty is. Don't take that from me, Ellie. Please."

Her eyes went soft, like dark chocolate melting. Her lips turned in a faint smile. "No," she said. "I didn't sleep with him. I didn't fall in love with him."

Curt hadn't realized he was holding his breath until it emerged from him in a sigh. Just because she hadn't slept with the brilliant doctor didn't mean she loved Curt. She hadn't slept with him, either.