Ben was building Cassie a dollhouse. "It's from Kyle and me," he said the first time Eden saw the pieces spread out on his table. "Kyle's the financial backer." She watched him put it together, a huge Victorian with lacy gingerbread trim, and thought of what his own daughter was missing out on and would continue to miss.

"Are you allowed to give her gifts?" she asked as he glued a tiny window frame in place.

"No contact," he said. "That would constitute contact."

"But even if you were guilty, isn't totally depriving her of her father more damaging?"

"You and I are the only people who seem to think so. And Sam. Sam's doing what he can to try to get me supervised visitation, but I'm not optimistic. Her counselor says it would confuse her. It's not in the best interest of the child." He stood back to look at the house slowly taking shape on his table. "What color do you think I should paint it?"

As open as he was, there were times he could not talk about Bliss, and she learned when to back off. When he did speak of her Eden felt his helplessness and his rage.

"I can't stand the thought of Jeff being in my house, sleeping with my wife, reading Bliss Green Eggs and Ham, and tucking her in at night. One day I had a wife and child and the next day Jeff strolls in out of nowhere and takes over. Finders keepers."

"How did Sharon know Jeff?"

"The school where she taught. He teaches history."

"Could Sharon have set this up somehow?" she asked, carefully. "Maybe she wanted you out of the picture."

"No, I don't think Sharon knew Jeff very well back then, and our marriage was okay. Besides, even if she despised me she wouldn't use Bliss that way."

The phone call to Michael had been more difficult than she'd anticipated. She was surprised at how much it hurt her to hurt him. She cared about him more than she'd admitted to herself.

"Is this just a summer thing?" Michael had asked. "I mean, how serious is it?"

"I'm not sure," she'd answered. "I'm taking it one day at a time."

Michael hesitated. "Have you slept with him?" he asked.

"Yes."

He gave a pained laugh. "You've been going out with me for nearly a year and I get a good-night kiss if I'm lucky. You've known this guy a couple of weeks and...Christ."

"Michael, I'm sorry. But I never led you to believe there would be more between us."

"I know."

"I still want you to play Matthew Riley. The more I get to know about him, the more I realize you're perfect for the part. You even look like him."

Michael said nothing.

"Michael? You'll still do it, won't you?"

"As long as you're still playing your mother and we get some juicy scenes together."

She smiled. "I care about you a lot, Michael. Please, let's stay friends. And don't let this...set you back." She could see him going out tonight, getting high, licking his wounds. She thought of asking him not to spread this around, but that would hardly be fair.

"I need to see you," he said. "I feel like you're changing into a different person."

"I am changing, but not into a different person. For once, I feel like myself."

She got off the phone with Michael's question sounding in her ears: How serious is it? This relationship was a mass of impossibilities, most of which she was not ready to face.

One afternoon, she let Ben up to her mother's old room to type a reference letter for a former student. She sat on the bed and watched him hunt and peck his way across the keyboard of her word processor. He was wearing a gray-and-white striped cotton shirt and his hair was damp from a shower. He looked beautiful, and she felt sure of what she was about to tell him.

"Ben?"

He pushed the print button and turned to face her.

"I want to start taking the Pill again."

She watched his face as her words registered. "Does that make sense?" he asked. "It won't be effective for a couple of weeks, right? And you won't be here that much longer."

"Maybe I won't leave at the end of the summer."

He looked at her blankly for a moment. "Eden, you really need to think through what you're doing. You told me you were with Michael Carey to keep people from linking you with anyone else. You said you had to protect your public image. I'm about the riskiest person in the world for you to get hooked up with-you know that, don't you?"

"Who's going to know what I'm doing as long as I'm out here in the boondocks?"

He stood up and came over to the bed, put his hands on her shoulders. "I'm not going to argue with you. I'm not that anxious to get rid of you." He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a wrapped condom. "Might as well use these up.

She laughed. "You're carrying them around with you?"

"I like to be prepared for anything." He leaned over to kiss her but she held him away.

"We can't make love here. Kyle and Lou are downstairs." She remembered with a clarity that pained her the times she'd sneaked one boy or another into her bedroom in New York. Tex, usually. Bo on one occasion. They would do it on the floor to keep the bed from squeaking and waking up Kyle and Lou.

Ben walked to the door and closed it quietly. "I can't tell you how many times I had to listen to the two of them going at it-those Colombian hotels had paper-thin walls." He sat next to her and kissed her softly.

"We have to be very quiet," she said.

"Like snowflakes," he whispered, and he stood up to unbuckle his belt.

At the breakfast table on the morning after the tramposo upset she asked Kyle for another notebook.

"I'm begging you, Kyle, let me have it. I'm stuck in the screenplay because I don't know how Matt finally gets Kate to surrender."

Kyle carried his plate to the sink, then stood behind Lou's chair. He rested a gentle hand on his wife's shoulder, and Lou reached up to cover his fingers with hers.

"What's your hurry?" he asked Eden.

"I'm curious. Just let me read ahead a little, please?" He shook his head. "Sorry, honey. It'll be over soon enough. Don't rush it."

His words shook her. This was not a game. It was a real life she held in limbo inside her word processor, a real life that would end all too soon.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that writing a screenplay still doesn't come naturally to me. I get nervous when I'm not sure where I'm going with it."

"You always were an excellent writer," Lou said. "Even as a child."

"I never wrote anything as a child."

"You wrote papers in junior high and high school. You always brought home A's."

Eden laughed. "Your memory's inflated my grades over the years."

Lou looked up at Kyle with a question in her round blue eyes, and he nodded. "Come in the bedroom, dear," Lou said. She wheeled herself down the hall with Eden and Kyle following.

Kyle disappeared inside the walk-in closet of their bedroom and returned carrying a dusty cardboard box.

"Your pack-rat uncle," Lou said as she shifted from the chair to the bed. Eden sat next to her, and Kyle set the box on Eden's lap. She lifted the top. The first thing that met her eyes was yellowed typing paper: "The Pros and Cons of Legalizing Abortion," by Eden S. Riley, January 7, 1970.

"Oh, my God." She laughed. "I'd forgotten I ever wrote this. She leafed through the stack of papers. History, science, book reports. Kyle had kept everything. And they were indeed all A's, except for the C's from her senior year.

"I can't believe you saved all this stuff," she said. At the bottom she found a stack of report cards held together with a cracked rubber band that broke when she removed it. She glanced through them. All A's and B's until her senior year. That year she'd even failed a couple of subjects, and the teachers' comments were consistent.

"Eden needs to realize that her involvement in the Drama Club this year is hampering her academic performance," Eden read aloud, her nose wrinkled.

"They can eat their words now," Lou said.

"I loved reading your papers because it was the only way we had of knowing what was going on in your head," Kyle said. "You never shared much with us."

"I didn't bring you two much pleasure," she said quietly. She felt herself moving toward them with baby steps of intimacy.

Kyle laughed. "What teenager does?"

"I was testing you. I wanted to see how much obnoxious, despicable behavior you'd put up with before you got rid of me. I was always afraid you'd send me away."

Lou stared at her. "What did we ever do to give you an idea like that?"

"Nothing. But everyone around me died or shipped me out. I figured it was just a matter of time until that happened with the two of you."

"I wish we could have reassured you somehow," said Lou.

"You did everything you could. You made enormous sacrifices for me. I know I appeared ungrateful at the time, but deep down I was so thankful I had both of you. It was just hard for me to tell you that." She returned the report cards to the bottom of the box and looked at her uncle. "I feel as though I stole those years from you and gave you very little in return."

"Don't ever think that, honey," Kyle said.

Eden moved the box from her lap to the bed and stood up. "Well." She smiled at both of them. "I just hope Cassie gets around to telling me she appreciates me before she's thirty-six."

The four of them went to New York for a few days early in July. This followed a painful discussion during which Eden persuaded Ben to let her pay for their train tickets and the hotel. Money was the sorest point between them, and she had to address the topic with great care.

They got rooms with a connecting door at the Sheraton Centre. They watched the fireworks from a bench overlooking the East River, visited the Museum of Modern Art, and saw two shows on Broadway. Whenever they waited in line they played games-something Ben, Lou, and Kyle were obviously accustomed to doing. Ghost, Botticelli, Twenty Questions. The three of them were quick with each other, taking esoteric shortcuts through the games that left Eden dazed.

The trip was fun, but Eden couldn't shake the feeling of dread she had at being in New York with Lou and Kyle again. From each point in the city she was acutely aware of how far they were from the intersection of Twenty-third and Park. It pulled at her from the seventeenth-story hotel window, and although the view was blocked by a mile of skyscrapers, in her mind's eye she could see that intersection clearly. She wondered if it had changed, if the streetlights still formed a spotlight in its center. She wondered how many other accidents had happened there.

On their last night in New York, the four of them went to dinner in a small Italian restaurant in the Village, not far from where she had lived with Kyle and Lou as a teenager. They'd spent the day shopping, and by the time they were seated behind the red-and-white checkered tablecloth, they were hot and hungry. Eden and Lou told the men what they wanted and left for the ladies' room.

The rest room was cramped and dirty, with one narrow stall.

"It's not wheelchair-accessible," Lou said. "I'll need your help, Eden."

Eden supported Lou as she hopped from the chair to the toilet, where she struggled to lift her skirt and pull down her underpants. Eden's arms shook with the strain as she lowered Lou to the seat. She stepped outside the stall and held the door closed.

"What do you do if you're someplace like this and don't have another woman around to help?" she asked.

"Kyle comes in with me. We holler first to get the women out and apologize to anyone who walks in on us. But most people are very understanding."

Eden closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. She pictured the corner of Twenty-third and Park. Could Lou ever pass through that intersection without remembering?

"I'm ready, dear."

She helped Lou back into her chair and turned it toward the sink just as a woman entered the rest room. Eden gave the stranger a quick smile while she waited for Lou to wash her hands. The woman stood in front of the closed bathroom door, making no movement toward the stall, and Eden assumed she was waiting for the sink. She watched the woman from the corner of her eye. Her greasy blond hair was hacked off chin-length. Her once white sweater was ratty and gray with a long mustard-colored stain down one arm. She wore gold polyester pants over doughy legs. There was something peculiar in the way she stood motionless, speechless. Something that made Eden's heart pick up its beat.

"Excuse us," Eden said as she grasped the handles on Lou's chair.

"You ain't going nowhere till you give me your pocketbooks," the woman said. Her eyes were big and brown, her stare unnatural and riveting.

"We have to get back to our table," Lou said. "I'm sure our husbands are wondering where we are by now."

The woman reached slowly, calmly, into her own purse and drew out a knife, a steak knife with a cheap plastic handle and a serrated edge.

Lou made a sound of disgust and opened her purse. "How much do you need?"

"The whole pocketbook." The woman's teeth were brown and crooked. "Hand it over."

Eden thought of the contents of her own purse. Credit cards, driver's license, check-cashing cards, keys. All those things that were a nuisance to replace, and all those things that identified her as Eden Riley. This woman would think she'd struck gold. And then there were the pictures of Cassie, starting with the baby picture taken at the hospital.

The blade of the knife caught the yellow light from above the sink, and Eden handed over her purse.

"Money," Lou said. "That's all you get from me." Her voice was strong, but as she opened her wallet Eden saw her hands shake. It took her a few seconds to grasp the three bills and hand them over to the woman, who took them without protest.

"Now why don't you give this young lady her purse back, dear," Lou said. "Take the money but let her have the rest. I'm sure she has pictures of her family in there that are irreplaceable."

"It's all right, Lou." Eden set her hand on Lou's shoulder. "Just let us out please."

"Stay back!" The woman held the knife in front of her menacingly, and Eden drew Lou's chair back as close to her as she could. Then the woman spun around, pushed the door open, and ran into the hall.

Suddenly more furious than afraid, Eden pushed her way out of the room. She spotted the woman running down the long, dirty linoleum hallway toward the back door of the restaurant, the gold polyester pants straining over her bulbous rear end. "That woman stole my purse!" she screamed.

A couple of workers darted from the kitchen and took off after the thief. Eden heard them laughing, saw their grins. It must have been a boring night for them.

She went back into the rest room to find Lou shaking almost convulsively. "I'm a little dizzy," Lou said.

Eden wrung a paper towel out in cold water and laid it on the back of Lou's neck just as Ben pushed the door open. "What's going on? Are you two all right?"

Eden explained what had happened, and Ben left to call the police. She knelt in front of Lou's chair. Her aunt's face was gray, her hands clammy and cold. "Put your head down, Lou," she said.

Lou obeyed and Eden put her arm around her, pressed her cheek against Lou's forehead. "You were so brave," she whispered.