"It's happy music. I have no idea what they're singing about, which is fine with me. You don't speak French, do you?" He looked worried until she shook her head. "Good. It'd wreck it if I knew what they were saying. This way I can pretend they're singing about whatever I choose. Make it up to suit my mood."

She smiled at him. Had she really thought a few hours ago that he was intimidated by her?

He leaned back against the side of the truck. "I read most of your mother's books when I was a kid. They were full of adventure."

"I'm afraid my mother's only adventures were in her mind."

"I tried reading one of them to my daughter, but she'd rather watch the movie. Typical kid, I guess. She's a big fan of yours."

So, he was married. She wasn't sure if she felt relief or disappointment.

"I told her I sort of knew you," he said.

"Now you can tell her you really do. I'd be happy to meet her, if you like."

"Well, I don't get to see her that often. She lives with my wife."

"Oh. Where does your wife live?"

"Annapolis." He stretched his legs out in front of him. "Your daughter's about the same age as mine. Cassie, right?"

"Do you know about her from Lou and Kyle?"

"Everybody knows about Cassie, don't they? Including all the personal details of how long you tried to get pregnant, how you spent the last three months of your pregnancy on bed rest, et cetera?"

She made a face. Wayne had said he was sick of people learning the most intimate details of their lives while waiting in grocery store lines.

"How do you tolerate having so little privacy?" Ben asked.

"Sometimes I don't tolerate it very well." After Heart of Winter, her face had been on so many magazine covers that she'd lost count. That had been fine until Wayne left. Then she'd wished she could have disappeared from the public eye altogether.

"So how do you go about writing a screenplay?"

"The research comes first. I thought I'd have to pick Kyle's brain, since he's the only person still living who knew Katherine well. But last night he told me she kept a journal. It would make my work much easier, except that it's written in a dozen notebooks and Kyle plans to feed them to me one at a time."

A smile broke slowly from Ben's lips. "He wants to keep you here as long as he can. He was so excited you were coming."

"I don't know why. I didn't give him the most pleasant years of his life. Anyhow, I don't want to work strictly from the journal, because I have a specific idea of how I want to present her..." She cocked her head to look at him. "How do you think of her? I mean, as someone who only knows about her from the media?"

He swallowed a bite of his sandwich. "As an isolate," he said. "A woman who valued solitude above anything else. That's something hard for me to understand. I'd rather get hit by a train than spend my life alone."

"Exactly," Eden said. "No one understands her because of the way she's been presented in the past. I want to normalize her. I want people to see this film and be able to relate to her, not think, oh, here's that weird Katherine Swift again."

"How old was she when she started the journal?"

"Thirteen."

"What does a thirteen-year-old have to write about?"

"Plenty. She was feisty and impulsive. And lonely. The other kids didn't like her. She got into a lot of trouble. She got her first period and her mother-my grandmother-was so crazy she cut off all Katherine's hair. So she ran away. That was when she found the cavern."

Ben looked in the direction of the cave. "Do you remember what it was like inside?" He almost whispered the question, as though he understood that the cave was a subject to be treated with reverence.

Eden stared across the field to the wooded embankment. She could just make out the dark patch through the trees where the boulders marked the entrance to the cave.

"I was four when they sealed it up," she said. "My memory's very cloudy."

"Close your eyes."

"What?"

Ben set down his sandwich. "My brother's a shrink. Whenever I can't remember something he tells me to close my eyes, and gradually the picture comes into my head."

Eden obediently closed her eyes and leaned back against the cool metal side of the pickup. At first she could concentrate only on the sound of Ferry Creek rushing below them. But then she heard it, the clack, clack, clack of the typewriter keys, muffled by the cotton her mother had put in her ears. She felt cool air on her arms. The cave was dimly lit by lanterns hanging from the walls and by candles set here and there on the floors and rocky ledges. The room was filled with shadows. Eden was playing with her friends, the stalagmites. She'd forgotten about them, the cold, grotesquely shaped formations that in her four-year-old imagination took on human form.

Her mother sat on a wooden chair, an enormous black monster of a typewriter on the table in front of her. Sheets of paper were scattered on the cave floor around her chair. Her face was blurry. Eden could see only her hands, the skin silky and smooth, the fingers slender, the nails trimmed short. Her hands never paused. Clack, clack, clack...

Eden opened her eyes. Ben was watching her, gnawing his lip.

"I was afraid you got stuck back there," he said.

"I remembered the stalactites and stalagmites. Tites and mites, my mother called them. They fill the cavern. They were my playmates. I'd play with them while she typed, and when she was finished for the day she'd cuddle me on her lap and read to me." Her voice had softened, thickened, betraying her. She'd forgotten what it felt like to be held that way, with no strings attached to the love.

Ben leaned forward to touch her knee. "This film's not going to be easy for you to make," he said.

She shouldn't have said so much, been so open. With every word she'd made herself more vulnerable. "I don't think it will be that difficult." She stood up and jumped out of the truck, relieved to have the heat of his fingers off her knee. "I'd better get going. Thanks for the sandwich."

"Could you show me how to do that?" he asked.

"What?"

"Turn off your feelings that quickly." His eyes were narrowed.

"I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do. One minute you're sad, next minute everything's right with the world."

She sighed, giving in. "To be honest, I'm usually better at it." She put her hands on her hips and looked toward the cave. "My defenses are down out here. Usually I can pretend everything's fine until I actually start to believe it myself."

"Whew. I'll teach you to dig if you'll teach me how to do that. How about over dinner tonight? Just something casual. just, you know, platonic." He grinned. "I mean, I know about you and Michael Carey."

She groaned. "Michael and I are just friends. And why do you want to have dinner with me if you already know everything about me?"

He ignored her question. "I'll pick you up at seven."

She wanted to go. It would be easier than having dinner with Kyle and Lou. "Maybe I could meet you somewhere." She'd be in control then. No chance of being stuck with him longer than she could handle.

"Seven at Sugar Hill," he said. "Kyle can tell you how to get there. Don't forget to take your pottery with you to impress him."

She walked across the field to the pit, picked up her pottery, and headed toward the embankment, feeling his eyes on her the whole way. What was his game? She would meet his daughter. He didn't have to take her out for that to happen. He could write to the folks back home and say he went out with Eden Riley. Hopefully he had no illusions that she would sleep with him. Maybe he wanted to get on Kyle's good side to get a boost up the career ladder. He had to be bored in this confining little site. Or could he possibly just be lonely? It didn't matter what his motives were. She knew as she walked through the woods toward the house that it was her own neediness she had to fear, not his.

6 Sugar Hill was Ben's favorite restaurant in the area. He liked the rustic atmosphere, the woody smell. It was always dark inside, which helped him feel anonymous. There was a dance floor in the center of the tables, and the bar stretched the length of one wall.

He sat at a dark corner table, watching the door, trying to recall if he'd eaten dinner with anyone other than Kyle and Lou or Sam and Jen in the last year and a half. He had not. Unless he counted prison, but his dining companions in jail had hardly been his choice.

So he was justified in feeling nervous. He stood quickly when he saw Eden at the door. She hesitated, adjusting her eyes to the dim light. He walked toward her. She wore her dark blond hair pinned up, as she had that morning. Her throat was long and slender, like the rest of her, but she had a solidity that appealed to him. Probably because it was the antithesis of Sharon's fragility. She looked as if she could handle whatever might come her way. She would not spook easily.

Again, he was struck by how unrecognizable she was. Good. He didn't want to draw attention to himself in here.

Eden smiled when she saw him and took the hand he held out to her. He led her to the table, got her seated with a menu.

"What would you like from the bar?" he asked.

"Wine," she said. "Something white."

He ordered Eden's wine and his beer at the bar. As the grinning bartender handed him the drinks he winked at Ben and said, "She's a little old for you, isn't she?"

Ben turned away without comment. On another night he might have said something in return, something sharp to defend himself. But he didn't want to start this evening that way. Ignore it, he told himself. Don't let it get to you.

But by the time he'd set Eden's wine in front of her and taken his own seat, his knees were shaking. That one line from the bartender had thrown him off balance. He was not as anonymous in here as he would have liked. He sipped at his beer, wondering if all eyes in the room were focused on him and Eden.

"Do you come here often?" Eden asked.

He nodded. "In a rut, I guess."

The older waitress, Ruth, appeared at their table, her orange lipstick creeping outside the line of her lips. "You want your regular?" she asked Ben.

"Uh, no." He was in a rut. "I'll have the crab cakes tonight."

He felt hot and knew the color was rising up his neck to his cheeks. If the bartender knew about him, Ruth must as well.

"I'll have the stuffed flounder." Eden smiled innocently up at Ruth.

He was certain Ruth gave him a curdling look of disgust as she headed back to the kitchen. He never should have brought Eden here, should have suggested someplace farther out where no one knew him. But there was dancing here. Nearly every night he watched other couples dance, wondering if he'd ever have the chance to hold a woman in his arms again.

"Do you like to dance?" he asked.

"Love it."

"The band will start up in a little while."

She nodded, lowering her eyes as she sipped her wine.

"What did Kyle think of your pottery?"

"He thinks you planted it for me to find."

"Did he wash it off for you?"

"Yes. And I painted the little numbers on the back."

He swirled the beer in his glass, annoyed at his discomfort. He'd felt fine with her this morning, once he realized Kyle had not told her about him, but he could not shake the feeling that his every move here was being scrutinized by the other diners, by the staff. He would have to keep any conversation on her and off himself.

"You look deep in thought," she said.

"I was trying to think of a question to ask you that I don't already know the answer to."

She laughed and the diamond she wore at her throat shimmered in the light from the dance floor. "Tell me what you know and we can work backward."

"Well, you split up with your husband nearly a year ago." His cellmate had been reading the National Enquirer and there it was on the front page. A picture of a dark-haired man arm in arm with a redheaded woman, the caption in capital letters proclaiming something like EDEN RILEY CRUSHED BY HUSBAND'S AFFAIR WITH PENNSYLVANIA TEACHER. There was a small picture of Eden in the lower-right-hand corner, her face contorted with emotion. Probably something they pulled out of one of her movies and stuck, out of context, in the paper. Sitting there on his bed in his cold cinder-block cell, he felt sorry for her. He knew what it was like to have your life picked apart by the masses.

"A year next month," she said. "How about you? How long have you been divorced?"

"We separated about a year and a half ago and were divorced this past January." He couldn't let her question him. "Your husband was a lawyer, right?"

"Uh huh."

"You're lucky you got custody."

"He put up a valiant struggle."

"I'm sure he did. Lawyers aren't my favorite people." He stared at his beer. God, he sounded like an idiot. "You must know people around here from when you were a kid," he said.

"Not many. No one I'd care to see."

"How old were you when you moved in with Kyle and Lou in New York?"

"Thirteen."

"And your grandparents took care of you before that, right?"

"My grandfather and his second wife. You do know my life story, don't you?"

"Kyle and Lou brag a lot. And they're in love with Cassie."

Her face brightened and he knew he had found the right topic. Her beautiful white teeth flashed in a smile as she told him about her daughter. Only problem was, he couldn't listen. It was too hard to hear about a four-year-old girl. He wanted to say, Bliss does that too, or, Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about, but he couldn't. Instead he tuned out her words and focused on the warm blue of her eyes.

"Cassie will be here in July," she said. "Will your daughter visit you this summer? They could play-"

"Shhh!" He quickly covered her hand with his as Ruth set their plates in front of them, and he held her silent with his eyes until the waitress walked away. "Sorry," he said as he took his hand away and picked up his fork. "No, not this summer." Not any summer.

Eden frowned at him. "Is something wrong?"

"No." He cut a wedge of crab cake, neatly, with great concentration. He couldn't look at her, and he was relieved when she finally lifted her own fork and began to eat. How had he managed to kid himself into thinking he could ever have a normal relationship with a woman again? And Eden Riley? Christ, Alexander. He'd thought about her all afternoon, hoping there could be something between them-something short, a brief connection. He wasn't asking for much. When she said she and Michael Carey were just friends, wasn't she telling him she was interested? Fool. This woman was an Academy Awardwinning movie star. Every person in this restaurant would recognize her name. She wore an enormous diamond around her throat. Her daughter went to what sounded like an exclusive day-care program. She lived in a beautiful house on the ocean. He could picture it-hot tub, parties in the balmy California air. He saw her again in that hotel room scene with the darkly handsome Michael Carey. How ridiculous that he'd thought she could be interested in him. At one time he might have stood a chance, but not now. He made barely enough to keep a head of lettuce and some cheese in the refrigerator and a leaky roof over his head. He wanted to tell her about the house he and Sharon had owned, the one he'd designed himself. He wanted to tell her he'd had a job that earned him the respect of the entire archaeological community. But then he'd have to explain why he'd lost it all.

She had eaten a third of her flounder when she set down her fork. "Ben, I'm not sure what's going on here but you look as though you'd rather be just about anywhere but here with me. We don't have to drag this out, okay? Let's call it a night."

"No." He grabbed her hand again, panicked. "I'm sorry. I have a lot on my mind, but I don't want to leave yet." The band was starting to play. He liked this band. Old rock and roll, of a sort. They made every song sound as if it had a little country in it, but that was okay. He watched another couple walk onto the dance floor. "Let's dance," he said, getting to his feet. If they moved they wouldn't have to talk.