"What do you do?" Quentin repeated.

"You do what you can." She looked down at her bare toes. "You wield your shoe as a weapon."

Quentin laughed shortly and bitterly. "You use that thing like a Chinese throwing star."

She showed him the poker face. "Did I hurt you?"

"Rio," he said. He would not allow her to change the subject before he got the whole story.

"Rio," she agreed. "The hotel hears the commotion and calls the police. Of course, it's your job to go with Nine Lives and get him out of jail. But you're not going to take this, right?"

"Right," Quentin said.

"And you can't stay trapped in Rio, right?"

"Right."

"You know he can have all the charges against him dropped with a bribe and come after you again." She looked at Quentin with her dark-fringed eyes. "But not if you bribe first."

Quentin blinked. "You used your money to bribe the police in Rio to keep him in jail?"

"No," she said. "I used his money. I had access to his bank accounts because he gave me power of attorney one of the times he went to rehab. I set up payments so the police would keep him in jail indefinitely."

She embraced her knees, curling into a ball again. "If he gets back to New York and tells Manhattan Music what I did, I'll be fired from Stargazer for sure. And if Wendy knew about the whole thing, she'd try to cover for me. I can't ask her to do that. The truth would come out eventually, and she'd go down along with me.

"But if I get your alb.u.m first, and your concert goes smoothly, I'll have enough clout at Manhattan Music that they'll believe me over him. I can threaten to have him dropped from the label if he crosses me. He doesn't have a lot of friends there." Her chin went back down onto her knees. "And now he's out of jail."

Quentin frowned. "You don't know he's out, do you?"

She shrugged.

"Is there someone in Rio you could ask?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to make a call like that from the States. His lawyers might trace it and use it to blackmail me. I'm acquainted with his lawyers."

"It's a good thing you have a lot of hair," a pa.s.sing nurse remarked to Quentin. By the time he turned around, the nurse was gone. He realized he had his hands in his hair again. He extracted his fingers with some difficulty.

Then he sat on the edge of the bed and hugged Sarah around the IV tube and the monitor cable. She didn't hug him back, but that was okay. He held her in his arms and kissed the top of her head.

"Sarah, I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry for being rough with you. When I worked here, I saw a lot of things that human beings shouldn't have to see. But today was the first time I ever panicked. Martin's so p.i.s.sed at me. You can't panic in this line of work." He hugged her harder. "People do die of shock from bee stings. Not often, but it happens. And I saw you were about to pa.s.s out . . . " He pressed his lips to her silky pink locks again and tried to appreciate the reality of Sarah, and breathing, and Sarah breathing.

"I'm sorry, too," she said into his shirt. "I'm sure being threatened with a knife was an unpleasant surprise, especially juxtaposed with the hand job." Something in his face prompted her to add, "Don't you dare ask me what juxtaposed means."

"Sarah." He rubbed her knee, trying to rub some of the life back into her. "You're not alone anymore. If something like this ever happens to you again, you can always call me, wherever you are in the world, and I'll come get you."

"That's sweet, Quentin," she said sincerely, looking into his eyes. "But you'll move on. You'll get married and have kids and forget all about this day."

Not likely, Quentin thought. He said, "So will you. But if it's another one like that Harold Fawn jacka.s.s, how much good is he going to do you? I mean it. If you ever need help, call me. I'll bring Owen and Martin and Mad 'Red' Mud if I have to, and we'll come get you."

He turned at a rattling behind him. The attending leaned past him with a tin, offering Sarah a homemade cookie.

"No, thanks," Sarah said, putting a hand to her stomach.

"You should eat something," said the attending.

"Kind of queasy," Sarah murmured.

The attending offered the tin to Quentin as an afterthought.

"Do they have nuts in them?" Quentin asked.

"What do you think I'm trying to do, kill you?" the attending asked. "Don't answer that." She moved around the curtain to the next bed.

Sarah stared after the attending, then turned to Quentin. "Tell me what happened in Thailand."

He'd known this was coming. "t.i.t for tat," he muttered. "Well, it was the end of the tour. We were tired. We wanted a vacation. I should have known better, because everything went wrong that day. Martin found some heroin right away. Karen and I were getting on each other's nerves. I'm supposed to keep an asthma inhaler and an adrenaline shot-that shot Martin gave you-with me all the time. They were in Erin's purse. But Erin went in a market by herself and got her purse stolen. Owen and I tried to kill us a Thai guy, but he'd already pa.s.sed her purse to somebody else. I didn't think anything about the inhaler and the shot, which were probably halfway to Udon Thani by then.

"We gave up and went to the beach. It was this beautiful beach. Let's just say it put spring break at Panama City to shame. There were these enormous rocks jutting out of the ocean."

"Like Chimney Rock?" Sarah asked.

"No. And then I felt myself start to pa.s.s out. I try to be careful what I eat, but sometimes when we're on tour, I slip up, because I don't know where all the ingredients are coming from.

"I pa.s.sed out. Then there was a motorcycle with a cab on the back for pa.s.sengers. They use them as taxis. A ride in that thing would've shocked anybody back into consciousness. At the hospital, I remember there were cats running down the halls, and the medical equipment looked like the computers in the first Star Trek TV series, very sixties.

"I was glad I'd had a nice day at the beach, because I was about to die. It got hairy in the ICU in Oklahoma City last January, but I never thought I was going to die. This time was different. This was it. The doctor told me they were inducing a coma until my lungs recovered. The way I felt, I did not expect to wake up. Erin will tell you that it got very weird. I took her hand, and then Martin's hand, and Owen's hand, and Karen's hand, and said good-bye to them one last time."

He was back in the ICU. Karen clung to one hand and wailed, as if he was supposed to be strong for her, even though he couldn't breathe. Erin held his other hand firmly and chewed gum. That's what he concentrated on as they were putting him to sleep: the grip of Erin's hand, the sound of her gum smacking, and the strange concentric square pattern of the foreign ceiling tiles.

"And then, a few days later, I did wake up."

Sarah pulled at him. She wanted him to lie down with her. He tried to settle beside her on the bed, but the IV tube and the monitor cable got in the way. He moved to her other side and lay behind her, his front to her back. Careful not to touch her stung shoulder, he put his arm across her chest. He inhaled the scent of her hair: shampoo and Sarah.

She asked him, "Were you beckoned by the light?"

"Are you making fun of me for being near death?" he demanded. "Why does everybody make fun of me for being on a ventilator?"

"Because you love it. It helps you cope." She looked back over her shoulder to show him a genuine smile. "Just trying to lighten the mood here."

"Oh." He forced a laugh. "No, I was under heavy sedation. The propofol pretty much took care of anything like that."

She smoothed her hand up and down his arm. He felt his hair stand on end, and the IV tube swayed. She asked, "Why'd you fire Karen?"

The excuse he'd given himself was that he didn't want her to find out about Martin's drug use. There was more to it than that. "I fired her because I broke up with her. I didn't think I could break up with her and still have her as a manager, because h.e.l.l hath no fury." Instantly he was sorry for quoting Shakespeare. But idiot Quentin didn't have to read Shakespeare. It was a common expression. Albeit probably not one idiot Quentin would use.

Sarah let it slide. "Why'd you break up with her?"

"Because . . . " He wasn't sure of the answer himself. "I don't know. I've been sick a lot. But before this, I never really expected to die at thirty. I thought I'd finish school and have kids. I thought I'd change the world with the research foundation we started. And I thought that when I died, I'd be with somebody I was in love with."

Sarah's hand halted on his arm. "What about Erin?"

He was able to stop himself from saying, "What about Erin?" He'd made enough mistakes today. He said truthfully, "When Erin and I are together, we don't get along. We argue."

"Do you love her?"

He wished Sarah would move her hand on his arm again, but there was no chance of that now. He was d.a.m.ned either way. If he said he didn't love Erin, Sarah would leave him. She would think she'd gotten too close to him and he had chosen her over Erin, wrecking her plan to keep the band together. If he lied and said he was in love with Erin, that would ruin any slim chance he might have at a real relationship with Sarah later, if he ever figured out how to swing it.

He said carefully, and again truthfully, "Yes, I love her." Just not the way you mean.

Sarah sat up suddenly. The cable pulled out of the monitor, and the alarm sounded.

"I've got it," Quentin called over the beeping so that ten nurses wouldn't rush in. He rolled off the bed and bent to plug the cord back in.

"So, Martin used to work here, too?" Sarah asked conversationally, poker-faced.

"Yeah. Martin was a terrific nurse. The job kept him sober, because the hospital makes employees take drug tests. And Erin worked here as an ultrasound tech. We never were sure what Owen did. He has an MBA, and he worked up in accounting."

"Owen has an MBA?"

"Pretty good for a dumba.s.s." Quentin grinned.

"What did you do?" she asked.

"Helped out." Quentin cupped his hands and called, "King to queen seven," to a pa.s.sing paramedic.

"s.h.i.t," the paramedic exclaimed without stopping.

Quentin glanced up at the almost empty IV bag, then at his watch. "We can still finish your alb.u.m by the deadline tonight. But we won't finish it before your courier's flight back."

"I'll take it to New York myself tomorrow morning," she said.

Quentin's heart skipped a beat. "Are you coming back down after that?"

"Of course," she said. "I'll just go up for the day. We still need to get you and Erin together. And I have to keep you out of trouble until the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event."

"I'll go with you to New York," he said suddenly.

Her eyes brightened, then darkened. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"We don't know whether Nine Lives is on the loose. It's bad to have the thing I have, the disabled-What did you call it?"

"Disabling codependence?"

"Yeah. It's bad to have that. But it's okay to ask for help."

She half smiled. "I don't want you to bite the head off a dove in the record company office."

"I'll behave," he promised.

"That's not the only thing I want to do while I'm in town. I need to visit Wendy's baby. This may be all the baby I ever get."

"Oh, honey," he said, taking her hand. "You should have told me it meant that much to you. We could have finished the alb.u.m days ago, and you could have been there when the baby was born."

He really was idiot Quentin. He didn't realize what he'd admitted until her poker face began to fissure. She seethed, "You mean to tell me that all this time, you've been holding back, delaying the alb.u.m on purpose-"

He clapped his hands. "Okay, let's get you out of here. We have an alb.u.m to record." He caught a pa.s.sing nurse and gestured to the IV. "Has she had enough of this? I'm taking her home."

Quentin hadn't expected what was left of the Birmingham paparazzi to be waiting on the sidewalk outside the emergency room, plus ten extra reporters and photographers in town early for the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event. But come to think of it, an ambulance pulling up to his house three days before the concert was a scoop.

He pushed through the photographers like a bodyguard to clear a path for Sarah, but Sarah stopped and gave a statement to the reporters. With a feeling of foreboding, he listened to her tell the truth. When they finally reached his big-a.s.s truck, he told her reprovingly that she should be careful what she told the press, because it might come back to sting her.

"How can it possibly matter to anyone that I'm allergic to bee stings?" she asked.

"You're going to be sorry," he said as he drove back to the house.

He tucked her into his bed and went downstairs to the recording session made frantic by his bandmates' fears that they might miss the deadline. Several times he went upstairs to check on Sarah and found her sound asleep in the quiet room.

But at about eight in the evening, she stumbled down the stairs to the studio. It was a far cry from the first day he'd known her. Barefoot, she wore his boxers and T-shirt. She'd knotted them to take up some slack, but they still hung off her. A blanket was hunched around her, and her tousled hair fell in stripes to frame her ashen face. Wandering behind the technicians and stepping around the Timberlanes, to whom she didn't give a glance, she lay across the empty chairs at the back of the control room and curled into a ball. He had thought he'd never see it, but here it was: Sarah undone.

Erin nodded in Sarah's direction, as if Quentin needed prompting. He set his ba.s.s in its stand and walked out of the sound booth. Kneeling in front of Sarah, he pushed a pink strand away from her furrowed brow. "What can I get you?"

She opened her eyes and closed them again. "Nothing, thank you," she murmured. "Couldn't sleep."

"You're sure as h.e.l.l not going to get any sleep down here."

"I wanted to be with you."

He wished this were true. You mean you wanted to make sure we got your alb.u.m done, he thought, but he didn't have the heart to argue with her. He smoothed her hair again, squeezed her shoulder, kissed her forehead, and went back into the sound booth.

He switched off the sound to the control room and turned his back on the spectators. He wouldn't put it past Sarah to be able to read lips. "Sarah's taking the master copy to New York herself tomorrow," he told the band, "and I'm going with her."

"The h.e.l.l you are," growled Owen.

"She knows a lot of our secrets," he said pointedly to Owen. "We don't want her to tell the record company. I think we should keep her happy."

Owen looked away.

Quentin explained to Erin and Martin, "We're only going up for a few hours. She wants to see her friend who just had a baby, and I'll check on the medical foundation. I won't have time to break Rule Three."

"It probably wouldn't take you very long," Martin remarked.

"I'm tired of your stamina jokes," Quentin said. "Erin, tell Martin about that time in Valdosta."

Erin smiled. Owen, adjusting a cymbal, didn't look the least bit jealous. What a relief.

But then Erin said, "Sarah won't tell the record company about us now that she has the alb.u.m. You can check on the foundation some other time. There's no good reason for you to go." She ran through a fiddle lick as if that were the end of the discussion.

Quentin stepped over to Martin and said quietly, "Nine Lives is more likely to come after Sarah up there than down here. I'd appreciate it if you could help a brother out on this one."