"At one time in my life, I'd have given anything for it." She rubbed Sami's back, but the small, broken whimpers only sped up.

"She needs to be put to bed in a proper crib." "I don't have a proper crib."

"And you're telling me what to do with my kids7" She didn't need this.

Not from Noah Perrine.

She was too tired, too tense, too unsettled.

"You're right. The baby needs to be put to bed." She started toward the door, calling out over Sami's crying as she went "But I do know something about your kids, and that something tells me they need help.

I'd suggest you either bring in a professional grief counselor or let me and my partners talk with the kids who are upset. These kids are at risk. You and I can argue for hours but nothing will change that fact." She passed through the door and strode straight across the grass, which might have been against one of his precious rules but was the fastest way to reach her car.

"All right," came a call from behind, then abreast "you can come talk with them tomorrow.

You already told them you would."

She strode on. "Fine. But the baby will be with me. Where I go, she goes." She swung open the car door and slid inside.

"You aren't going to drive with her like that, are you?" he asked through the open window "The alternative," Paige said dryly, "is to strap her onto the passenger's seat. Since she has about as much muscle control as a sack of potatoesand since she isn't particularly happy right nowI don't think that's a good idea. She's safer like this." She started the car, shifted into gear, and pulled away from the curb.

"You need a car seat," he yelled.

Ignoring him, she smoothly negotiated the curved campus road until she reached the iron arch. By then Noah Perrine was out of sight and Sami had stopped crying.

At the stop sign, she looked both ways, pulled out onto the main street, straightened the wheel, and headed home. She drove slowly, increasingly numb, as though her brain had finally hit overload and was temporarily ceasing to perform all but the most urgent of functions.

She might have liked it to stay that way a while, but she wasn't so lucky. By the time she had laid Sami carefully in the middle of her own king-size bed and set about assembling the playpen, which was as close as she would come to having a crib until she had someone move the large one from Mara's house to hers, her hands were trembling.

Somehow she managed to change Sami, give her half of another bottle, and put her down in the playpen to sleep. By that time her own advice was echoing in her ears.

The thing is that when something like Dr. O'Neill's death happens, we have to learn from itthe lesson being to speak up when we're upset.

Seconds later she was on the phone to Angie.

four ANGIE BIGELOW LIKED TO SAY THAT SHE HAD spent the nine months of her earliest existence reading Time magazine through her mother's navel, and though her mother claimed it was Newsweek, the detail was moot. Angie was a knowledgeable woman. She had a photographic memory and an overview of the human experience that enabled her to understand and apply every fact she read. All this gave her more than her share of self-confidence.

Her patients loved her because she was rarely wrong. When she diagnosed something as a virus that would run its course and be gone in two weeks that was just what it did. If she determined that a limb was bruised rather than broken, it was bruised rather than broken. She read voraciously in the field and was familiar with every medical study that had been done, which meant that she knew what tests were worthwhile and what medicines appropriate. Her instincts were unrivaled when it came to reading between the lines of a patient's concerns.

She came closer to making medicine a science than many another doctor.

She ran her home in much the same way. She was organized, efficient, and thorough. Everything had its time and placegrocery shopping on Thursday afternoon, a load of laundry every night after dinner, house cleaning on Sunday afternoons. It wasn't that she couldn't have asked Ben to help with those thingshe worked at home and had the timequst that she did them better herself. She liked the idea of being wife, mother, and career woman and prided herself on doing all three well.

That was why she went to the extra effort of making a full dinnerlentil soup, scrod, rice, and salad and the first of the Macoun apples from the local orchard, baked with honey and served a la mode for Ben and Dougie that Friday night. Burying Mara had been the culmination of three long and emotionally draining days for all three of them. A pall lingered in the air. She was hoping to dispel it by reestablishing the norm.

Having finished washing pots and pans, she was wiping down the kitchen counter when the phone rang. She reached for it before Dougie could, half expecting it to be his little friend from Mount Court, who had already called twice, three times yesterday, and twice the day before.

Young love was obsessive. It was also worrisome for the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy, who knew how advanced fourteen-year-old girls could be. Dougie wasn't ready for this one. He wasn't ready for any one.

But it wasn't Melissa. It was Paige, sounding upset as easygoing Paige rarely was. There were high-pitched words, mention of Mara, a crib, and baby-sitters. Angie slowed her down, made her start again. When her meaning finally got through, Angie didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Mara's baby from India? You have to be kidding."

"She's lying right here beside me, big as a peanut but very real. And she's mine for now, Angie. I'm all she's got, and I have office hours tomorrow and double hours next week to fill in for Mara, and that's not to mention five practices and a cross-country race at Mount Court, and that's only next week What am I going to do?"

Angie was still trying to deal with the fact of the baby having arrived. "Mara must not have known she was coming so soon."

"She knew. The agency rep talked with her Monday."

"How could she have killed herself, then? She was so excited about adopting a child. She looked on it as her saving grace. What went wrongvn "I don't know!" Paige cried Why didn't she tell us the baby was on her way?" al don't know," Paige wailed.

But words were coming back to Angie, mentions Mara had made of bad luck and a curse, more than once, in counterpoint to talk of a saving grace.

Angie had assumed she was being facetious. Perhaps not. gShe may have been superstitious. She may have thought that if she said the words, something would go wrong."

Damn it, if she'd said something, we might have been prepared."

"That's assuming she planned to kill herself."

"Even if she didn't. She should have told us damn it. We were her friends. She should have told us when the baby was coming. She should have told us she was upsetshe should have told us she was taking Valiumshe should have told us she was losing it. Damn it, Angie.

Damn it."

I'm coming over," Angie said without another thought. Give me five minutes to get things set here, and I'll be on my way."

Paige took a broken breath. "I'm okay. You don't need to."

But Angie did. Attempts at normalcy notwithstanding, she was sick about Mara. She couldn't blot out the image of that deep, dark hole in the ground into which the casket had been lowered earlier that day.

She kept asking herself what she might have seen or done to prevent it, and although she didn't seriously think that Paige was on the verge of suicide, she wasn't taking any chances.

She wanted to talk with Paige.

And she had to see the baby.

Ben was sprawled on the den sofa, flipping between CNN and C-Span. His sketch pad was beside him, at the ready should he see anything worthy of caricaturing, but Angie knew it was more habit than anything else.

He wore a glazed look that said he wasn't concentrating. Mara's death had shaken him badly.

She broke into his distraction. "Hon? I'm running over to Paige's.

Remember the little girl Mara was going to adopt from India? Well, she arrived today. Today. Paige has her."

Ben's eyes reflected his surprise, though he didn't move a muscle.

"She wasn't due for weeks."

"So Mara said. But she's here, and from the sounds of it, Paige is on the verge of panic."