Paige drawled back, ill don't know him enough to "He looked right at home in your bedroom."

"He was helping pick up. Giving moral support. It's scary, this kind of thing," she said, and looked around. "Whoever was here even went through the baby's things. Why would he have done that?" "I don't know. Breaking and entering isn't my thing. I just steal from stores."

Paige sighed. She put an arm around Sara's shoulders and said softly, "I'm glad you told me that. If you only steal from stores, then my parents' silver is safe, and my grandmother's Waterford, and the diamond earrings my father gave me when I turned sixteen." She tugged Sara toward the door.

"Let's go down. You can help with my room.

More appropriate you than your dad. It's women's stuff."

Late that night, after a semblance of order had been restored to the women's stuff and everyone had left, after Sami had taken the evening bottle that she was on the verge of giving up, and Jill was asleep, and the new bolts on the doors had been thrown, Paige crawled into bed.

While she absently tossed a tiny paper ball for kitty to retrieve, she opened another packet of Mara's letters.

ill love him, I think," she wrote. Paige looked for a date but could find none. It was pretty old, if Mara was referring to Daniel in the present tense. Daniel had been dead for fourteen years.

it seems I've known him so long, and hail the time we're arguing, but there's a side of him that few people see. He comes across as a guy who's totally confident, when the opposite is true. He was the youngest in his family and the least able to do things the others did I identify with him in that, which is maybe why I can understand so much of what he's feeling.

When I tried telling him that once, he got angry. He doesn't think he's insecure. So I don't tell him anymore, but I can see it in everything he does, especially when he's with me and needs the upper hand Poor guy. He tells himself that he's the kingpin of the practice, when everyone knows that he isn't. He brought his local contacts to the group, but he has no business sense. He had his office on the opposite side of Tucker Tucker?

when we arrived. Paige was the one who booked space right next to the hospital, which is where he should have been all along. Paige was the one who put the group together. She was the one who decorated the offices and designed the letterhead and hired Cinny and Dottie.

Paige set down the letter in astonishment.

Mara was talking of Peter. She snatched it back up and She did it purposely of course. She let him take the credit. Maybe she was being polite, or diplomatic Or maybe she knew how insecure he was, too. What she didn't know then, and doesn't know now, is how hard he fought against that insecurity. He studied his way through school and went into medicine, and he came back to Tucker to hold his head high. I admire him for thatand because he's a good doctor. He may be arrogant sometimes, but there are other times when he's that little boy sitting alone in a corner of the schoolyard, steeling himself against the taunts he is sure will come. Those are the times when I melt. Paige tells me I have a thing for the wounded. She should only know the extent of it.

Paige skimmed the remaining lines of the letter set it aside, and opened another.

Halfway down, she He comes in the middle of the night and never stays long He says that it wouldn't be good for the group if the others knew we were involved, and maybe he's right. Paige and Angie wouldn't understand the attraction. He can be a pain in the buff somehmes. But they don't know how good it is with him. In the middle of the night, he's a clinger He holds me like he's afraid someone will come aiong and snatch me away, and even if he's doing it in his sleep, I don't care.

It makes me fee/ good.

Mara and Peter. So it was true. And Paige hadn't known a thing. She skimmed that letter, then several more, moving quickly over passages that were blatantly physical. At the next to last letter in the bundle, she slowed.

I shouldn't be surprised, really. I never could sustain a relationship for any length of time. Something always goes wrong.

But it wasn't my fault this time. We were cleaning up after working in his darkroom when I found the pictures buried under a pile. At first I thought they were cut from a book, they were so striking, and then I recognized the model. She graduated from Mount Court two years ago.

Peter claims she ws of age at the time he took the pictures, and she might have told him that, but he was fooling himself He could have checked the medical records and found out. She was barely seventeen, posing in the nude in ways that would put him behind bars foryears.

He says it's art. I say it's trouble. He says I'm a fine one to talk after giving my husband the pills that killed him, but that wasn't what happened at all The problem is that if he tells, I can kiss my career goodbye. So it's a drawI don't tell on him and he doesn't tell on me.

Paige folded the letter with unsteady hands.

She didn't want to read more, not that night, at least. She was feeling sick. That morning Peter had learned about the existence of Mara's letters. He had suddenly had an allergy meeting that hadn't been on the books, and while he had been out of the office, someone had searched Paige's house. It was too coincidental for comfort.

fourteen p AICE PHONED PETER EARLY THE NEXT MORNINC and arranged to meet him at the coffee shop around the corner from the hospital. His house would have offered them more privacy, but she wasn't feeling sure enough of him for that. If the worst-case senario were true and he was guilty of everything she'd imagined in the course of the long night just past, he was a far different person from the one she had thought she knew.

Oh, she knew he was insecure. During their weekly group meetings, he jumped to his own defense more often than the others. Moreover, she had always suspected that his feelings for Mara ran deeper than he let on. Angie had called it a love-hate relationship Paige agreed.

But the restit was hard to accept.

Hey, Paige," he called in greeting, looking dapper as always in a tweed blazer and slacks.

He winked at the cashier as he strolled past to the table Paige had taken. What's up?" He pulled out the chair and sat down.

gCoffee?"

"Sure." He turned the mug at his place right side up.

Paige poured from the pot the waitress had brought but left her own mug facedown. She was jittery enough without the caffeine.

He added cream and two sugars and took a drink. Satisfied, he took another, then set the mug down. "Problems?" ill don't know." She was trying to gauge his mood, without luck. He was the same nonchalant Vermonter he had been the very first time they had met. Whether the nonchalance was natural or deliberate was the question. "You're the only one who can tell me that."

He put his elbows on the table. "Shoot."

"Mara's letters? The ones I told you about yesterday?"

"Mmmm?" He took another drink of coffee.

ill was reading more of them last night. There were a bunch that talked about you."

He set down the mug with a thud. "Does that surprise you? I told you she was hung up on me."

"These were very specific," Paige said in a lower voice. "They talked about a love affair.

They talked about accusations each of you made against the other, and a stand-off whereby neither of you would tell if the other didn't."

He was visibly shaken. "Mara was nuts."

"She didn't sound it in the letters," Paige argued. "They made perfect sense. They implicated you as much as they did her."

"Implicated me in what? A love-starved woman's dreams?"

Paige felt suddenly less sympathetic. Mara might indeed have been love-starved, but Peter, in his way, was no less so. "Don't put her down so quickly," she cautioned. "She wrote some upsetting things. I can't just put the letters away and forget about them."

Peter looked disgusted. "You're talking about the pictures. She made a goddamned big deal about those. They freaked her outmostly because they were artistically superior to anything she could produce herself.

They were beautiful pictures."

She said that."

"They weren't pornographic."

Paige leaned forward. "But she said that your model was underage, and if that's true, we have a problem."

"She was eighteen."

"At the time the pictures were taken2" "She told me she was eighteen."