He knew what I was thinking, and vice versa. We were totally in .sync But we always lost it when we stood up. Had it in bed, lost it when we got out That's the story of my life.

Paige lowered the letter.

"Who's it from?" Noah asked from the door.

Once before she had put him off. She didn't see any reason to do it now. "Mara. After she died, I found bundles of letters in her house.

They're kind of ikeuwhdaatsrsY,nShth wro?"te them over a period of years."

"Different things. Some are personal. Others are more philosophical.

I've learned things about her that I never knew. It's sad. She was such a close friend." She frowned, haunted still by all she hadn't known about this close friend. "It makes you wonder whether any of us know, really know, the people we're with all the time."

"Of course we do," Noah said kindly. "But there are always those people who, for whatever their reasons, shield part of themselves.

It's not that they're dishonest, just that they don't always tell the whole truth."

"If I'd known the whole truth, I might have been able to help."

"If Mara was one to tell the whole truth, your help might not have been needed. She would have been healthier and stronger."

Paige knew he was right. She gave the letter a nudge. "I keep thinking of the isolation she must have felt when she was writing these."

"It's too bad she didn't just give them to you at the time she wrote them."

"Oh, they're not written to me. They're written to someone else."

Saying it, she felt a new wave of guilt.

"To a friend?"

"I guess." And Paige was a voyeur on the thoughts Mara shared.

"Someone back in Eugene.

Mara never mentioned her to me." She shot Noah a contrite look. "I know. I should package them up and send them on, and I will. I just want to read them a while longer. They make me feel closer to Mara.

They help me to understand her death."

"Did this friend come to her funeral?"

Paige shook her head. "Only Mara's parents and three of her brothers came from Eugene."

"Do you think she knows that Mara is dead?"

"Good Lord, I hope she does. I assume she found out." But the guilt swelled again.

"There haven't been any telephone messages from an old friend since Mara died. I mean, it's been two and a half months. If the two of them kept in touch, she would have tried to call. Wouldn't she have?"

"If they kept in touch, she would have," Noah reasoned. "But maybe they didn't. That would explain why Mara never mailed the letters."

"Then why did she write them?" Paige asked.

"She needed the outlet."

"But why to this person?" And why not to Paige? There was some hurt in that, Paige realized. Perhaps even envy. Surely, though, she hadn't kept the letters to deliberately deprive Lizzie Parks of something she wanted for herself.

Or had she?

Stricken, she took her address book from the nightstand and punched out the number of Mara's parents in Eugene. Mary O'Neill answered the phone. Paige had spoken with her several times in the course of disposing of Mara's things.

Now, after a cordial greeting, she said, ill have some papers here, Mrs. O'Neill. They're actually letters written by Mara to a Lizzie Parks."

She gave the address.

"I'd like to send them on. Do you think Lizzie's still at this address?"

There was a silence at the other end of the phone. Paige imagined that Mary O'Neill was trying to decide if the address was indeed correct or, alter nately, that she was flipping through a phone book to check.

As it happened, Mary O'Neill was doing neither of those things. In an awkward voice she said, "No.

There's no Lizzie at that address. There's no Lizzie With horror, Paige imagined that Lizzie Parks too, had died. "What do you mean?"

"There never was a Lizzie. Not in real life.

When Mara was little she used to pretend she had a cousin just her age who lived here in Eugene.

But there never was any cousin. Lizzie Parks was Mara's + imaginary friend."

Paige's hand shook. She bowed her head and pressed her free fingers to her forehead.

"Oh," she said in a small voice. "Well. That solves the mys tery, then." An imaginary friend.

"Thank you. I'm sorry I bothered you," she said, and hung up the phone. l She studied the letter she still held in her hand, r until the script blurred. Noah, too, was blurred when she raised her eyes.

"No Lizzie Parks.

She was an imaginary friend." z Avoiding him, she went to the love seat, gathered I the rest of the letters that had been in the packet, ,l and retied the yarn that held them together.

Noah lowered himself beside her. "She was an r unhappy woman." L Paige swore softly and lowered her head.

"An uVAr n."l9 imaginary friend."

"Others have them."

"In their late thirties?"

"Sometimes. These letters aren't much different from what many adults write, only they call it a journal.