Claudia bit her lip.

"Have you spoken to Ryland... asked him...?"

"Not yet. I thought I'd phone him from here. Did she say anything to you about...?"

"No," she replied unhappily.

"She was only on the phone for a few minutes and she rang off before I could really ask her anything. Oh, Garth held her as she wept.

"She just needs time," he said, repeating what he had told her earlier, but then he'd been assuming that Tara would spend that time safely with Ryland and that Ryland would help her come to terms with what she had learned.

The discovery that he was in Boston had disturbed Garth more than he wanted Claudia to guess. The thought of Tara dealing with the painful discoveries the day had brought with Ryland was one thing; the thought of her having to deal with them alone was quite another.

"Her car's gone," he told Claudia sombrely.

Silently, they looked at one another. Then Claudia asked him bitterly, "What are you thinking, Garth? That she's gone to look for her mother, her real mother?" She started to shake with harsh, racking sobs that tore at her throat and Garth's heart.

Try not to worry he counselled her.

"Right now, Tara will be feeling antagonistic towards both of us, and no doubt she's also feeling rather afraid and alone, and curious, too, about Katriona--that's only natural. Give her time, Clo... give her time."

/! know you're right," Claudia agreed.

"I just wish..."

"It's eleven o'clock," Garth said.

"Let's go to bed. If Tara does ring again, there's a phone in the bedroom."

"Tomorrow I must go... go home," she told him huskily.

"Yes, I know." Very gently, he touched her neck, brushing her skin with tender lover's ringers.

"I'd like to go back with you, but under the circumstances--' " No, you mustn't," Claudia broke in quickly.

"Tara might ring and--' Firmly, Garth took her in his arms.

"Perhaps this isn't the best of times to say this, but there's no way I'd want to change what's been happening between us, Clo. No way at all. It might be an arrogant thing for me to say but ... you and I were meant to be together. Vfefit together, belong together, and I'm putting you on notice that from now on I want to be very much a part of your life."

Lifting her head to look at him, Claudia declared simply and truthfully, "You are my life, Garth, you and Tara. Oh, I know I've got my friends, the business, my charity work, a busy and fulfilling life, and I'd be lying if I pretended that they don't mean a lot to me, but giving love, being loved by those closest to me... " I've missed you," she admitted bravely, 'and although you may not understand this, it's actually because I loved you so much that I had to end our marriage once I knew you were Tara's father. You see, I simply couldn't live with the knowledge that, as I then thought, you'd betrayed me with another woman--any other woman, but most especially Tara's birth mother. I hated Katriona so much then. You were mine and I felt that she'd taken you from me. You don't know how many nights I've lain in bed torturing myself by imagining the two of you together, imagining you telling her how much more desirable, how much more sexy, how much more of a turn-on she was for you than me."

Claudia could see from Garth's expression how much her admissions had stunned him.

"It was never anything like that," he protested.

"I never--' " I know that now," Claudia assured him.

"But then..."

"Why didn't you say anything?" Garth groaned, drawing her closer.

"When you said you wanted a divorce, I thought it was because you were completely disgusted and revolted by me... that discovering I was Tara's father was simply the last nail in the coffin for our marriage.

I'd felt for so long that you were irritated by me and tired of me. mat I was simply someone who came between you and Tara, demanding your time and attention when you wanted to give them all to her. I thought discovering that I was Tara's father was simply giving you an excuse to end our marriage. I thought you wanted me to go. "

"I did," Claudia agreed, 'and yes, I know there was a time when I was guilty of. of neglecting you and our relationship. I don't honestly know why. All I do know is that a good many other young women in their early thirties with young children come to me for counselling saying much the same thing. They complain they just don't have the time, the space, the energy to be both good mothers and loving wives. Perhaps it's because nature has designed us to put our children first when they are young. Young children need that love and protection from their mothers in order to survive, to flourish. But I never stopped loving you. Garth, and once you were gone--' "Why didn't you say something... tell me...?"

"How could I? You seemed more than content with your new life. I even began to ask myself if you were relieved that I had asked you for a divorce, if I had simply preempted a step you yourself had been wanting to take. My pride wouldn't let me tell you how I really felt.

In fact, it wasn't until I was sitting outside our old flat reliving the past that I finally admitted openly to myself what I had known deep down inside for years. I told myself I was coming to see you for Tara, but--' "It doesn't matter why you came," Garth whispered as he looked lovingly into her eyes.

"All that matters is that you did... that you're here and that we're together, now and for always. Come on, let's go to bed. We've got a lot of time to catch up on," he reminded her wickedly.

"I wonder where Tara is now?" Claudia remarked sadly as she let him guide her towards the bedroom door.

Tara thanked the receptionist for her help and took the keys she was handed for the rental car she had organised for her.

It was just gone nine and still relatively light. Common sense urged her to wait until morning when she was properly rested after a night's sleep.

Hearing Claudia's voice over the phone had disturbed her more than she expected and she told herself it was crazy to feel concern for someone who had deceived her so heartlessly, and yet when she heard the tears in Claudia's voice, her instinct had been to try to comfort her.

In the taxi back from the hypermarket, she had studied the map she had bought, quickly finding the village where Claudia said Katriona had been brought up. It was less than twenty miles away, that was all, a relatively short drive.

Her hire-car was by coincidence the same make and colour as her own car. An omen? Maybe, but of what? What was she expecting to find?

What did she want to find? Not Katriona. How could she? Katriona was dead, she're n minded herself fiercely as she unlocked the car door and got in.

Though sturdily built, the car hadn't been designed to be driven recklessly round sharp bends at high speeds, especially not by a driver whose mind was not really on her driving.

By the time she realised she had misjudged the sharpness of the bend and her own speed, it was too late. The car was careering out of control, skidding at a frightening speed towards the line of mature trees that marked the edge of the road.

The elderly couple who lived several yards away from the bend heard the sound of the car hitting the tree when they opened their door to let their equally elderly dog out. They telephoned the police immediately, but as the grave-faced traffic officer informed them, even if they had gone out to the car there would have been nothing they could have done for its sole female occupant.

"She must have died instantly," he told them. What he didn't tell them but what his accident report would was that she had not been wearing a seat-belt. Whether having done so at the speed she must have been driving would have made any difference was academic now. She had had nothing to identify her but he had radioed in the number plate of the car.

Since it was registered to an owner living in London, it would not fall to him to go and see them. London was Met territory and they were a relatively small country force.

Garth was just about to take Claudia a tray of tea and toast when the constable from the Met arrived, his grave expression at odds with his youth.

After Garth had let him in, he asked him formally, "I wonder if you can tell me, sir, if you are still the owner of a vehicle registered J850 AYG?.

"Yes, that's my daughter's car," Garth replied. The car was registered in Garth's name simply because the partnership paid a contribution towards the running costs of both of their cars since they used them for work.

The constable looked away from him and then back before clearing his throat and telling him, "I'm afraid I have to tell you that the car has been involved in a ... fatal accident. You say the car belongs to your daughter? The young woman who was driving had no identification on her, and in the circumstances, I'm afraid, I'm going to have to ask you to identify the body."

"Garth, I heard the door ... is it Tara?"

Claudia checked the doorway of the living room, the hope dying out of her eyes as she saw the policeman.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she began, apologising and backing away, but then as though something in the fixed stances of both men alerted her, she suddenly froze in her tracks. Turning to Garth, she demanded, "What is it... what's happened? It's Tara, isn't it? Something's happened to Tara." As her voice started to rise, her whole body seemed to crumble, the blood draining from her face as she clutched the doorway.

"There's been an accident," Garth was forced to tell her. "I ... I have--' " Where is she? Which hospital? " Claudia demanded immediately of the policeman while he looked at Garth.

Going to her. Garth placed his hand on her arm, almost unable to form the words.

"She isn't... Tarais..."

As he watched her absorb and interpret his message, he could see in her eyes a reflection of the pain and disbelief he knew were in his own.

"You stay here," he advised her gruffly.

"I'll go with the officer."

"No... no... I'm coming, too," Claudia told him fiercely, struggling to suppress the avalanche of emotions threatening her self-control.

Tara dead. No! It couldn't be true. She would have known, sensed. But the grave expression on the face of the young policeman and the shocked anguish in Garth's eyes persuaded her that it was true.

She felt as though she had opened the bedroom door and walked into a nightmare. Tara dead. It wasn't possible.

"Where...?" she began to ask, dry-mouthed, as Garth guided her towards the door.

"How...?"

Garth touched her arm.

"Later' he whispered.

They sat silently side by side in the back of the police car, frozen into immobility by the sheer weight of their loss, feeling almost as though by not moving, by not breathing, they could some and Betray how keep the news they had been brought from actually becoming reality.

The hospital morgue was at the end of a long, seemingly endless corridor. Their footsteps echoed hollowly as they slowly made their way to the door at the end. Garth couldn't help remembering the time so many years ago when he had looked upon the face of his stillborn child. Painful though that had been at the time, it had been nothing like this.

They both hesitated outside the door to the morgue, but the police constable pushed it open and stood back to allow them to pass.

The girl lay on a long table, the empty, body- length drawer open in the wall behind her making Garth shudder as he looked away from it. As a former army officer, he had seen death before, but this was different. This was his own flesh and blood.

Tears filled his eyes. He turned towards Claudia and to his shock heard her saying in a firm, dear voice, "That isn't our daughter.

That's not Tara. "

Garth shook his head. He had known, of course, how hard this would be for her, and for her to deny the facts was perhaps not unexpected. But to do so this positively, this determinedly. His tear-distorted glance swept over the dark head and the pale, lifeless arm that lay across the covered body.

"Clo..." he began beseechingly.

"Darling, I know--' It isn't Tara," Claudia interrupted him, pulling away. Before he could stop her, she walked quickly towards the table and around it.

"It isn't Tara, Garth/ she repeated more gently, her own eyes filling with tears as she stood facing him across the body, her gaze fixed on the face that he still hadn't had the courage to identify.

"Come and look," she invited him as tenderly as if he were a small child.

"I promise you it isn't her."

Reluctantly, he did as she said, grasping the hand she held out to him, feeling its warmth and reassurance, too grateful for its comfort to question the fact that she was the one giving support and he the one taking it.

"Look, darling. It isn't Tara," Claudia repeated once more, her expression turning sombre as she confounded him completely by brushing her fingertips over the dead girl's face in a gesture of loving comfort and then bending down to kiss her cold cheek.

"Poor child. I don't know who she is but I'm profoundly sad for her and her family."

As he blinked away his tears. Garth forced himself to look at the dead girl for the first time. His expression must have given him away, he realised, because immediately the constable was asking him, "Do you recognise her, sir?"

"Yes, yes, I do," he confirmed, turning to Claudia.

"It's Estelle. She works for us." Garth tried to gather together his scattered thoughts.

Estelle might not be his daughter, his child, but she was someone's, some man's, a man who as yet had no awareness, no knowledge, of his daughter's fate; a man who, if he was any kind of a father, would grieve terribly for her once he learned the truth. And Garth felt that it behoved him as a man, as a fellow human being, to allow a few seconds of respect both for Estelle and for that unknown man even in the midst of his own dizzy relief that the body before him did not belong to his own precious Tara.

"You say she was driving my daughter's car," he remarked, looking at the younger man.

"I don't know how..."

"Perhaps Tara lent it to her," Claudia suggested.

It was a possibility. Garth acknowledged, but from what he had heard on the grapevine about Estelle, he suspected that the reality was more likely to be that the other girl had 'helped herself to the car.

Perhaps in her furious rush to clear her desk, Tara had forgotten her keys, or perhaps while rejecting her parents, she had also decided to reject the car that had been a birthday gift to her and simply left the keys on her desk where Estelle had found them.

"If you could tell me her full name," the police constable suggested patiently.

Dazed, Garth did so. To have gone from being told that Tara was dead and then discovering that she was not--all within the space of an hour--had left him feeling in very much the same frame of mind as he recalled once feeling in Northern Ireland when a companion had been hit by a sniper's bullet, leaving him still standing. Relieved, and yet at the same time, both disbelieving and guilty.

As they walked back to the police car. Garth saw that Claudia was crying, the tears pouring silently down her face.

Hugging her, he told her, "It's just the shock. I know how you feel."

Claudia shook her head.

"No... I'm not crying for that. I'm crying for that poor girl in the morgue and for her mother," she explained tearfully to him.

"When I saw her and I knew she wasn't Tara, Garth, I realised that the worst thing that could happen to me isn't losing Tara's love and trust--the worst thing that could happen would be if Tara had been that girl.

"Maybe Tara never will forgive me for what I've done, maybe I'll have to live the rest of my life without her, but at least I'll know that she's living, that she has her life.

"I knew, you know," she told him then as they got into the waiting car.

"I knew even before I saw her. Tara's life couldn't end without my knowing something, without my feeling something. It just isn't possible."