"That's the law, but it doesn't hold much weight with important clients, reputations and billable hours."

"They should've stuck by you, Eli, even if only out of principle."

"They had other a.s.sociates, partners, clients, staff to consider. Initially they called it a leave of absence, but I was done, and we all knew it. Anyway, it gave me the time and the reason to write, to try to focus on that."

"Don't turn it into them doing you a favor." Her voice snipped, sharp as scissors. "You did yourself the favor. You did the positive."

"I grabbed a lifeline with writing, and it's more positive than letting go. When they didn't come to arrest me, and believe me that was something I waited for every day, it gave me the chance to go to Bluff House."

A kind of purging, Abra thought. A hulling out that had left him tired and tense and, to her mind, entirely too willing to accept the hand dealt him.

"And now?" she asked.

"Now, the lifeline's not enough. I can't just hold in place, wait for the fall. I'm going to fight back. I'm going to find the answers. When I have them, I'm going to stuff them down Wolfe's throat."

"I love you."

He glanced at her with a smile, but it faded into a look of wary surprise when he saw her eyes. "Abra-"

"Uh-uh, better watch the road." At her gesture, he tapped the brakes before he rear-ended a hatchback.

"Terrible timing," she continued. "Not romantic, not convenient, but I believe in expressing feelings, especially the positive ones. Love's the most positive feeling there is. I like feeling it, and I wasn't sure I would. We've got such c.r.a.p behind us, Eli, and we can't help that some of it's still sticking to the bottom of our shoes. Maybe it helps make us who we are. But the bad thing is it makes us hesitate to trust again, reach out again, take those risks again."

Amazing, she thought, just amazing that saying the words out loud made her feel stronger, freer. "I don't expect you to take those risks just because I did, but you should feel good, and you should feel lucky that a smart, self-aware, interesting woman loves you."

He navigated the tricky traffic to squeeze his way onto 95 North. "I do feel lucky," he told her. And panicked.

"Then that's enough. We need better tunes," she decided, and began to search and scan his satellite radio.

That's it? he thought. I love you, let's change the channel? How the h.e.l.l was a man supposed to keep up with a woman like that? She was a lot harder to negotiate than Boston traffic, and even more unpredictable.

As the miles pa.s.sed, he tried to think of something else, but his thoughts kept circling back to it like fingers seeking out a nagging itch. Eventually he'd have to respond, somehow. They'd have to deal with the ... issue. And how the h.e.l.l was he supposed to think clearly, rationally, about love and all it implied when he had so much else to deal with, to work through, to resolve?

"We need a plan," Abra said, and tossed him straight back into panic mode. "G.o.d, your face." She couldn't stop the laugh. "It's a study of barely restrained male terror. I don't mean an Abra-loves-Eli plan, so relax. I mean a Justin-Suskind-risked-sneaking-up-to-the-third-floor-of-Bluff-House-and-why plan. We need to systematically go through what's up there."

"I've started doing that a couple hours a day, every day, and I've barely made a dent. Have you seen how much is up there?"

"That's why I said systematically. We stick with the stance he's after the dowry. We expand that by the reasonable a.s.sumption he has information, right or wrong, that caused him to dig in that area of the bas.e.m.e.nt. And we can further expand that by logical speculation. He was looking for more information, another lead, something that confirms-to his mind-the location."

Eli imagined there were a lot of invisible or missing dots, but all in all it wasn't a bad way to connect what they had.

"For all we know he found what he was after."

"Maybe, but he's come back to the house since then. He still thinks the house is the key."

"Things weren't jumbled up." Eli thought it through. "I don't know what kind of order things had in the trunks, the chests and storage boxes, the drawers in all that furniture up there, so they could have been searched through prior to the police. But if he did, he was careful about it. Then the cops went through it, and now it's pretty jumbled up."

"How could he know someone wouldn't go up there, and before he found what he wanted. He didn't want anyone to know he had access to the house. We wouldn't have known if we hadn't been wandering around the bas.e.m.e.nt in the dark."

"We were wandering around the bas.e.m.e.nt because he cut the power. That's a big clue to a B-and-E."

"Okay, that's a good point. But would you have searched down there? If you'd come home, called the police, it's really unlikely you'd have gone down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, looking for signs the intruder had been down there. Or if you did, it's not likely you'd have gone beyond the wine cellar."

"Okay. He took a calculated risk."

"Because he wants and needs the access, and maybe, if we do that systematic search, we'll find out more about why. We have to wait for him to come back before we can try the ambush agenda," she reminded him. "We might as well do something active until. More active," she amended. "I know you've been researching and cross-referencing, and plotting out theories and connections, and the trip today gave us new information to process. But I like the idea of actually getting my hands into things."

"We can take a deeper look."

"And spending some time up there might give you more ideas about how to use that s.p.a.ce. I'm going to pick you up a paint fan."

"You are?"

"Colors inspire."

"No," he said after a moment, "I can't keep up."

"With what?"

"You." Relief when he finally cruised through the village tempered with frustration. Love to radio stations, systematic searches to ambushes to paint fans. "How many directions can you go in at one time?"

"I can think in a lot of directions, especially if I consider them important, relevant or interesting. Love's important, and certainly on a different level I think music on a drive's important. Searching on the third floor and refining any plan to, hopefully, catch Suskind inside the house are absolutely relevant, and paint colors are interesting-and eventually both important and relevant."

"I surrender," he said as he pulled up and parked at Bluff House.

"Good choice." Abra got out of the car, spread her arms, turned a circle. "I love the way it smells here, the way the air feels. I want to take a run on the beach and just fill myself with it."

He couldn't take his eyes off her, couldn't block the lure of her. "You matter to me, Abra."

"I know it."

"You matter more than anyone has."

She lowered her arms. "I hope so."

"But-"

"Stop." She hauled her bag out of the car, shook back her hair. "You don't have to qualify it. I'm not looking for you to balance the scales. Take the gift, Eli. If I gave it too soon or wrapped it the wrong way, it can't be helped. It's still a gift." She started for the door, and from inside, Barbie sent out a fury of barks.

"Your alarm's going off. I'll change and take her with me for that run."

He got out his keys. "I could use a run, too."

"Perfect."

She said no more about it, and instead plowed straight on with the new agenda. They unpacked trunks, with Abra diligently inventorying the contents on a laptop.