LITMIR.BIZ

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say anything, but the conviction in her troubled blue eyes told its own story.

      “What?” Juliet asked. “At this point you might as well tell me.” She didn’t figure there was anything else Marcie could say that would hurt her more. She’d never understood, until that moment, how one could hurt too badly for tears.

      They’d come. She knew that. Later, when she was alone in her bed.

      “I didn’t think you could help me.”

      “That’s crazy!” Juliet’s defenses were up, a first for her with Marcie. It panicked her. She didn’t know what to do. “Who better than me, Marce? I was in the same position you’re in right now. And I love you more than anyone in the world.”

      “You don’t know that,” Marcie said. “You have no idea how much Hank loves me.”

      So that’s what this is about. Two months ago, for the past fifteen years, Marcie had talked about the lack of fire between her and Hank, the lack of a feeling strong enough to get them to the altar. But now that she was pregnant, suddenly she was seeing things she’d never seen before?

      Had it been that way with their mother, too? Had she known, before she got pregnant, that she and their father weren’t in love?

      Was Marcie just like her after all? Another believer in fairy tales? Another woman looking for a man to take care of her? Another dreamer?

      Another gray body lying naked in a tub, waiting for a daughter to come home? To dress it with shaking fingers to preserve an irrelevant modesty when the authorities arrived?

      “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Marcie said, and Juliet stared, wondering for a minute what her sister meant. “Hank doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

      “What does?”

      She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know, but something forced her to sit there and listen.

      “Mom.”

      Marcie had read her mind, just like always. Under the circumstances, Juliet felt exposed.

      “What about her?”

      “You aren’t rational where all that’s concerned, Jules. You never got over it.”

      “Of course I did. I went to counseling. Got on with my life.”

      “You continued to live, but I don’t think you ever moved beyond it.”

      Anger sped through her, giving her energy. Air to breathe. “You’re somehow going to blame the fact that you lied to me on Mom’s death?”

      Marcie nodded and Juliet felt herself deflate. “You’re so afraid I’m going to end up like her, Jules, that you can’t see straight on this one. I know that. I understand. I love you for it. But I can’t tell you how I feel about this whole thing with the baby and Hank and Maple Grove. You just don’t get it.”

      Marcie was wrong. She had to be. Juliet was the strong one of the two of them. She always had been.

      “Are you saying you think I made the wrong choice when I was pregnant with Mary Jane?” she asked, trying to find even a small part of the anger that had driven her seconds before and given her a sense that she’d survive. “Because if you are, then this is not the first time you’ve lied to me. You’ve often said you completely agreed with me.”

      “I don’t think it was the wrong choice,” Marcie said softly. “Not necessarily because getting married would have made you unhappy, but because you were so certain it would have. Because of that, there wouldn’t have been any other option.”

      It was too much for her take in. After months of worry about Mary Jane, her renewed contact with Blake, the possibility that he could face life in prison, a case that was one dead end after another, and Marcie’s pregnancy, she just couldn’t process any more.

      “What is it that I supposedly don’t understand?” She asked a question she thought she could cope with.

      “That I might be able to be happy in Maple Grove,” Marcie said, her voice calm, growing stronger. “I hate the place. I have the same memories there that you do. But I do love Hank. All of this has shown me just how much.”

      Marcie stopped, her hands still in her lap as she glanced over at Juliet, and the momentary conviction in her sister’s eyes gave Juliet more pause than anything else that had come before.

      “I really thought that I wanted to move to San Diego,” she said. “For years, I’ve thought that. I’ve been dissatisfied, unwilling to give Hank any indication that I was planning to hang around. That he was enough to keep me there. But I didn’t leave, either. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”

      Juliet knew why. The same reason her mother and grandmother before her had stayed. Fear to believe in anything more. Fear of leaving what little security was guaranteed to find out what the world could bring.

      “It’s because I was too afraid not to want to leave,” Marcie said, making no sense to Juliet at all. “I was afraid that if I wanted to stay in Maple Grove, I’d be just like Mom.”

      It made a very twisted kind of sense. Or was her sister merely justifying the very thing they’d both feared? That they were just like the two generations of women who had come before them.

      “You expect me to believe now that you like Maple Grove?”

      “No.” Marcie shook her head. “But I love Hank. And he loves me, too. Probably even more. He’s supporting me through all of this. He’s willing to wait while I work things out because he knows I need to do this on my own. To know for sure. But his life is in Maple Grove.”

      “If he loves you so much, why can’t he think about making a life somewhere else?”

      “I asked him the same question.”

      “And?”

      “He doesn’t know the answer.”

      Life was never easy. And in the space of a few short hours, it had just gotten inexorably harder.

      BLAKE WAITED at their usual booth in the little place out by Mission Beach for Juliet to arrive for their weekly meeting the first Friday evening in July—just three weeks before his trial.

      Lucy brought over his whiskey as soon as he sat down. “Where’s Juliet tonight?”

      “On her way,” he told the older woman. “She’ll have the usual.”

      Lucy nodded, didn’t bother with her pad. “You having dinner?”

      “Probably.”

      “I’ll just leave these then.” She pulled a couple of worn black menus from the back of her waistband and plopped them down. “You don’t look so good, son,” she said as she was leaving. “Take that woman of yours on a cruise. You’ll both come back rested and raring to go again.”

      Take his woman on a cruise. What an impossible thought.

      But an intriguing one. A whole week alone with Juliet on the Mediterranean Sea. Fresh air. Sunshine. Cliffs older than time. History. Great food. And all night long for making love…

      “Hi, sorry I’m late.” He hadn’t noticed her approach and she was already sliding into the booth before he could stand.

      Probably not such a bad thing.

      “Your drink’s on the way.”

      Her smile was beautiful, as always, and mostly surface. He knew what that meant. The clock was ticking and answers weren’t appearing.

      “Might as well get it out of the way,” he told her as soon as Lucy had brought her glass of wine.

      She slid her arms out of the jacket to her suit. He hadn’t seen the yellow one before and couldn’t imagine many women looking good in it. On Juliet, with that fire-laced hair, the outfit was attention-grabbing.

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