"You're happy?"

She tipped her face up to smile at him. "Of course I am." She snuggled back in. "So happy I'm pretending there aren't dishes waiting to be washed or leftovers to put away."

"You haven't been happy the last few days."

"No, I guess I haven't." She settled her head more comfortably on his shoulder. "I felt like I'd lost my direction, and everything around me was shifting and changing so fast I couldn't keep up. Then it occurred to me that if I didn't change, at least open myself to changing, the direction didn't matter. Because I was going nowhere."

"There are some things I want to tell you, if you can handle some more changes."

Uneasy, as his tone was so serious, she braced herself. "All right." "About Lily."

He felt her tense, an instant tightening of muscles, and could all but feel her will herself to relax again. "This may not be the best moment to tell me about another woman. Especially one you loved and planned to marry."

"I think it is. We knew each other casually for several months, then intimately for the best part of a year. We clicked on a number of levels. Professionally, socially, sexually—"

Her lovely cocoon was now in shreds, and she began to feel the cold. "Flynn—"

"Hear me out. It was the longest adult relationship I'd had with a woman. Serious relationship with long-term planning. I thought we were in love with each other."

"She hurt you, I know. I'm sorry, but—"

"Quiet." He tapped a finger on the top of her head. "She didn't love me, or if she did, that love had specific requirements. So you couldn't call it a gift."

He was silent for a moment, selecting his words carefully. "It isn't easy looking in the mirror and accepting that you were missing some element, some thing that kept a person you wanted from loving you."

She tried to keep steady. "No, it's not."

"And even when you come to terms with it, when you realize it just wasn't right, that there was something missing from the other person, too, something missing from the whole, it still breaks your stride. It makes you a lot more hesitant about taking that kind of chance again."

"I understand that."

"And you end up going nowhere," he stated, echoing her earlier statement. "Jordan said something to me the other day that had me thinking, and thinking back. I asked myself if I'd ever really imagined life with Lily. You know, pictured how we'd be together a few years down the road. I could see the immediate future, the moving-to-New-York thing. How we'd get jobs in our chosen fields, find a place to live, and then I realized that was pretty much it. That was all I'd been able to see. Not how we would live or what we'd do beyond that vague picture, not how we'd look together in a decade. It wasn't hard to picture my life without her in it, maybe harder to pick up my life at the point she dumped me. Lots of bruises on the pride and ego. Lots of anger and hurt. And the byproduct of feeling like I probably wasn't cut out for the whole love-andmarriage thing."

Her heart was twisting, for both of them. "You don't have to explain."

"I'm not finished. I was bumping along pretty well. Had my life in order—not so you'd think so, but it suited me. Then Moe knocked you flat on the sidewalk, and things began to change. No secret I was attracted to you from the get-go, and hoped we'd end up naked on this sofa sooner or later. But, initially, that's as far as I could see things, regarding you and me."

This time he tipped her face up. He wanted her to look at him now. Wanted to see her face. "I've known you less than a month. On a lot of basic points we come at it from opposite angles. But I can see my life with you, the way you can look through a window and see your own little world spread out. I can see how it could be a year from now, or twenty years from now, with you and me and what we make."

He skimmed his fingers along her cheek, just to feel the shape of it. "What I can't see is how I'd pick up my life from this point and make it without you."

He watched her eyes fill with tears, watched them spill over. "I love you." He brushed away a tear with his thumb. "I don't have a master plan for what happens next. I just know I love you."

Emotions surged through her, so bright and rich she wondered that they didn't burst out of her in colored light. Terrified that she was about to fall apart, she struggled to smile. "I have to ask you for something important."

"Anything."

"Promise me you'll never get rid of this couch."

He laughed, nuzzled her cheek. "You're going to regret that."

"No, I won't. I'm not going to regret a thing."

With the two women who had become her friends and partners, Malory sat on the front porch of the house that would be one-third hers.

The sky had clouded up since she'd arrived, clouds stacking on clouds to make a multilayered sweep of grays.

Storm brewing, she figured, and found herself pleased with the idea of being inside with rain pounding on the roof. But first she wanted to sit while the electricity gathered in the air and those first puffs of wind bent the trees.

More than anything she'd needed to share her joy and her nerves with her friends.

"He loves me." She didn't think she would ever tire of saying it aloud. "Flynn loves me."

"It's so romantic." Zoe dug a tissue out of her purse and sniffled into it.

"It was. You know, there was a time I wouldn't have thought so. I'd have had a very detailed outline in my mind. Candlelight, music, with me and the perfect man in some elegant room. Or outdoors, in some spectacular setting. It would all have had to be arranged, just so."

With a shake of her head, she laughed at herself. "That's why I know it's the real thing. Because it didn't have to be just so, and elegant and perfect. It just had to be. It had to be Flynn."

"Jeez. It's hard for me to equate the stars in your eyes with Flynn." Dana rested her chin on her fist. "Nice and all, because I love him too. But it's Flynn, my favorite moron. I've never pictured him as a romantic figure." She turned toward Zoe. "What the hell's in that meat loaf? Maybe I should get the recipe."

"I'm going to take another look at it myself." She patted Malory's knee. "I'm really happy for you. I liked the way you two looked together right from the start."

"Hey, you moving in with him?" Dana perked up. “That would set Jordan out on his butt that much sooner."

"Sorry, we didn't get to that stage yet. We're just basking in the we're-in-love moment for now. And that, friends and neighbors, is a real change for me. I'm not making schedules and lists. I'm just going with it. God, I feel like I could take on the world! Which brings me to the next part of this session. I'm sorry I haven't contributed to any of the plans for the house here or done anything about moving forward with ideas for fixing it up, putting it all together."

'I wondered if you were going to bail," Dana admitted.

"I was thinking about it. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I guess I had to work out for myself what I was doing and why. Now I know. I'm starting my own business because the longer you put off dreams, the less chance you have of making them real. I'm going into a partnership with two women I like a lot. Not only am I not going to let them down, but I'm not going to let me down either."

She got to her feet, and with her hands planted on her hips, turned to look at the house. "I don't know if I'm ready for this, but I'm ready to try. I don't know if I'm going to find the key in the time I have left, but I know I've tried there, too."

"I know what I think." Zoe rose to join her. "If it weren't for the key, you wouldn't be with Flynn now. We wouldn't be together, and we wouldn't have this place. Because of that I've got a chance to make something special, for myself, for Simon. I wouldn't have had that without the two of you."

"Let me start off saying we can skip the group hug." Still, Dana walked over to them. "But I feel the same way. I wouldn't have had the chance for this without both of you. My idiot brother has a classy lady in love with him. All that starts with the key. I say you're going to find it."

She looked up as rain began to splatter. "Now let's get the hell in out of the rain."

Inside, they stood in a loose semicircle. “Together or separate?" Malory asked.

“Together," Zoe answered.

“Top or bottom?"

“Top." Dana glanced over, got assenting nods. "You said Flynn was coming by?"

"Yeah, he's going to slip over for an hour."

"We can use him as a pack mule, then, for anything we want to haul out of the attic."

"Some of the stuff up there is great." Zoe's face shone with enthusiasm as they started up. "I know it looks like junk at first glance, but I think once we get to it, we'll be able to use some. There's an old wicker chair that could be rewoven and painted. It'd look good on the porch. And there's a couple of those pole lamps. The shades are trash, but the poles could be cleaned up and antiqued."

Her voice faded away as Malory climbed the steps. The window at the top was wet with rain, dull with dust. And her heart began to thud like a fist against her ribs.

"This is the place," she whispered.

"Yeah, it is. This is it." Dana set her hands on her hips as she looked around the second floor. "It'll be ours and the bank's in a few weeks."

"No, this is the place. From my dream. This is the house. How could I be so stupid not to realize, not to understand?" Excitement pitched into her voice, rushing the words out. "It wasn't what was Flynn's, but what was mine. I'm the key. Isn't that what Rowena said?"

She whirled back to face them, her eyes brilliant and bright. "Beauty, knowledge, courage. That's the three of us, that's this place. And the dream, that was my fantasy, my idea of perfection. So it had to be my place."

She pressed a hand to her heart as if to keep it from leaping free. "The key's here. In this house."

In the next instant she was alone. The staircase behind her filled with a thin blue light. Like a mist, it rolled toward her, crawled along the floor at her feet until she stood ankle-deep in the damp chill of it. Rooted in shock, she called out, but her voice rang hollow in a mocking echo.

With her heart drumming, she looked at the rooms on either side of her. The eerie blue fog snaked and twined its way up the walls, over the windows, blocking even the gloomy light of the storm.

Run! It was a frantic whisper in her mind. Run. Get out now, before it's too late. This wasn't her fight. She was an ordinary woman leading an ordinary life.

She gripped the banister, took the first step down. She could still see the door through that sheer blue curtain that so quickly ate the true light. Through the door was the real world. Her world. She had only to open that door and walk out for normalcy to click back into place.

That was what she wanted, wasn't it? A normal life. Hadn't her dream shown her that? Marriage and family. French toast for breakfast and flowers on the dresser. A pretty life of simple pleasures built on love and affection.

It was waiting for her, outside the door.

She walked down the steps like a woman in a trance. She could see beyond the door, somehow through the door, where the day was perfect with autumn. Trees a wash of color gilded by sunlight, air brisk and tart. And though her heart continued to gallop inside her chest, her lips curved in a dreamy smile as she reached for the door.

"This is wrong." She heard her own voice, oddly flat and calm. "This is another trick." A part of her shuddered in shock as she turned away from the door, turned from the perfect life waiting outside. "What's out there isn't real, but this is. This is our place now."

Stunned that she'd nearly deserted her friends, she called out for Dana and Zoe again. Where had he put them? What illusion had separated them? Fear for them had her rushing back up the steps. Her flight tore the blue mists, only to have it gather back into nasty ribbons be-, hind her.

To orient herself she went to the window at the top of the stairs and rubbed away those frigid mists. Her fingertips went numb, but she could see it was still storming. Rain whipped down out of a bruised sky. Her car was in the drive, just where she'd left it. Across the street a woman with a red umbrella and a bag of groceries dashed toward a house.

That was real, Malory told herself. That was life, messy and inconvenient. And she would get it back. She'd find her way back. But first she had a job to do.