The lawyer-Charly-said in a thick Southern drawl, “For Lord’s sake, Jake, after you almost lost Evie-”

The FBI man cut her off, speaking directly to Caitlyn in a quiet but curiously vibrant voice. As if, she thought, he was trying to cover up some powerful emotion and not doing a very good job of it. “We do want to set a trap for Vasily, of course. Because if there’s one thing in this world Ari Vasily would take care of in person rather than leaving to his loyal-not to mention untraceable-soldiers, it’s picking up his little girl, once he finds out where she is. But the last thing we’d want to do is use you or the child as bait. Too many things can go wrong.” He paused to clear his throat against a background of more shiftings and stirrings.

Undercurrents, thought Caitlyn, intrigued in spite of everything.

“What we want to do,” the FBI man-Jake?-went on after a moment, raising his voice in a struggle to reclaim his self-control, “is get you under wraps and keep you there until we’ve got Vasily in custody. To do that-”

“You’ll have to use me,” Caitlyn said calmly. “You said yourself-he wants me alive.”

“He wants his daughter,” Jake corrected, his voice now hard and flat. “You’re the means to an end, as far as he’s concerned, nothing more. We’ll set up the situation, and it’ll be one that isn’t going to put you or Emma Vasily in harm’s way-leave that to us. Right now we’re more concerned about getting you to a safe place without Vasily knowing about it.”

A safe place… Her mind filled with achingly brilliant images of her room in her parents’ house on its shaded street in Sioux City-soft-green walls and borders of pink tulips clashing intriguingly with the dark and brooding posters of Middle Earth from the Tolkien phase she’d dwelt in during most of her high school years.

I want to go home.

She couldn’t go home, and knew it. So did everybody else in the room, judging from the silence and tension that had followed Jake’s words. Caitlyn’s sunny visions of home took on the grainy, shadowy shadings of an old film noir movie as she imagined Ari Vasily tracking her down…finding her there. She couldn’t let him find out where her family lived. Ever.

She shivered, and felt isolated…alone.

A gruff and froggy sound reached for her in her cave of loneliness and yanked her back to the room filled with people. C.J., clearing his throat. C.J., sitting close to her, on the other side of the bed from the FBI man who’d demanded her focused attention so that she’d all but forgotten anyone else was there. C.J., the cute Southern trucker with the melting-chocolate eyes, sweet smile and wicked dimples, who she’d asked for help and who had let her down so badly and who she had expected never to see again, and yet-who was now so inexplicably and constantly here.

C.J. cleared his throat and said, “How ’bout this? How ’bout she comes home with me-to my folks’ place in Georgia?”

Silence again-and Caitlyn thought she’d never known before how many different shades of silence there were. This one shimmered around the edges, balanced on the verge of sound, like that suspenseful moment of emptiness in a symphony just before the strings come in at triple pianissimo.

Then everyone spoke at once, a murmur and chatter of sound that blew past her ears like a capricious gust of wind.

In its wake, C.J. said, with what she thought was a touch of belligerence, “Look, it’s the perfect place. Where we live it’s way out in the country-”

“It is that,” said Charly dryly. “C.J.’s right. Out there, the only neighbors are friends and family, and they all know one another. It’d be just about impossible for any stranger to get close enough to Caitlyn to do her harm, and anybody dumb enough to try would have to go through all the brothers and in-laws first-” she interjected a rich, warm chuckle “-not to mention Momma Betty. Personally, I’d bet on Betty Starr up against a hit man any day of the week.”

Jake said, thoughtful and somber, “Actually, it’s got possibilities. There’s no way to connect any of you with Caitlyn…” She could tell by the clarity of his voice that he was looking at her, waiting for her reaction.

“Honey?” Her dad’s voice, cautious and distant. “What do you think?”

What did she think? She couldn’t think. The silence was all around her…vibrant…waiting. Where was C.J.? Was he watching her? Were they all looking at her, watching for her response? Searching her face for revelations? Unable to see them, she felt exposed…vulnerable…naked. In self-defense, she fought to make her expression unreadable.

“In case she needs lookin’ after, my sister Jess is a nurse, lives right there with my mother,” C.J. put in, rather like a punctuation mark-as if that should settle it.

C.J., who’d let her down and turned her in to the police and got Mary Kelly killed. Now he expected her to go home with him? Let him and his Southern relatives take care of her?

Caitlyn’s head felt as if it might explode. Through the hum of sound inside it, like the conversation of angry bees, she heard a chorus of agreement:

“It’s not a bad idea…”

“Actually, it’s a great idea.”

“It’d be the ideal place…”

“She’d be protected…”

“It’s the perfect solution.”

“We’d have to get her there without anybody knowing,” Jake said slowly. “And I mean anybody.” Caitlyn felt his weight shift as he turned from her to address the others. She heard the rush of a sharply exhaled breath. “Getting her out of this place won’t be easy. Camera crews and news media everywhere you-”

“Do I hear somebody playing my tune?” That was a new voice, light and musical as birdsong.

Someone said, “Eve!” and it was echoed around the room in varying tones of surprise and delight, along with cries of “Hey, when did you get back?” and “I thought you were in Afghanistan!”

Jake’s weight was gone from the bed. Caitlyn heard, “Hey, Waskowitz…” in a voice deep-throated and husky with intimacy, and after a moment, more softly, “You just get in?”

“Just,” the newcomer murmured back. “I came as soon as I got your message.”

“How was your flight? Get any sleep?”

“Okay…not much…never mind…”

Chafing with impatience, Caitlyn waited, listening to the exchange of mundane and essential information between partners and lovers-for that much was obvious from the first word spoken by the newcomer-reunited after a separation prolonged both in time and distance. She stared fiercely into the nothingness as if she could penetrate it with the sheer effort of her will, and was struggling against a childish sense of exclusion, the urge to cry out, “Hey! Over here! What about me?”

Then she felt her hand covered with one that was slender but strong…the skin roughened as if it had recently been too much exposed to hot dry winds and too little to soap and soothing lotions. The bright, musical voice said, “Hey, I’m Eve Waskowitz, Jake’s wife. And you’re Caitlyn, right?”

Before Caitlyn could utter a word, a new, lighter weight settled onto the bed beside her, and the voice became nearer and almost a whisper, like secrets whispered by best friends in the friendly dark. “They said you can’t see at the moment-gee, I can’t imagine how confusing it must be, surrounded by a bunch of strange people all talking at once. Are you doing okay?”

“Yeah…I’m fine.” And for the first time in a long time, Caitlyn found herself thinking she might be. “Nice to meet you. Did…somebody say you were in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah…filming.” There was a gust of breath. “Long story. In a nutshell, I make documentaries. Cable, mostly, although this one’s for one of the major networks-big thrill. Not to mention more money than I’m used to having at my disposal.” By way of changing the subject, she shifted her weight and turned to include the others in the room, although she kept her hand on Caitlyn’s. “So, what’s going on? What did I miss?”

“We’re havin’ a council of war,” Charly said-and the last word sounded like wo-ah.

“Oh, goody,” Eve chortled, while Caitlyn, talking over her, was saying flippantly, “We’re planning to set a trap for the bad guy, and use me as bait.”

Someone-C.J.-actually growled, and Jake sucked in air and said shortly, “We’re not going to do that.”

“Anyway, that’s puttin’ the cart in front of the horse,” Charly said in her distinctive, dry way. “We need to get her well first. To do that, we’ve got to get her tucked away someplace safe where the bad guys can’t get at her.”

There were restless stirrings from C.J.’s side of her bed, and his voice said testily, “We have a place. What I’m gonna do is take her home to Georgia with me. The trick is getting her out of here without anybody catching on. The damn media-’scuse me, Eve-have got this whole place surrounded. Every TV station in the country’s got a truck parked out there.”

Eve made a sound like a self-satisfied cat. “Then nobody would be apt to notice one more, would they?”

There was a short, fat silence, and then Jake murmured, “Eve…” just as C.J. said, “Hah!” and Charly, chuckling, said, “It’s perfect.”

“Of course it is. Simple, too. We’ll just smuggle her out as part of my crew.” Eve’s hand squeezed Caitlyn’s and her weight was no longer beside her on the bed. “It’ll take me a couple days to round ’em up-they’re still trickling in from Afghanistan-I came ahead to get things set up for postproduction-but you’re not going to be ready to go for a while anyway, right? She’ll need to be on her feet, at least. And, hmm, let’s see…those bandages might be-”

“Eve,” her husband said in a low, warning tone, “nobody in your crew can know about this. I mean, nobody.”

“Well, of course. Not a word goes beyond the people in this room.” Caitlyn felt the brush of a cool cheek and then Eve’s voice, light with laughter, faded into distance. “Don’t worry, my love-leave everything to me!”

To C.J., still tuned to the nuances of sound in a sightless world, the silence that followed her leaving had a vibrancy to it, like the aftermath of the ringing of a bell.

For long seconds nobody seemed to have anything to say. Then Charly, in her dry, sardonic way, said, “Well, I guess that takes care of that.”

Jake cleared his throat, gazed distractedly after his departed wife and muttered, “I wouldn’t quite say that… Uh, there’s a lot to take care of on my end. So…guess I better get on it. I’ll be in touch.” The last was for Caitlyn as he touched her hand in a brief farewell.

As if that was a signal of some kind, Wood Brown took a step forward and Charly glanced at her watch and said, “Well, I’m gonna head on back. What about you C.J.-you comin’?” He shook his head, and she gave the blanket-draped lump that was Caitlyn’s foot a friendly squeeze. “Okay, y’all keep me informed, now, y’hear?” She and Jake went out together, as Wood moved to his daughter’s side.

He took her hand and gently squeezed it. “Okay, honey, guess I’d better go see what your mother’s up to. I’ll tell her what we’ve decided.” C.J. thought his quiet ways must be very reassuring under those circumstances. For a moment he felt a twinge of something akin to envy-he could barely remember his own father. And then Caitlyn’s father leaned over and brushed her forehead with his lips and was gone.

It was the moment C.J. had both wanted and dreaded. Alone with the woman he knew deep down in his heart he’d wronged, he felt tongue-tied and useless. And yet, he didn’t want to leave simply because, right then, at her bedside was the only place in the world he knew how to be. No matter how bad he felt being there, he knew he was going to feel worse somewhere else.

But in a way, it was even more fundamental than that, nothing whatever to do with thought, just a heaviness inside him that was bone deep, as if his body had somehow taken root in that hospital chair.

Seconds ticked by. Wood Brown’s footsteps were swallowed up by the hospital sounds. C.J.’s breathing seemed loud enough to him to wake the dead.

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Caitlyn said in a low voice, turning a shifting, unfocused gaze toward him. Searching for him in her private darkness.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. With that sound her gaze found him and sharpened unnervingly, almost as though she could see. Uncomfortably he mumbled, “You need anything? Can I get-”

“I’m fine.” But she flinched as she said it, as if she acknowledged the lie it was.

C.J. watched a frown pucker the middle of her forehead, the unmarred part just below the purple lump bisected by a dark line held together by neat, white butterfly bandages where she’d met the brick courthouse steps on her way down. From out of nowhere came a throat-tightening urge to touch his lips to the spot, and he swallowed rapidly and looked away, glad for once that the object of the impulse wasn’t able to see him.