I‘ll never be a candidate for World‘s Greatest Mom, Kate said without apology. How bad a grandmother do you think I‘d be?

He rolled his eyes. Dad had The Talk with me when I was ten.

He did? Kate thought of Jack Morgan, dead almost four years now. First her boss at the Anchorage DA‘s office as she became a legend as a sex crimes investigator with a conviction rate record that stood to this day, and then, inevitably, her lover. Jimmy Buffett had cemented the deal, she remembered with a faint smile. They‘d first made love after they‘d fought over Jimmy moving from acoustic to electric. She was still right, African Friend was still Jimmy‘s best song to date.

She waited for the pain to strike at the memory of the tall, ugly man who had known her better than anyone else in the world. Instead, she felt only the sweet sorrow of his absence, and gratitude that she had had him in her life for so many years. He had forgiven her everything, not so much as a look of recrimination over her shortlived affair with Ken Dahl when she returned home to the Park after burning out on the job in Anchorage. That their affair had helped get Ken killed was something for which she still felt a lingering guilt, but Jack had never said a word. Later he had given his life to save her own, a sacrifice he had made willingly, and he had died in her arms with a laugh on his lips.

And he had given her Johnny. She looked at his son, boding to be as tall, and if not quite as ugly then as memorable in feature and as independent in personality. I‘m not a mommy, she‘d told Jack a long time ago, and he‘d saddled her with a twelveyear-old son in response.

Well, she still wasn‘t a mommy. They were friends, her and the kid. She was older and tougher so she could make what she said stick, for now. Just because she had resorted to blackmail to keep his mother from taking him away didn‘t mean anything. Except that she loved him, first for his father‘s sake and now for his own.

Johnny‘s a gift , she‘d told Old Sam, and it was the simple truth. He was a smart, funny kid who had grown into a young man of such promise it almost hurt her eyes to look at him. After a lifetime spent in a determined search for independence, she now had a hostage to fortune.

Jack had to be laughing his ass off somewhere. Of course he‘d had The Talk with Johnny at age ten. He would probably have had it with him at age six if he hadn‘t recoiled from the need to use pictures to make himself understood.

Today, Van and Johnny slid into the cab of the four-wheel-drive Ford Ranger XL long-bed Super Cab Kate had received as a fee for babysitting Mandy Baker‘s Beacon Hill parents during their one and only visit to the Park. Mutt already took up a large portion of the bench seat but they managed to pull the door shut on the mashup.