“Push has come to shove,” Ashley said as she sipped some of her wine.

“Ashley, for God’s sake, don’t do anything crazy.”

Jeremy sounded serious, but she shrugged off his concern. “Why change now?”

Ashley breezed across the room to Lillian Parker. She was asking Roger to fetch her something stiff to drink, and when Roger dashed off to comply, Ashley sidled up to the famous newswoman. “Maine air agrees with you, Lillian,” she said cheerfully. “You look terrific.”

Lillian laughed. Years of television work made it sound less forced than Ashley suspected it was. “Cosmetics can hide anything. And how are you? Besides stunning. Crockett said the You piece didn’t do you justice. You have a taste for the right clothes for you, Ashley.”

“I’ve got four years of mistakes hanging in my closet. A fashion consultant once told me I should try to get people to focus on my eyes, that they’re my best feature.”

“They are.” Lillian’s voice was hollow. Roger appeared with a Scotch, and she gulped it eagerly.

“At first,” Ashley went on casually, “I didn’t notice how similar they are to Judith Land’s eyes because everything else about her portrait struck me so much. She was startlingly beautiful, wasn’t she?”

Lillian made no reply, but stared at the amber liquid in her glass.

“Anyway, it took me a while to see how much her eyes are like mine. They are similar, don’t you think, Lillian?”

Still staring into her Scotch, as if she were trying to spot a fruit fly that had just flown into it, Lillian said, “She had her mother’s eyes.”

“I see. And David has her father’s eyes. Crockett’s eyes.”

Lillian drank some of her Scotch, then resumed staring into it. “Johnny, Crockett’s father, had those same piercing black-blue eyes—except his were bloodshot half the time. He’s in the history books. Look him up sometime.”

“I intend to.” Ashley sipped her wine, amazed that her hands weren’t even shaking. “Was Judith Land my mother?”

But Lillian Parker’s hands were shaking, and she finally had to set down her drink. She still wouldn’t meet Ashley’s eye. “Oh, please—I don’t know. I...”

“You do know. Or at least you can make a good guess.”

“Get out of this, Ashley.” She turned then, her eyes intense, clear, remarkably direct. “For the love of God, Ashley, go home.”

“You’re afraid. Why?”

“Because I’m a coward,” she said suddenly, her voice a vicious, tortured whisper. “I was a coward thirty years ago, and I’m a coward now—a pawn. Someone to be manipulated.” She snatched up her glass, but her hands were shaking too violently, and she had to put it back down. “There’s nothing you can do to change what happened. And what good are answers to questions that never should have been asked? You’ll only get hurt. Go home.”

Ashley shook her head just once. “I have to know who I am.”

There were tears in Lillian’s eyes when she smiled. “Ashley, you’ve never not known who you are. Judith would have liked that.”