“I must stay.”

Her heart pounded and she began to shiver uncontrollably, her hands twisting together in a mockery of prayer. She stared through the screen and tried to distinguish the outline of his face among the shadows.

“You must be brave,” he said. She could feel his warm smile. “One day, perhaps.”

And that was all.

Unable to speak, she watched the screen slide shut. There was fear in her eyes, she knew. And no hope.

1

With a flagrant disregard for the sweltering heat, Ashley Wakefield dashed down the six steps of her regal brick building on the flats of Beacon Hill. She had shut her cream-colored door with a firm pull and now moved quickly, her two-inch heels clicking on the brick sidewalk. There had been a time when anything more glamorous than a pair of old sneakers had defeated her. But that had changed. So much had.

She fished her keys from an outer pocket of her Hermes leather handbag, singled out the one she wanted, and stuck it in the lock of the maroon Jaguar XJS parked unceremoniously on the curb. She paid dearly for space in a parking garage—more than what her rent used to be—but if she found a spot on lower Chestnut Street, she grabbed it. She didn’t worry about car thieves. If someone stole the Jag, she’d buy another. It was only a car.

As she bent slightly to open the door, a few strands of her long, very dark hair loosened from her French twist, her only concession to the sticky weather, and dropped into her face. She brushed them impatiently away.

To her left, just beyond the hood of the car, there was a clicking noise. Then, “Got it!”

She looked around and sighed. Him again. The skinny photographer with the high-water jeans. He’d been wearing the same outfit when she’d first encountered him in Newport a few weeks ago. One of the infuriating paparazzi following the Newport set, he’d popped out from nowhere and snapped a picture of her in a batik sarong skirt and bandeau. She’d decided it was just one of those unfortunate things and promptly forgotten the incident.

Then, a week later, he’d turned up at a gala event at Tanglewood in the Berkshires and, she supposed, got any number of shots of her in an elegant, understated Bill Blass evening gown. She’d wondered if it were just a coincidence, but somehow doubted that.

The following week he was there, in New York, when she headed into the gargantuan building on Central Park South where she had a pied-a-terre, and he’d caught her laden with bags and boxes from Bergdorf Goodman. It was obviously not a coincidence. But as she rarely shopped, it was as if he were photographing someone else. Was she that slender blue-eyed woman in the white sundress?

It was now clear she was a special target for him. As they went into the dog days of August, he’d turned up at Touchstone Communications, the Boston consulting firm of which Ashley was founder and president. He hadn’t ventured inside. He’d merely lurked in the main lobby of the building until she’d emerged with one of the firm’s more famous clients. And then he’d pounced, clicking off a half dozen shots while Ashley had fumed.