Nealy remembered seeing something needy in her eyes when she’d been arguing with Mat. Maybe she didn’t like the idea of another woman horning in on her territory.

“I’m hitching a ride,” Nealy replied.

Lucy stared at her resentfully, then looked toward the driver’s seat. “What’s the matter, Jorik? You couldn’t go without sex so you had to bring her along?”

Definitely proprietary.

“Ignore her.” Mat picked up a road map and began to study it. “Lucy thinks if she talks dirty she’ll make me cry.”

Nealy gazed at Lucy and thought about the dazzling group of teenagers she’d hosted at the White House just last week. They were all National Merit Scholarship winners, and their contrast with this girl couldn’t have been more pronounced. Well, she’d wanted a glimpse of ordinary life, and she’d found it.

Lucy set the jar of baby food down on the couch. The baby, whose mouth was rimmed in green, immediately let out a demanding shriek. The teenager rose and went to the banquette, where she slouched down. “She’s not done eating, but I’m done feeding her.” She reached for her Walkman, slipped the headset over her ears, and leaned back into the corner.

Mat glanced over his shoulder at Nealy and shot her a pointed smile. “Time to earn your keep, Nell.”

For a moment Nealy couldn’t think whom he was addressing.

“Finish feeding the baby so we can take off,” he said.

Lucy was shaking her head to the music coming from the Walkman, but the watchful eye she kept on the baby indicated she was listening to every word. Nealy had the distinct impression she was being put to some kind of test.

She turned to the baby and felt the familiar dread. Although she related well to children, being around babies was torturous. It was one of her most closely guarded secrets, especially ironic in light of the disguise she’d adopted.

She didn’t need a shrink to figure out why she had a problem. The famous Time magazine cover photo taken when she was sixteen didn’t show that the starving Ethiopian baby she’d been holding had died in her arms moments after the photographer had walked away. The memory had never left her.

Although she picked up a lot of healthy, smiling babies for photo ops, those contacts were always brief. Instead, it was the desperately ill babies her job so frequently required her to spend time with. She’d gazed at dozens of crack babies in isolettes, cuddled a hundred HIV babies, cooed to babies suffering from unspeakable diseases, and brushed flies from the empty eyes of those who were starving. In her mind, babies and suffering had become inexorably linked.