Amy Chambers’s eyes sparked as she listened to Boomer Ward’s message on her answering machine. “This is not a request, this is an order,” she mimicked him. “Go ahead, Boomer, issue all the damn orders you want, see if I care.”

She wondered if somehow, some way, Boomer knew that Wednesdays were Amy Days, as Arnie called them. He took the girls to school on Wednesdays, and his parents picked them up so they could spend the night and then drove them to school in the morning, thus giving her and Arnie some private time. It would not be a problem to meet the others at seven-thirty in the morning, since Arnie was up and out by seven. Most Amy Days were spent lying in bed until eleven watching the early-morning talk shows. It was a nonproductive day just like all the other days of her life.

She rewound the message and played it again, getting sicker by the moment. It was all going to come out. She could lie till hell froze over, and it wouldn’t make a difference. If she could convince Andy to go along with her, it would be Pete and Boomer against her and her brother. Who would people believe? And if Cady remembered, it was all over.

She’d never felt so alone in her life.

She screamed then, at the top of her lungs. “Why didn’t you die that day with Jeff?” Oh, God, what is happening to me? Am I losing my mind? Why didn’t I take the ten o’clock appointment with the psychiatrist in Pittsburgh? “Because I’m afraid,” she whimpered. She knew she would never keep the appointment she had made for the first week in June.

From years of habit, she picked up the phone and dialed her brother’s office number. She almost fainted when she heard his voice. “Don’t hang up, Andy. I need to talk to you. Boomer Ward left a message on my machine this morning. Did he call you, too?”

“Pete called me. Boomer called him. And before you can ask me, no, I don’t know if Cady is going to be there or not. What is it you want, Amy?”

“I guess I want to know what you’re going to say? You know what I’m going to say.”

“I’m going to tell the truth. I think that’s what this is all about. Why can’t you understand what a relief it’s going to be finally to get this off our shoulders? If we go to Cady and tell her the way it happened, she’ll be the one to make the final decision. She came to see me this morning about switching up her car insurance. She was real nice, Amy. Just like she was when we were kids. I don’t know if she’s gotten her memory back or not. I don’t care either. I just want to be done with this so I can move on. You need to talk to someone, Amy. You really do.”

“You keep saying that, Andy. All of a sudden I’m crazy because I don’t want my life to fall apart. That’s what’s going to happen, and you know it. I wish to God she had died that day.” Amy reared back when she heard the loud click in her ear, and then the sound of the dial tone.