He wanted to be angry with her for screwing him over the way she did. But today he had only seen her gentle face, the hair soft around her eyes. She had always tried to tame that hair, pull it into place, but he most loved her when she let it go, when she let herself go.

In college she’d been the type of person who drew others, not only because of her inherent beauty, of which she was completely unaware, but also because of something in her, around her, that turned her into what others wanted or needed from her. Strangers and friends were constantly coming up and telling her: “You look like my sister,” “You look like Farrah Fawcett,” “You look just like a girl I dated in high school.”

She would smile and, just for a second, be that person for them. She had always told him that with him she was only and rightly Amy, Nick’s Amy. His beloved. She could morph and change for the others, but for him she let her real self surface. Who was she now for this man, these children? He was sure she was exactly what they needed, loved, wanted her to be. Because she could be.

Nick walked over to the French doors that led to the back deck. He leaned his head against the dark doorframe and stared out at the rock-black lake melding with the pine-lined gray horizon.

Something moved, flickered against the dock: a flash of silver? It was the first thing he had noticed the second time he met Amy—her silver cross and how it rested at the base of her throat.

He had stood at the front desk of Dorm B, waiting for the girl, Carol Anne, who had asked him to a sorority formal. Kappa Alpha pledges were instructed to go to any formal they were invited to—it was part of the pledge process. He began, then, to see that maybe he wasn’t so sure he wanted to be part of the whole pledge thing, belonging to a fraternity just because his dad had. It had seemed so necessary when he arrived at college, but now it seemed juvenile and insulting. Either way, he had a date.

He picked up the black rotary phone to call Carol Anne’s room—no boys allowed past the gray metal door to the back halls. Her roommate said she would be right down. But when he spun on his heel at the sound of his name, the world spun with him; he blinked at the quick flash of a silver cross around her neck.