“Ah. And your father,” said Jenna as casually as she could. “I don’t want to pry, but there have been stories …”

“You mean the Sandra Waters thing?” “Well … yes.”

“That’s nothing to worry about. Nothing he can’t handle. He has a lot of enemies, you know. They started this whole business. But he’ll get it all straight- ened out. He told me he would.”

Jenna could almost hear Malik—confident, even arrogant. A far cry from the young man who’d fled al-Remal to save his life and that of his daughter. And yet, she thought, Sandra Waters had been right. There was so much his money couldn’t buy. Genevieve was dead. And Laila—would she not have been happier, safer, with a simpler life, a simpler father?

The call ended with mutual promises to be in touch, but Jenna could tell that Laila’s thoughts were elsewhere—on a boyfriend, perhaps? She tried to picture Malik’s attitude toward his little girl’s growing up. Would the aging rebellious son approve of the same tendencies in his daughter? She had to smile at the thought.

O

Chance. Serendipity. That was all it was.

Jenna almost canceled out of the conference, even though she was one of the presenters. She simply had too much work to do, she told herself, to fly off for a long weekend in Puerto Rico.

It was Karim who finally convinced her to go. “All the kids I know, their parents take vacations,” he said. “You never take one. You need some R and R, Mom, even if it’s just hanging out on a beach with some other shrinks.” It wasn’t a self-serving argument aimed at getting an unsupervised weekend. Karim would be spending the time with the Hamids at the professor’s cottage on the Cape.

“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. Lately, even with her work and her worries about Malik—or perhaps exactly because of those things—she had felt as if her life was stagnating. A tropical beach sounded good.

As she settled into a comfortable business-class seat on the early-morning American Airlines flight to San Juan, she debated whether to review the paper she would be presenting. Let it go, Jenna. You know the material like the back of your hand. Just relax and enjoy. Her duties at the conference would require, at most, half a day. The rest of the time would be hers.

Her moment of pleasant anticipation was broken by a deep, gravelly voice, answered by a woman’s laugh. She opened her eyes. The flight attendant was fairly fluttering around the man she was ushering into the seat next to Jenna’s. He was lean and deeply tanned, with rather weary-looking gray eyes and blond hair lightly streaked with gray.

“Can I get you a magazine?” the young woman asked breathlessly. “Something to drink?”