Still, she wondered, if she’d been a better daughter, would they still be alive? Would they still be with her? Every day, she missed them. Missed her life with her parents and Sebastian and his mother, Mrs. Cain.

“No more wallowing,” Analise muttered to herself. “Dr. Rhodes is waiting.”

He was an exacting man who had little time for social niceties with a teenager. Quickly installed in a dormitory, she only saw him during their monthly meetings. He didn’t approve of the way she’d used her talents before Callenwolde. A former regular on the game show circuit and on talk shows, all that had ended when she came to campus.

Today she’d prove that she was more than a sideshow attraction. The paper she’d worked on in secret would make her a scholar.

Beyond the communal laboratory, the professors maintained their offices, which increased in size depending on the length of tenure. She halted outside Dr. Rhodes’s office, suddenly stricken with worry. He was an academic marvel, a renowned scientist, like her mother. He was also a writer, like her father. She’d read every one of his books, and longed to see her name imprinted on a monograph one day soon.

However, her hesitation was as much feminine as it was intellectual. In addition to his remarkable intellect, Nathan Rhodes was quite handsome.

At forty-three, he had no physical interest in her, she realized, but basic vanity prompted her to touch up her lip gloss and run fingers nervously through hair that tended to escape its confines.

Inside the office, Nathan Rhodes waited for Analise. The child was infuriatingly prompt, another of the imp’s perfections. The currently maddening example smirked up from the bare surface of his desk. No other papers cluttered the top, but not because of neatness or a pursuit of order. Nathan doggedly locked all of his personal work in the filing cabinets behind him until he required a document. The more important documents were safeguarded in his desk.

The world of academe was brutal, filled with cutthroats and thieves; and, he acknowledged dryly, he was among the more creative. His peers, such as they were, harbored bitter resentment against him. He was famous, popular, and prolific, the stuff of fantasies for the administration. His spacious office, inflated salary, and five teaching assistants proved his worth to his struggling contemporaries. He was one of the most admired men in his field. As a particularly astute journal article had phrased it, he was a creature of talent envied by all.

Nathan drummed thin, tapered fingers on the paper on his desk. He had once toyed with the idea of becoming a concert pianist. At his Juilliard recital, when he’d placed second, he had stormed from the concert hall and enrolled at NYU the next week. Staring at the slim lines of bone and flesh, he remembered the vicious pulse of disappointment. Second was unacceptable.