“You’re in luck, big fella,” Reba responded warmly. “The munchkin happens to be home from school today.”

Mitch sat up a little straighter in his desk chair. “Is she sick?”

“Nothing serious,” his ex-wife assured him promptly. “Just the sniffles. So, how have you been, Mitch?”

Mitch couldn’t help smiling. Reba definitely wasn’t your standard ex-wife. She was happy with her new husband and that happiness warmed her entire personality. “I’m in love,” he confided, without really expecting to.

“Oh, Mitch, that’s great!” Worry displaced a little of the buoyancy in her voice. “It is great, isn’t it? Maybe great enough to keep you out of jungles and hotbeds of political unrest?”

“No more jungles, Reba,” he said solemnly. He’d made changes in his life recently that he had refused to consider while he and Reba were married, and he wondered if she would resent that.

Not Reba. He should have known. “We’ll all breathe a sigh of relief,” she chimed. “On the count of three, now. One, two—”

Mitch laughed. He remembered the good times with Reba and, for a fleeting moment, mourned them.

When Kelly’s piping voice came on the line, he forget about Roget and all the other ugliness in the world. But the house seemed even bigger than it was after he’d talked to his daughter, and even emptier.

He threw himself into his work, concentrating on Rosamond Dallas and what had made her tick.

The need to throttle Rosamond was gone by the time Shay visited her that afternoon; in its place was a certain sad acceptance of the fact that mothers are women, human and fallible.

She approached her mother’s chair, kissed her forehead. “How can I hate you?” she whispered.

Rosamond rocked and clutched the ever-present doll. It seemed to Shay that she was retreating deeper and deeper into herself and growing smaller with every passing day.

Tired because of a most delicious lack of sleep the night before, a day of work and telephone conversations with half a dozen contractors, Shay sighed and sank into the chair facing her mother’s. “I’m going to meet my grandmother tomorrow,” she said, hardly able to believe such a thing could be possible and expecting no reaction at all from Rosamond.

But the woman sat stiffly in her chair, her famous eyes widening.

Shay was incredulous. “Mother?”

The fleeting moment of lucidity was over. Rosamond stared blankly again, crooning a wordless song to her doll.

Shay looked at the doll and, for the first time ever, wondered if that raggedy lump of cloth and yarn could, in Rosamond’s mind, represent herself as a baby. It was a jarring thought, but oddly comforting, too. Maybe, Shay thought, she loved me as well as she was able to love anyone. Maybe she did the best she could.

On her way home from the convalescent home, Shay stopped at a bookstore, looking for the four titles Ivy had written down for her. Mitch’s work was published under the odd code name of Zebulon, with no surname of any kind given and, of course, with no photograph on the back or inside flap of the book jackets.