“This time you’ll have the answer without asking.” He dropped his hand, but his gaze never faltered. She needed nothing else to tell her the calm was over. “I met a woman, almost a dozen years ago. I was writing as Laura Miles by then, so that I could afford a few luxuries. Dinner out occasionally, the theater now and then. I was still living in L.A., alone, enjoying my work and the benefits it brought me. She was a student in her last year. Brains and ambition she had in abundance, money she didn’t have at all. She was on scholarship and determined to be the hottest young attorney on the West Coast.”

“Hunter, what happened between you and another woman all those years ago isn’t my business.”

“Not just another woman. Sarah’s mother.”

Lee began to pull at the tuft of grass by her side. “All right, if it’s important for you to tell me, I’ll listen.”

“I cared about her,” he continued. “She was bright, lovely and full of dreams. Neither of us had ever considered becoming too serious. She still had law school to finish, the bar to pass. I had stories to tell. But then, no matter how much we plan, fate has a way of taking over.”

He drew out a cigarette, thinking back, remembering each detail. His tiny, cramped apartment with the leaky plumbing, the battered typewriter with its hiccuping carriage, the laughter from the couple next door that would often seep through the thin walls.

“She came by one afternoon. I knew something was wrong because she had afternoon classes. She was much too dedicated to skip classes. It was hot, one of those sultry, breathless days. The windows were up, and I had a little portable fan that stirred the air around without doing much to cool it. She’d come to tell me she was pregnant.”

He could remember the way she’d looked if he concentrated. But he never chose to. But whether he chose to or not, he’d always be able to remember the tone of her voice when she’d told him. Despair, laced with fury and accusation.

“I said I cared about her, and that was true. I didn’t love her. Still, our parents’ values do trickle down. I offered to marry her.” He laughed then, not humorously, but not, Lee reflected, bitterly. It was the laugh of a man who’d accepted the joke life had played on him. “She refused, almost as angry with the solution I’d offered as she was with the pregnancy. She had no intention of taking on a husband and a child when she had a career to carve out. It might be difficult to understand, but she wasn’t being cold, simply practical, when she asked me to pay for the abortion.”

Lee felt all of her muscles contract. “But, Sarah—”