I MUST see you. Please. Meet me under the tree at the Chapel-on-the-Hill after dinner tonight.

She sat back and reviewed her handiwork. It omitted any personal identifying information. She didn’t sign it, but she was confident Nora would know it was from her.

She sealed it in a blank envelope. It was 8:23 a.m. Nora would be at work by now. Before she could change her mind, she dressed and hid the envelope in her coat.

Ten minutes later, after taking a roundabout route to be sure she wasn’t followed and that Nora wasn’t home, she slipped the note under Nora’s front door.

By the time Nora left work that night, all she wanted was to curl up in a fetal ball and make the world go away. Dr. Lawrence gave them a target of one kilogram of enriched Tubealloy per month. Without Alpha-1, and with construction still underway on several of the other racetracks, she could see no way that they could even come close to hitting that target. According to Jane, barely four percent of the product was ending up in the “enriched” collection box, and even that was enriched only to twelve percent.

On top of that pressure, she couldn’t stop thinking about Mary. Her body craved her, and her heart missed her. But the incident last week drove home the very point her head had been making all along—everything about this situation screamed trouble. She’s a girl. She’s young, impressionable, and you’re in a position of power. Not only that, what business do you have falling in love with a girl in the first place? Maybe you should give Del a chance? Maybe you could make yourself feel the same way about him that you do about Mary? Even as she thought it, her stomach rebelled. She couldn’t even consider doing the things she’d done with Mary with Del, or any other man for that matter.

What she needed was time…time to sort out her emotions, time to focus on the job at hand, and time to wrestle her rebellious body under control. She arrived home, pushed open the front door…and slipped on something underfoot. “What the…?” She bent over and retrieved the offending object. A blank envelope? Could she have dropped a piece of mail? As she examined it more closely, a whiff of perfume floated up toward her nostrils. It smelled like Mary.

Her hands shook as she carefully slit open the envelope. Inside was a note. She read it twice, anger welling inside her, mixed with longing. What time had she left the note?