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<h1>The Kathryn Dance Situation</h1>

<p>Love her.</p>

<p>Love the children.</p>

<p>It works, many, many ways.</p>

Jon Boling liked Michael O’Neil a great deal. He was a solid, decent man. A good father who’d kept his path during a divorce from a faithless and frivolous wife. And to hear Kathryn tell it he was one hell of a law enforcer. But there was another factor in the code Boling was now writing.

<p>Michael O’Neil loves Kathryn.</p>

A stretch of flat surface and Boling pulled off to the sidewalk. He texted the college’s computer science department, where Lily was hard at work on cracking the computer or phone.

Lily, quite a beauty she was. Smart as could be.

No success yet. But Boling had confidence she’d find the magic key: a pet cat’s name plus five random numbers plus the bra size of a girlfriend, or the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities.

Back to the Situation. And the big question: Did Kathryn love Michael?

He’d lain awake a number of nights wondering, tagging her words and looks and gestures with meaning, wondering, wondering…and replaying certain images and words over the past year. The radiance of her eyes, the lift of her lips when she smiled, characterized by faint, charming wrinkles.

<p>What are Kathryn’s true feelings?</p>

Boling recalled overhearing the fight she and O’Neil had had last night. Raw. Sharp words, back and forth. Then he pictured her returning to the house and her face changing, melting, relaxing, growing comfortable once more. Boling and Dance had laughed, had some turkey reinvented into something innovative, salad, wine. And the hard day in Orange County, the hard words fired by Michael O’Neil, fell away.

<p>Do Kathryn and Jon have a future?</p>

He now eased to a stop outside the store he’d bicycled ten miles to come to. It was, like most stores and houses in Carmel, on the borderline between quaint and precious. The decor was Bavarian ski resort, not uncommon here, though Boling suspected the downtown saw snow once a decade at most.

He unstrapped his almond-shaped helmet and slung it over the handle­bars. He leaned the bike up against a nearby fence. Didn’t bother with the lock. Nobody was going to steal a bike in daylight in downtown Carmel. That would be like trying to host a gun show in Berkeley.

Jon Boling had done some research on By the Sea Jewelry, the store he was walking toward now. It was just what he needed. Glancing at the beautiful antique engagement and wedding rings in the window, Boling pushed inside. The door opened with a jingle from a cowbell, both incongruous and perfectly apt.

Five minutes later he was outside once again.

<p>Do Kathryn and Jon have a future?</p>

Boling opened the By the Sea Jewelry bag and peered into the box inside. Good. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. He found himself smiling.

Helmet on. Time to head back to her house.

There were several ways to get there. The shorter was to go back up Ocean Avenue. But that was a steep hill, made for the thighs of a twenty-year-old. The other option, longer, was to bike downhill toward the beach and then meander along Seventeen Mile Drive back to Pacific Grove.