His square chin lifted. His eyes narrowed on her face. “You’ve lost weight.”

She shrugged. “One of the better consequences of my profession,” she said quietly. “How are you, Gabriel?”

“I’ve been better.”

She searched his eyes. “How’s Sara?”

“Getting back to normal.”

She nodded. She swallowed again and dropped her eyes to his chest. It was hard to find something to say that didn’t involve apologies or explanations or pleas for forgiveness.

The silence went on for so long that she could hear pieces of conversation from other churchgoers. She could hear the traffic on the highway, the sound of children playing in some yard nearby. She could hear the sound of her own heartbeat.

This was destroying her. She clicked the key fob again deliberately. “I have to go,” she said softly.

“Sure.”

He moved back so that she could open the door and get inside. She glanced at him with sorrow in her face, but she averted her eyes so that it didn’t embarrass him. She didn’t want him to feel guilty. She was the one who should feel that emotion. In the end she couldn’t meet his eyes or even wave. She just started the car and drove away.

Well, at least the first meeting was over with, she told herself later. It hadn’t been quite as bad as she’d expected. But it had been rough. She felt like crying, but her eyes were dry. Some pain was too deep to be eased by tears, she thought sadly.

She changed into jeans and a red T-shirt and went out on the front porch to water her flowers while a TV dinner microwaved itself to perfection in the kitchen.

Her flowers were going to be beautiful when they bloomed, she decided, smiling as they poked their little heads up through the dirt in an assortment of ceramic pots all over the wooden floor.

She had three pots of chrysanthemums and one little bonsai tree named Fred. Gabriel had given it to her when she first moved in with them, a sort of welcome present. It was a tiny fir tree with a beautiful curving trunk and feathery limbs. She babied it, bought it expensive fertilizer, read books on how to keep it healthy and worried herself to death that it might accidentally die if she forgot to water it. That hadn’t happened, of course, but she loved it dearly. Of all the things Gabriel had given her, and there had been a lot, this was her favorite. She left it outside until the weather grew too cold, then she carried it inside protectively.

The Jaguar had been wonderful. But she’d still been driving it when she did the story that almost destroyed Gabriel’s life and after that, she could no longer bear to sit in it. The memories had been killing her.