Holding the phone in one hand, the cookbook in the other, she’d stopped moving and stared at the recipe as she took in his words. Dance could still picture the page in the cookbook perfectly, though she’d read it only that one time. She even remembered the caption under the picture. A hearty, tasty soup that you can whip up in no time. And it’s nutritious too.

She could make the soup from memory.

Though she never had.

Kathryn Dance knew it would still be some time before she healed—well, “heal” was the word her grief counselor used. But that wasn’t right, because you never did heal, she’d come to realize. A scar that replaces slashed skin is still a scar. In time a numbness replaces the pain. But the flesh is forever changed.

Dance smiled to herself now, in the cab, as she noted that she’d crossed her arms and curled up her feet. A kinesics expert knows what those gestures are all about.

The streets seemed identical to her—dark canyons, gray and dim brown, punctuated with bright neon: ATM. Salad Bar. Nails $9.95. Such a contrast to the Monterey Peninsula, with the pine and oak and eucalyptus and sandy patches dotted with succulent groundcover. The passage of the smelly Chevy taxi was slow. The town she lived in, Pacific Grove, was a Victorian village 120 miles south of San Francisco. Populated with eighteen thousand souls and nestled between chic Carmel and hardworking Monterey, of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row fame, Pacific Grove could be traversed in the time it had taken the cab to drive four blocks.

Gazing at the city streets, she was thinking, dark and congested, chaotic, utterly frantic, yes . . . Still, she loved New York City. (She was, after all, a people addict, and she’d never seen so many of them in one place.) Dance wondered how the children would respond to the city.

Maggie would go for it, Dance knew without doubt. She could easily picture the ten-year-old, her pigtail sweeping back and forth as she stood in the middle of Times Square and glanced from billboards to passersby to hawkers to traffic to Broadway theaters, enthralled.

Wes? He’d be different. He was twelve and had had a tough time since his father died. But finally his humor and confidence seemed to be returning. At last Dance had been comfortable enough to leave him with his grandparents while she went to Mexico on the kidnapper extradition, her first international trip since Bill’s death. According to Dance’s mother, he’d seemed fine when she was away and so she’d scheduled a seminar here; the NYPD and state police had been after her for a year to present one in the area.