She backed away, gaze steady now. “I have to, Adam. Please. This afternoon, what we did—afterwards it made me cold.”

My hands fell to my sides. “That wasn’t meant.”

She stood tense and quiet. I felt suddenly drained. “We’ll go then,” I said.

Kris Ann was still quiet on the way to Henry’s. When we drove up, the house was dim and massive and Cade almost a shadow as he came to the window. He vanished when Kris Ann got out; then the front door opened and Kris Ann disappeared. I waited outside.

About ten minutes later Kris Ann emerged looking pale. “Henry?” I asked.

“He’s sedated.”

She lapsed into pensive silence as we drove off. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “You found Lydia, not me. I acted hysterical.”

“No matter, Krissy. There’s no good form for this.”

“What I mean is that we can go home if you want. Really, it’s been so horrible about Lydia that I forgot your father—”

I took her hand. “It’s okay. All that was a long time back.”

She turned to me, questioning. I tried switching subjects. “I’ve been missing you all week. When did you get in last night?”

“Not until after midnight. I got the last Atlanta flight and didn’t want to wake you. It all seems so long ago.”

“But your cousin’s okay.”

“Fine.”

“And the baby?”

She turned back to the window, her profile still. The stab of beam lights on the empty road ahead accented our solitude in the moving darkness. “He’s precious,” she finally said. “They’re very lucky.”

It was quiet as we both thought whatever we were thinking. “You’re sure it doesn’t matter?” she asked.

“About the club?” I tried smiling. “Not really. They can bore me, but they can’t make me think.”

We arrived at a staid building of English fieldstone set back from the road with the distance that money buys. There were two prowl cars at the end of the drive and a uniformed officer had replaced the doorman. Leaving the car with an attendant, we took an entrance hall, lined with pictures of dead founders, to the ballroom. It stretched across the blue hand-loomed rug to a large rectangular mirror on the far wall, two hundred feet from where we stood. Seven chandeliers swept toward it in a crystalline line to be abruptly reflected, the nearest the largest, like stations in society. Beneath a thin haze of smoke, men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses drank in small clusters from which the occasional one or two would drift toward the bar, then amble with a fresh drink in search of something new. Usually they would discuss vacations, children, their lake houses, the imbecility of the President and the next party where they would discuss all that again. But tonight there were police inside, and the talk was of Lydia Cantwell.