He said, “Caller ID takes all the excitement out of answering the phone. Leaves nothing to the imagination.” And neither did the Rose girls, it seemed; Caroline had already heard from Pearl and knew all about his car trouble and the trip home from Savannah on the train. Her tone was light and friendly and solicitous as always, with an edge of something slightly frazzled. Of course, the story he had to tell about Tab Darling roving through Ogilvie fueled by beer fumes was the kind of news to make anybody nervous.

“I’ve got some pasta left,” Caroline was saying. “And some beer, if you want to come over.”

“Beer.” John couldn’t remember the last time Caroline had drunk a beer in his presence, much less brought any home to Old Roses.

“Rivera brought it. She came over to keep me company.”

“Rivera?” He sounded like a parrot, and was powerless to stop himself.

“She brought some DVDs, too, of a sci-fi cult classic called Farscape. Strong women kicking butt and the men who love them.”

“Much like Ogilvie,” John said, and she laughed at that, a distinctly non-Caroline laugh. The idea of Rivera at Old Roses teaching Caroline how to appreciate beer and high-end sci-fi must mean something, but the one thought that presented itself to John was the fact that Angie had not exactly lied, but had certainly misled him. The whole time he sat in the kitchen with her he had assumed that Rivera was somewhere close by, and she had let him.

“Unless you wanted to come over?” Caroline finished, and John woke up enough to realize she had been waiting for him approve of her plans. No doubt Rivera was listening to that half of the conversation and shaking her head in disapproval, and with some reason.

Just that suddenly the question that had been nagging at him for a long time came into focus: Where did the intelligent, self-aware, confident Caroline, the one who chaired international meetings and wrote sharp critical reviews, disappear to when she left her office for home? Which of these two Carolines was he about to marry? And, most important—to him at this moment anyway: Why had he been avoiding this question for so long?

Right then the one thing John knew for sure was that he couldn’t cope with Caroline and Rivera, not just now. Not this evening.

“I’m beat,” John said. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

There was a pause. Embarrassment? Relief? He couldn’t tell. Then she said, “You do sound tired. Sleep is what you need.”

They could agree on that much, at least, and so John left Tab Darling’s convertible where it stood and went to climb into bed, alone, where he found, to his considerable irritation, that the thing he needed most was simply beyond him.

ELEVEN