“This is his sister,” Jane said. “Please ring him and tell him I need to talk to him immediately.”

“I’m sorry, but as I just—”

“You don’t understand,” Jane said quietly. “It’s an emergency. It’s an emergency!”

While she waited for him to come on the line, she bent down and tried to rub the wine off her stocking with a rumpled piece of tissue paper while vowing not to lose her cool like that again.

“I have clients coming by in the next hour,” Brian said. “I have three projects in trouble. I can’t drop everything to help you out with day care, Jane.”

She could hardly wait for his baby to be born, assuming it ever was. All the real work would be handed over to Joyce, who would probably accept it gratefully, but a certain amount of mess would almost certainly splatter onto Brian’s brow. “We’re talking about your nephew,” she said. “I’ve never asked you for anything and this would take all of half an hour out of your day, probably more like twenty minutes.” She spit on the tissue and rubbed hard.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing. Please, Brian, this is important.”

“I’m sorry, Jane, but I don’t have a free minute this afternoon. Don’t you have a baby-sitter or your mother-in-law or someone?”

She didn’t believe him. It was more of his selfishness, one more round in the pitched battle they’d been engaged in since they were children. She was probably as bad as he, except that she, in her very worst moments, wouldn’t take it out on a child. “If I had someone else, I wouldn’t be asking you.”

“The answer is no.”

Fearing he was about to hang up on her, she said, “You don’t have time for Gerald, but apparently you have time to squire Desmond Sullivan around town.”

That silenced him. She hadn’t been planning on saying it, hadn’t been planning on mentioning it ever because it was none of her business and made her uncomfortable, but he’d backed her against a wall and it had slipped out. It seemed as if minutes passed with neither of them saying anything, and for once in her life, Jane actually felt close to her brother as she listened to his harsh breathing.

When he finally spoke, his voice was weary. “Why is it that I never call you with these kinds of crises?”

Thank God he was giving in. “Wait until you have a child,” she said. But the relief passed as suddenly as it had come over her and was replaced by the realization that giving in was an admission that something had, in fact, happened between him and Desmond. “You’ll see,” she stammered. “You’ll see that . . . things come up you can’t elicit.”

“Elicit?”

“Predict. Things you can’t predict.”