Ashley looked down. “I don’t want to offend you, but it would be hard for me to think of anyone but Terri as my mom.”

“I can understand that, and it doesn’t offend me in the least. You used to call me Dean, but I’m not anymore, and that’s way too formal for our relationship. So why don’t you call me Casey and I’ll call you Ashley. How does that sound?”

“Okay.”

“How did you find out about your father and me?”

“Your father told Jerry Philips, my attorney, about the adoption. He told me.”

“And why did Henry reveal our relationship after so many years?”

Ashley decided not to tell Casey that Henry needed her to prevent Miles from taking his sister off life support, because she wasn’t certain how much Casey knew.

“I guess he wanted me to know that I still had a family.”

“Do you hate me for abandoning you?” Casey asked.

The directness of Casey’s question caught Ashley off guard. Then it dawned on Ashley that Casey Van Meter was once again the dean. Casey was back in charge.

Ashley decided that she would be direct, too. “I did at first.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Confused, but I don’t hate you anymore. I tried to look at it from your point of view, to imagine how I would have felt if I was pregnant by a man I…I didn’t love.”

Ashley looked down.

“You’re right, Ashley. I didn’t love your father. Marriage would have been wrong for both of us. It would never have lasted. And I was too young to be a mother. When I gave you up for adoption it had nothing to do with you. It wasn’t your fault. I never even saw you. They took you away the moment I delivered. I was sedated. I don’t even have a clear memory of the birth. But it turned out for the best, didn’t it? Norman was a good father?”

“The best.”

“And you loved Terri?”

“Very much.”

Ashley paused and gathered the courage to ask the next question. “Did you ever regret giving me up?”

“There have been moments when I wondered what became of you. I’m glad you had loving parents. I’m happy that you’re a strong, self-confident woman, even if I can’t take any credit for what you’ve become.”

“Did you ever try to find me?”

“No, never.”

“Why?”

“May I be brutally honest?”

“Please,” Ashley said, steeling herself.

“You were never real to me. You were like a dream. I never held you, I never saw you. How could I love you or want you? And what good would it have done if I showed up out of the blue and destroyed your peace of mind? Look at the turmoil you’ve been through since you learned I was your mother.”

Ashley swallowed, fighting the tightness in her throat and the fear that she would cry. She kept her next question overly formal to distance herself from the emotions that were raging inside her.

“What about now? Do you want to get to know me or would you prefer that we not contact each other?”

Casey cocked an eyebrow and flashed a wry smile. “What a silly question. Of course I want to get to know you. I liked you from the first day we met. Do you remember when I showed you the campus? I knew that you were a good person, immediately. I admired the way you dealt with the horror of your situation, your steel, your poise. Had we been the same age I would have wanted you as a friend. There’s still the age difference, but that means less and less as we get older. So I propose that we start off as friends. We can see each other from time to time and try not to force anything. Let’s see how it goes. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Okay.”

“Good. Now, you know what I’ve been doing for the past five years. I think it’s only fair that you bring me up to date on how you spent your time while I’ve been asleep.”

Jerry had to work late, so Ashley agreed to meet him at Typhoon, a Thai restaurant on Broadway a few blocks from his office. The hostess showed Ashley to a table in the crowded restaurant where Jerry was waiting.

“How did the meeting with Casey go?” Jerry asked as soon as she was seated.

“Better than I thought it would.”

“You shouldn’t be surprised. You liked Casey when you were at the Academy, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I only saw her a few times. Except for when she took Mom and me around, I never did more than say hi when we passed on campus. It was real superficial. And when I was at the Academy I didn’t know that she abandoned me and I hadn’t heard all of these bad things about her.”

“Bad like what?”

“You told me how wild she was when she met Dad. Miles said pretty much the same thing. She’s been in rehab. She was promiscuous. If you can believe Randy Coleman, she could also be violent and sadistic.”

Ashley related what Coleman had said about Casey chaining him to their bed and burning him with cigarettes. Jerry was appalled.

“But being in the coma and coming out of it, maybe that changed her,” Ashley said. “This afternoon we really clicked. I want to get to know her better.”

Jerry reached out and took Ashley’s hands. “This is good, Ashley. This can really help you. With Maxfield in prison and finding out that you get along with Casey, you can have a new start. You can get your life back.”

“You left something out.”

“What?”

Ashley squeezed Jerry’s hands. “You, Jerry. If anyone has saved me, it’s you.”

Did Ashley and your sister become friends?” a young woman in the back row asked Miles Van Meter.

“Yes, Ashley started visiting Glen Oaks regularly. When Casey was able to walk, Ashley would keep her company on the trails at the Academy. They’re still good friends.”

A hand went up in the second row. Miles smiled at a middle-aged woman in a business suit.

“Sleeping Beauty reads like a murder mystery,” she said. “Have you ever tried your hand at fiction?”

“I took a creative writing course in college. I did rather well in it. And, of course, there are all those lawyers who are writing legal thrillers. When that trend started I thought about trying my hand at one, but I practice business law and my cases were too dull for a good plot.”

“Are you going to write another true crime book?”

“No. Writing about my sister’s case was enough for me.”

“What about a novel?”

Miles smiled shyly. “Well, I do have an idea for a thriller. I’m working up a proposal. If my agent thinks it’s any good I’ll probably take a stab at it.”

A heavyset man in the front row raised his hand and Miles acknowledged him.

“Whose idea was it to write a new edition of Sleeping Beauty?”

“Actually, my editor got the idea after Maxfield’s arrest. He asked me if I had any interest in writing additional chapters that would include the trial for a new edition of the book. I agreed. I thought that the book needed these final chapters to bring the events in it to an end. It also gave me closure.”

A woman who was standing between the bookcases in the back of the room raised her hand. Miles pointed at her.

“Has your sister read Sleeping Beauty and, if she has, what does she think of it?”

“Casey has read it. I think it was tough for her, but she’s one tough lady.”

The audience applauded.

“To answer the second part of your question, Casey said she liked it, but I don’t think she’d be honest with me if she hated it. After all, we love each other. That, by the way, is one reason to never ask your mother to critique your work.”

Miles waited for the laughter to die down before calling on a scholarly-looking gentleman with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses who was wearing a tweed sports coat with leather patches on the sleeves.

“Was it hard for you to sit through Joshua Maxfield’s trial?”

“Yes and no. I didn’t like to hear about the terrible things he’d done, but I felt great relief that he was finally facing justice. I think it was much harder for Ashley.”