"I'm sorry if Pru seemed kind of rude," Cecilia said. "But VOMA really is very specific. It's not for everyone."

"I felt as if I had walked in on one of those girls' clubs that were always forming in grade school."

"It's in your best interest. I mean, it would be even worse to get into a group and find out it couldn't help you. You're not the first person Pru has turned away. Sometimes even men have tried to join." She lowered her voice when she said "men," as if the word itself were an obscenity. "We couldn't have that."

"Why would men want to join?"

"They have daughters or wives who have been raped, and they're looking for a way to make sense of it. But VOMA isn't for them, either."

"How long have you been a member?"

"Six years, from the beginning," she said with a small sigh. "Pru recruited me. The group was her idea, and she spent time at the courthouse, going through files and looking for victims whose rapists walked. I was raped almost seven years ago."

"And now you're getting married. I bet there was a time when that seemed remote."

"Yes. Very remote." She laughed. "I can't quite believe it myself."

They sat in awkward silence. Tess wondered if her face betrayed her conflicting emotions. The idea of anyone hurting this tiny girl made her sick. She was glad, now, that she hadn't told her rehearsed story. They would have known she was making it up. This was a kind of pain one couldn't fake. Then again, VOMA, with its celebration of victimhood, gave her the creeps. She just wanted to find the woman quoted in the piece and find out if she still was harboring a grudge against Abramowitz.

She slid one of her business cards across the table. Luckily it gave nothing away. "Well, if VOMA ever changes its policies, give me a call." She was hoping her overture would prompt Cece to offer her number, but she just pocketed Tess's card. Then she reached toward her head to play with the hair that was no longer there. Her hand dropped abruptly back into her lap.

"You know, you actually look pretty good with such short hair," Tess said. "Not many women would."

"Yeah, I had a pretty bad case."

"Um, cancer?"

Cecilia laughed again, a full-bodied laugh this time. "No, although you're not the first to think that. I had Highland-town hair-dyed, permed, with the little side bangs in the front and the rest hanging down to my shoulders."

Highlandtown was an East Side working-class neighborhood, home to the city's tallest beehives and thickest accents. Tess had never heard of Highlandtown hair, but she understood instantly what Cecilia meant.

"Why did you cut it off? The neighborhood must be shocked."

"Not as shocked as they were when I quit my secretarial job and got a scholarship to the University of Baltimore 's law school. Or when I stopped pronouncing the second ‘r' in ‘warter' and ‘ Warshington D.C. ' People told my pop I was getting uppity." Cece-Cecilia-was suddenly sitting up straighter, and she had lost the shy, shambling style. "They were right. I am."

"What prompted all the changes?"

"VOMA. It brought me together with a lot of women I might not have met otherwise. Rich women, from Roland Park and Guilford. Accomplished women. Pru really encouraged me. But she thinks I'm uppity, too."

"Why?"

Cecilia shrugged. "It happens. Someone's your mentor, then suddenly you don't need a mentor anymore. Hey-what was yours like?"

"My mentor?"

"No, your rape."

Tess stared into her glass, mumbling: "Oh, typical date rape. I was helping a guy study, and we went up to his room."

"Mine was a burglar. I asked him to…pull out. I was scared of, I don't know, pregnancy, or AIDS. I think I had this idea it would be more tolerable if he didn't come inside me. Of course he found the whole thing hilarious."

"How did he get off?"

"His lawyer used the thing about pulling out. He said I was so calm, so thoughtful, it must have been consensual. That it was my form of birth control. But that's not the reason he got acquitted. Someone, the lab or the cops or the prosecutors, lost the physical evidence, the swab. The case fell apart without that."

"How does VOMA help?"

"Oh, self-defense classes. Lectures. We even looked into some kind of civil suit."

"Against the lab, for losing your results?"

"Something like that. VOMA worked pretty well."

"Worked, past tense? Are you quitting because you're getting married, or because of law school?"

"Right. Exactly. Because I'm getting married." Cecilia jumped to her feet, gathering up her purse and the sheaf of papers on the table. In her haste she knocked everything to the floor. When Tess tried to help her pick the fluttering papers up, she panicked.

"Don't touch anything! Just let me put it back in order!" she shouted, her voice as shrill as a police whistle. It was a commanding sound, coming from such a tiny body. But Cecilia's voice merely startled Tess into holding the papers even tighter, crumpling the sheets in her fist.

Cecilia dropped into a practiced crouch, fingers curved as if to gouge someone's eyes or stab a larynx, but her self-defense training was of little use unless someone came at her. Tess merely stood there, staring at her, along with everyone else in the coffee bar, except for two chess players who were using a timer for their game. Cecilia knew how to defend, but not how to attack. Tess knew how to attack, but she had no intention of doing so. After a few moments of this standoff, Cecilia improvised, throwing her body against Tess's knees in a blatantly illegal tackle and bringing her crashing to the floor.

As Tess fell she reached out blindly with both hands, dropping the crumpled sheets. Cecilia grabbed them and bolted, leaving Tess in a puddle of steamed milk and crockery.

"Just another coffeehouse brawl," Tess told the manager when he rushed over to examine the damage, not to her but to the heavy cups and saucers. "Caffeine makes some people very aggressive."

It hurt, being dumped on one's butt on a concrete floor. Of course, Tess thought, a coffeehouse couldn't have anything warm or soft underfoot. As she pulled to her feet, she saw a coffee-splattered piece of paper under the table. Greasy and gray, it appeared to be a page from some company's articles of incorporation. Tess remembered seeing such documents when she was a reporter. This was the last page of the charter, bearing two signatures: Prudence Henderson, president and treasurer of VOMA, and the lawyer who had filed the charter for her: Michael Abramowitz.

The president of the United States came between Tess and her bagels the next morning, and it wasn't in one of her strange dreams.

Nor was it the first time. Like most Baltimoreans, Tess had more experience than she wanted with visiting presidents, First Ladies, cabinet secretaries, and their ilk. Just forty-five miles up the parkway from Washington, Baltimore had become the destination of choice during the last decade, an easy photo op for those who wanted to surround themselves with local misery or color. Real folks. Even the queen of England had felt obliged to put in an appearance at an Orioles game. But whether it was a monarch or a president, a Democrat or a Republican, it all meant the same thing for the local populace-traffic jams and security checks, breathless reports on television for a week before and after, a disruption of life in general.

Cranky at being deprived of her breakfast routine, Tess splurged on a chocolate-filled croissant and a cup of hazelnut coffee from one of the stalls inside the old Broadway market. She had planned to savor the high-calorie treat and gourmet coffee, but she ended up bolting both when she saw the bus crossing Broadway. One reason her Toyota had survived this long was because she used public transportation when possible, as long as she didn't have to transfer. Baltimore 's bus system didn't make it easy. Today she ended up six long blocks from her destination, the complex of state office buildings at Preston and Martin Luther King Boulevard.