Her directness, her confidence, her absolute certainty that she was right weren’t easy to ignore. Her tone alone was enough to make Jared wonder if he were being an idiot. Had Gerard framed Quentin?

He was about to pursue the subject when Rebecca landed on the terrace from the carriageway.

Jared went rigid at the sight of her.

Her hair, wet and tangled, hung in her face, and blood was smeared on her swollen cheek. She was pale and shaking, but her matchless eyes were blazing, fired with determination.

And Jared knew then-even as he slid to his feet to ask her what the hell had happened-that it’d be another fourteen years before he’d have the slightest hope of forgetting her.

She pulled out a chair, hard, but didn’t sit down. “Hi, there, Mrs. Reed.”

“Rebecca,” Annette said regally. “What on earth-”

“I’m fine.”

Jared didn’t take his eyes off her. She was breathing hard and obviously in pain, but he held back.

“Don’t look so grim,” she told the chairman of Winston & Reed. “If you hadn’t had Quentin fire me, I’d be so busy working on your company’s new graphic identity I wouldn’t have time to poke around in the library, get beat up, come around and pester you-stuff like that.”

Annette inhaled. “That’s unfair.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You can answer some questions.” She didn’t look at Jared. “Let’s begin with 1963. A man-a mercenary who’d been with the Foreign Legion-was driving the Jeep the day of the ambush. Know anything about him?”

“Why should I? Rebecca-”

“He’s French. Vietnam was a French colony for a hundred years. You have a house in France.”

“Let’s get some ice for that bruise,” Annette said. “I recall hearing something about the French driver, but as for knowing him…no, I don’t think so. Yes, I have a house on the Riviera and spent some time in Vietnam myself, but I hardly know every Frenchman who was there. Jared-the refrigerator’s in the same place as always. Would you mind?”

He didn’t move. Something had happened, and he had to get Rebecca out of there-but carefully. She looked ready to explode. “Sure,” he said, going easy.

“I don’t need ice,” Rebecca said.

“R.J.-”

“I’m not sure what people around here aren’t telling me or why, or whether it’d make any difference if I knew what it was. But something’s not right here, and never has been, and I’m going to keep digging and pissing people off until I find out what really happened to my father and then to Tam. And if there’s anything that needs to be fixed in the record, I’m going to fix it.”

Bravo for you, sweetheart, Jared thought, surprising himself, when Rebecca, white-faced and hoarse, finished.

Annette regarded the younger woman with placid amusement. Jared had always believed his aunt blamed not just Thomas Blackburn for the ambush that killed her husband, but Stephen Blackburn, as well, for having been Benjamin’s friend, for having invited him along that day-just for being a Blackburn.

“Rebecca,” she said, “I have no idea what’s happened to you or what you’re hinting at, but there’s no conspiracy of silence. Nevertheless-do what you have to do. The Blackburns always do, you know.” Her gaze turned cold. “And it’s the innocents like myself who suffer.”

“If it’s one thing you aren’t,” Rebecca said, rising, “it’s innocent.”

“Cheeky words from Thomas Blackburn’s granddaughter. Frankly, I don’t know how you can stand to be around him knowing he as much as killed your own father.” Annette drank some lemonade, adding coolly, “Of course, that’s none of my affair.”

“That’s enough,” Jared said in a low voice.

His aunt’s fierce gaze landed on him. “I’ll not be told what to do in my own house. I suggest you take Rebecca home and see to her.”

Without a word, Rebecca about-faced, going out the way she’d come.

Jared caught up with her jumping down from the carriageway’s picturesque wrought-iron gate, the quickest way off his aunt’s property. They used to have races climbing over it when they were kids. She landed neatly on her feet.

“R.J., wait for me-I’ll be right over.”

She pretended not to hear him. She hit the sidewalk and picked up her pace.

Jared hoisted himself up and over the fence, not with the abandon and speed he had at ten. He was so busy trying to keep Rebecca in sight that he landed awkwardly and subjected quiet Mt. Vernon Street to a string of blunt curses.

Rebecca had reached the intersection of West Cedar Street when he grabbed her by the upper arm and pulled her around to face him. “Whoa, there,” he said. “Come on, R.J., what’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes were shining and the swelling on her cheek and lip looked sore, if not as bad as he’d originally thought. He touched a spot of dried blood with one finger. “R.J.-” He tried to stop himself but couldn’t-didn’t want to. He dropped his hand from her arm to her fingers, catching them in his, squeezing them lightly. “I’m not your enemy, R.J. Who hit you?”

She shut her eyes. She didn’t trust herself. Jared seemed so solid and strong that suddenly all she wanted was for him to hold her. She was sick of being alone, sick of wandering, sick of a lifetime of half truths and secrets.

“R.J.,” Jared repeated, “who hit you?”

She looked at him. “The man from Saigon. The Frenchman.”

He could feel his expression hardening. “I should have shot him when I had the chance.”

“No, it’s more complicated than that. His name’s Jean-Paul Gerard. God knows what all he’s done, but he didn’t just shoot you in Saigon in 1975. I thought you saw everything. All these years I thought you knew.”

Jared froze. “Knew what?”

“He saved my life. And Mai’s.”

From the first moment Jared saw Mai bundled up in her exhausted mother’s arms, he knew this tiny, wriggling infant had the capacity to change his life. Already he had postponed getting out of collapsing South Vietnam because of her. She should have been born two weeks ago, when there was still at least some hope that Hanoi could be persuaded to halt its southward march.

But no baby came, and village after village fell to the communists, until, at last, shortly after six o’clock in the steamy Saigon dusk of April 28, 1975, a slippery, dark-haired girl was born to the sounds of her mother’s cries of pain and joy and the shelling of the giant Tan Son Nhut Air Base just four miles from the heart of the city.

The war had finally come to Saigon.

The French nun who’d served as Tam’s midwife took Jared aside several hours after the rough labor had ended. Tam and the baby were asleep in his bedroom, and the shelling had died down. But the nun-Sister Joan-looked concerned. “The baby’s healthy, but Tam is very weak,” she explained in English. “Her pregnancy was long and difficult, and I’m afraid so was the labor. She’ll be all right, I think, but you must wait as long as possible before you take her to America.”

Jared was surprised. “How do you know-”

“You must get her out,” Sister Joan said, with unusual intensity for one who’d seen as much fear, sickness and death as she had in the past month. Refugees were streaming into the city by the tens of thousands. Now there was nowhere left to run, except out of the land of their ancestors. The young nun gripped Jared’s arm. “The baby will get her out of Saigon. She’s what the Vietnamese call bui doi. It means the dust of life.”

It was the first time Jared had heard the expression, and he understood it at once. In a communist Vietnam, the children of American fathers, be they white, black or brown, wouldn’t fare well.

Releasing him, Sister Joan continued. “There are rumors those in charge of the evacuation are letting Vietnamese women with Amerasian children pass through the system with very little question. She wouldn’t even need a laissez-passer.”