Kristen shook her head in disbelief. For her, high school had ended that night at the Valentine’s Day dance. The remainder of the school year had been a blur that hadn’t become clearer with time. But, apparently, one of the perks of being valedictorian of the class was that she got to organize the class reunion.

She’d managed to duck this responsibility for nearly twenty years, but no more. Aurora was making certain that this anniversary of the graduating class of ’86 would be celebrated.

The only good news was the hope that she could pass the baton for the next reunion. If there was one…

Sliding behind the wheel, she rummaged in her purse for her cell phone. Starting the Honda with one hand, she speed dialed her home number with the other. On the second ring, as she turned on the wipers, her answering machine clicked on. “Lissa?” she said as soon as the recorded message beeped at her. “If you’re there, answer, okay?” A pause. Nothing. “Lissa, are you home?” But there was no breathless response; no sound of her daughter’s voice. Obviously she wasn’t home. “Listen, if you get this, call me back. I should be home in twenty minutes.” She clicked off, punched in the number of her daughter’s cell phone, and heard, “Hi, this is Lissa. You know what to do. Leave your number and, if you’re lucky, I’ll call you back.”

Kristen hung up. Her daughter was undoubtedly screening her calls. Caller ID could be such a pain. “Great,” she muttered under her breath as she nosed her car out of the lot and settled into the slow flow of traffic that oozed out of the downtown area. She was ticked that her daughter wasn’t home. Didn’t that kid know what “You’re grounded” meant? Hopefully, Lissa would show up before Kristen had to leave again, in what? Less than an hour? “Save me,” she whispered, thinking of the evening to come and the first of what would probably be a dozen meetings of the reunion committee.

Never reaching a speed even close to twenty miles an hour, Kristen edged west onto Canyon Drive, which sliced through the steep, forested cliffs of the West Hills. Her route cut under the Vista Avenue Viaduct, more commonly referred to as the Suicide Bridge, and each time she passed under that arching eighty-year-old stone span, she thought of those who had leapt to their deaths on the very pavement on which she was driving. Shuddering, she watched the fat drops of rain drizzling down her windshield as she reached the turnoff leading to her house. She punched the accelerator and her little car climbed up the hill, along an impossibly winding side road that snaked through the stand of Douglas fir trees to the crest and the tiny dead-end lane that stopped at her house, a cedar-and-glass “Northwest Contemporary” that had been built in the 1970s and boasted a panoramic view of the city far below.

Tonight she would have loved to throw on her most comfortable sweats, light the fire, and curl up by the windows with a good book. The last thing she wanted was to leave home again to deal with some of her ex-classmates. She could do without their exuberance to connect with friends, enemies, and unknowns after twenty years of virtual silence. Nothing sounded worse.

As she reached her house, she suddenly realized how wrong she’d been: the reunion meeting was not at the top of her “things I don’t want to do” list. That first, dreaded spot was reserved for dealing with her soon-to-be ex-husband. And it looked like she was about to have the pleasure of another face-off with him as well. Ross’s monster of a black pickup was blocking the drive.

“Give me strength,” she silently prayed as she parked her car across the street.

The day was quickly sliding from bad to real bad.

“Perfect,” she muttered under her breath. She sent up another quick plea for patience in dealing with the man she’d married during her sophomore year in college. It had been a rash, hasty decision, one she’d come to regret. If not for their only child, the now “out of cell range” Melissa, the entire marriage could be considered a colossal mistake.

She just hadn’t had the guts, heart, time, or energy to end it.

Neither, it seemed, had he.

No divorce papers had been filed.

Yet.

“More fun to come,” she whispered under her breath as she grabbed the mail from the box. With her orange tabby nearly tripping her, Kristen made her way through the open door of the garage, past the lawnmower, ladders, and recycling tubs to the door leading to her kitchen, where, big as life, Ross was seated at the nook café table, sipping one of her light beers and reading the paper.

Just as he’d done thousands of times during their years together.

Wearing a white shirt with the top two buttons undone, his sleeves rolled up, his tie tossed casually over the back of a chair, he scanned the business section. His wallet and keys were on the table.

“Been here a while?” she asked as he looked up, his gray eyes, as always, assessing.

Her heart did a funny little glitch. Even after all the years, the fights, the differing paths of their lives, she still found him sexy. Her downfall.

“I thought I’d take Lissa to dinner. She hasn’t shown.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah.”

She was stunned. “Did you consider calling?”

“Yep.” He took a swallow of his beer and leaned back in his chair to stare at her. “Thought better of it.”

“Why?”

He lifted a shoulder. “I figured you might try to talk me out of it. Or, if I got your okay, then I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. This seemed easier.”

“So you just let yourself in?”

“Still own half of the house. Got my own set of keys.” Those damned eyes skewered her, challenging her to argue with him. Kristen decided not to rise to the bait. She didn’t have the time or energy to argue.

“Where is she?”

“I thought you’d know.” He stretched, his shoulders and arms tugging at the seams of his shirt, the black hair at his nape a little too long and ruffling over his shirt collar.

Uneasiness crawled through Kristen’s blood. “Lissa was supposed to come home straight after school.”

“You told her that?”

“Oh, yes.” The ugly scene this morning was fresh in her mind. They’d argued, the gist of it being that Lissa was furious with her mother for finding the progress reports from the school. Even though the envelope had been addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Ross Delmonico, Lissa had considered the contents about her failing grades to be no one’s business but her own. She’d thrown a fit and refused breakfast. Her eyes, so like her father’s, had snapped gray fire and she’d half run out of the house to catch a ride with her boyfriend. “I grounded her because of the progress reports from her school,” Kristen explained.

Ross waited, eyebrows raised, for Kristen to continue.

“She’s flunking chemistry and German.” Kristen picked up the progress reports from the dining room table and handed them to him.

“Flunking?” he said, eyeing the page with the teacher comments.

“She claims it’s all a big mistake, that the teachers haven’t entered a couple of grades, so I told her to get everything fixed and have Mrs. Hanson and Mr. Childers call me, send me notes, or e-mail me. So far, I haven’t heard from either teacher, so I figure until the grades are up, she’s going nowhere.”

“Isn’t that a little Dickensian?”

“You got a better idea?” She didn’t need a lesson in parenting from a man who for years was a ghost in the marriage, spending all of his waking hours working. When Ross didn’t reply, she said, “I didn’t think so.”

“She still going to school with Zeke?” Kristen nodded, and Ross said maddeningly, “Doesn’t sound much like grounding to me.”

“I was running late and-” Kristen stopped short, clenching her teeth. She glared at him. “Why am I explaining this to you? It’s not like you were around to drive her.”