She left the cookies to cool and went back upstairs and got ready for bed. Then she climbed into the big four-poster with the third-and seventh-grade curriculums, along with a box of workbooks for grades one through ten since the nannies hadn’t been able to pinpoint exactly where the kids were in their education. At ten, she heard somebody outside her door, but by the time she opened it, the only thing in the hall was a tray with a pot of liquor-laced tea and a striped cup, with two of her cookies on a plate beside it.

She crawled back into bed and sipped her tea-Mrs. Crumb still with the heavy hand with the schnapps-and ate her cookies, which were exceptional, as always. God, I’m good at this, she thought, and then put her mind back on the trouble at hand: Mrs. Crumb. They were going to talk about housekeeping and when that was over they were going to talk about ghosts. It was one thing for the housekeeper to have a few screws loose after living in the House of Usher for sixty years, another thing entirely to drive nannies away with ghost stories, especially when there were two kids who so desperately needed their help. Not that the kids looked like they wanted any help. In fact, they were downright hostile. Maybe I shouldn’t have come, she thought, feeling the old urge to break and run to someplace better, but Alice and Carter needed her, North had been right about that, and she could last the month, get them back to Columbus where North could get them professional help. It was only a month.

She put her empty cup back on the bedside table, punched her pillow, slid down into bed, and turned out the light, her thoughts still racing even though the tea had made her groggy. She was going to have to tell Mrs. Crumb to knock it off with the tea, she was going to have to tell Mrs. Crumb a lot of things. Mrs. Crumb was…

Who do you love? She heard the whisper as the night grew chill and she drifted off. Who do you want?

Not Mrs. Crumb, she thought, but the whisper was insistent. Who do you love? And then North was there in her dreams again, turning toward her with his rare, slow smile-

Who is HE?

Andie roused and looked around, disoriented. That had been a real whisper, not a dream, and the room was cold, much colder than it had been when she’d turned out the light, it was always cold in her dreams-

The window across from her bed rattled, and she thought, That’s what I heard, the window’s got a leak and it’s letting in the cold air, and got up to stick a piece of paper into it to stop the noise and pull the drapes against the cold. There were too many noises at night in this house, walls sighing and floors creaking and now this damn window…

She tried to shake the top pane but it was tight, stuck, not rattling at all, so she dropped her hand to the lower pane and then froze, looking down at the ground two stories below.

North stood there, his hair white in the moonlight, staring up at her.

Andie caught her breath, blindsided by the fact of him, looking at her with the same intensity of their first night, the night they’d made love until dawn, starving for each other, and he was down there now, she couldn’t believe it, he was down there now. He’d asked her if she wanted him to come, and she had, but she’d said no, but maybe he’d known, maybe he’d come for her, the way he’d crossed the bar all those years ago to meet her, maybe-

A cloud scudded across the moon and everything went dark, and when the moonlight lit the lawn again, he was gone.

This is still a dream, she thought. She was losing her mind. She was almost engaged to another man. She didn’t even want North. It was because she’d taken this job, with these two kids who didn’t want her. She should get out of there, she should run-

Tell him to come to you.

She closed her eyes and thought about rolling in his arms again, the weight of him bearing her down, the push of his hips and the surge of him sliding hard into her-

Call him!

Andie jerked back from the window and looked around. Somebody had said that, somebody must have said that, but there was no one in the room but her. This is a dream.

Yes, it’s a dream, you’re dreaming of him. Call him. He’s the one. Bring him here.

Andie shook her head to clear it, dizzier than ever now. And cold, so cold that she climbed back into bed shivering. She pulled the comforter up over her, and thought, No more dreams, and then sank down into the pillows and eventually into a fretful sleep, ignoring the voice that whispered, Who do you love?, and then dreamed of making love with North.

North had been sitting at his desk, working late to figure out a way to keep the next day’s jury from noticing his client was a total waste of space and air, when his mother opened his office door without knocking and walked in, elegant and annoyed, and said, “We need to talk.”

Oh, hell, not now. North stood up. “Hello, Mother. How was Paris?”

“Loud.” Lydia sat down, every platinum wave in place, the pearls around her throat in regimented rows.

North sat down. “The little people talking in the streets again?”

Lydia ignored that. “I assume Sullivan has been in.” She sat with her back straight and her arms along the arms of the chair, symmetrical and unbending.

“Yes,” North said and waited to cut to the chase so he could get rid of her.

“And?” Lydia said and waited.

“He’s looking well.”

“He always looks well. He’s my son. What did he say?”

“He said you were in good health.”

Lydia smiled, her lips curving in the tight little half circle that had sent opposing lawyers scurrying to offer settlements for forty years. “This is amusing, North, but I don’t have the time. What did Sullivan tell you?”

North leaned back. “That’s privileged. I’m his lawyer.”

“North-”

“What do you want, Mother?”

Lydia drew in air through her nose, her patrician nostrils flaring like a Derby winner’s. “He’s found another woman.”

North nodded. “He does that.”

“Or should I say, she’s found him.”

North nodded. “They do that.”

Lydia’s brows snapped together. “You are not being helpful.”

“I don’t want to be helpful.”

“He’s your brother-”

“Which is why I don’t want to be helpful.” North straightened. “Mother, he’s thirty-four. And although you may not have noticed, he has a cheerful cunning that has kept him single and solvent through adulthood.”

“Only because we were watching him,” Lydia snapped.

“I never watched him.”

“Well, you should have.”

North smiled back at her, the same tight smile she’d given him, the one Andie had called “the crocodile smile.” Has the same sincerity as crocodile tears, she’d told him once in the middle of an argument. Just less emotion.

He twitched his lips to get rid of it now. “Southie’s fine, he always has been. Leave him be.”

“Southie?” Lydia said, suddenly alert.

“Sullivan.”

“You haven’t called him Southie in years.” Lydia narrowed her eyes. “What’s going on?”

North sighed. “Mother, go away.”

“He’s seeing that woman from Channel Twelve. The one obsessed with children in jeopardy who browbeats the people she interviews.”

“Imagine that,” North said, meeting her eyes.

“I do not browbeat people.”

“Mother, you’ve made a career out of browbeating people.”

“Witnesses,” Lydia said. “Lawyers. Not people.”

“Thank God you have standards.”

Lydia glared at him. “Are you telling me that that woman is like me?”

North pictured Kelly O’Keefe in the last interview he’d seen her do, the one where the woman she was haranguing cried so hard she threw up on camera. “No.”

Lydia sat very still for a few moments and then said, “I have heard it said that men either marry their mothers or their mothers’ opposites.”