The following morning, I awoke to the smell of coffee and the memory of a kiss. And last night’s guilt was fresh in my mind, too. I felt as if I’d betrayed John. Especially when I’d walked into the house last night and the first thing I saw was his daughter. Kara had been talking on her cell phone and waved at me in a friendly enough manner to warm my heart. Maybe there was hope for us after all.

I hadn’t wanted to interrupt her, so I’d gone straight to my bedroom. Sure, John would want me to find another partner. But that darn guilt still kept me tossing and turning for a good hour before I’d finally fallen asleep.

Now I sat up, stretched and checked the clock on my nightstand. Eight a.m. Kara must have made coffee, and I almost felt pampered. Then I realized my cats weren’t in the room. That bothered me. Routine is soothing, and this was a break from routine. I realized Chablis might be downstairs guarding her friends. But I wondered where my boys were.

Thinking about my visiting cats downstairs gave me a terrible thought. Dame Wiggins and her litter. Darn. I didn’t fill her dish last night, I thought, getting out of bed. I nearly tripped as I rushed out of my bedroom and headed down the hall.

Kara was in the kitchen, and I said, “Good morning. Coffee smells great,” as I hurried past her toward the basement door.

Kara seemed to know just what I was up to because before I made it to the basement door, she said, “Don’t worry, Jillian. I fed her and gave her fresh water. But perhaps you could do the litter box?” she said.

I stopped and looked at her. “Oh. Thanks.” I don’t know why I was so surprised by her thoughtfulness. I guess it had just been a long time since I had been living with someone else.

“Don’t you ever eat?” she asked. “I mean, you’ve got next to nothing but yogurt and tea. Tuna salad was good for lunch yesterday, but it’s not really my favorite breakfast food.”

“We can go to the Piggly Wiggly later. Or you can make a list and I can go,” I said.

“I’ll do the shopping.” She wore shorts and a tank top and was leaning against the counter holding her coffee cup. “I’m meeting with Tom today, and I’ll stop at the store after we’re done. That way I can pay for the week’s food.”

Okay. Lots of info. She has enough money to pay for food, she’s staying for at least a week and she’s meeting with Tom. I smiled and said, “Sounds perfect. And thanks for feeding Dame Wiggins.”

“Believe me, she came up here and told me to do it,” Kara said.

“She left her litter?” She must have been as hungry as when she’d showed up at Ruth Schultz’s farm to do that.

Kara smiled. She was so lovely with her flawless skin and gentle curves, and a decent night’s sleep and a better attitude only accentuated her assets. “Go down and check out what’s happening,” she said. “It’s great.”

So I did. Merlot and Syrah were lying in the middle of the game room again. Waiting for Chablis to grant them admittance to the bedroom? Probably. When I went to the door, I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing out loud-which would have surely hurt Chablis’s feelings. Chablis lay on Dame Wiggins’s quilt with those four babies cuddled close to her. Dame Wiggins sat at the food dish and stopped eating long enough to offer a sweet little meow.

I knelt next to Chablis, and I swore her purrs could have been heard in the next county. Apparently this was a dream come true for her. I stroked her head, and she closed her eyes. Yup, a litter of kittens was the best thing that had happened to her since John and I rescued her from that shelter.

I guess she’d been wanting a family all this time.

After I came back upstairs, I told Kara I was off to shower and then had quilting orders to attend to. When I came out into the kitchen an hour later, she was gone. Off to meet with Tom, I guessed. I consumed the last two yogurts and then took my coffee down the hall. Syrah and Merlot bounded into my sewing room ahead of me.

I still had to bind quilts for promised orders. I make continuous bias bindings for all my quilts and hand sew them on during the last binding step for a nice, neat finish. I had yards of completed bindings and took a green and red tiny print from my binding drawer. A woman in Georgia had ordered a quilt for her cat Saint Nick and wanted, of course, green and red. I’d made a simple nine-patch with beautiful small-print fabrics and added a flying-geese border to this one. Custom orders like this are my favorite.

Long strips of fabric like bindings are a cat’s dream, and I always keep several that my three can play with. I pulled out one of those, and Syrah was on that fabric like a bear on a fish. He grabbed it in his mouth and started to run toward the windowsill, but Merlot immediately snagged the other end. Too bad Chablis was missing out on this game, but she was probably having more fun downstairs.

I sat at my sewing machine by the window. No lake view on this side of the house, but there were the big hickories and oaks with lots of birds and squirrels to distract me. The binding was all ironed, and once I had machine sewed it all the way around the quilt, making sure to miter the corners, I would then flip the binding over the raw edges of the quilt and hand sew it on. This was my absolute favorite part of making a quilt-the part that relaxed me the most.

But I’d managed to get only the machine- sewing part of the binding done when my cell phone rang. The small voice I heard at the other end took me by surprise.

“Is this Miss Jillian Hart?” whispered the boy.

“Jack? Is that you?” I said.

“Yes. I can’t talk loud. I don’t want Mom to hear. Can you come over and help her?”

My heart fluttered. “Is she hurt?”

“Nothing like that. She’s called Candace like a hundred times, but Candace must be so busy with the professor’s death investigation, she doesn’t have time for my mom right now. Totally understandable to me, of course.”

“Totally,” I echoed, astonished again at this child. I wondered what it must be like to be so different from other kids. Difficult, was my guess. “How can I help, Jack?”

“Would you come over? Just for a little while. She’s… well, you saw how she is. And it’s worse because the professor died.”

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can. And I won’t let her know you called me, okay?”

“That would be especially considerate. Bye.”

I made a quick check downstairs and saw Chablis, Dame Wiggins and the kittens sharing the quilt. The kittens were suckling, and Chablis was curled close to Dame Wiggins’s head this time. Syrah had carried the quilt binding downstairs and lay on his back on the game-room floor with the fabric between his paws. Maybe he thought he could tempt Chablis out of the bedroom with the binding and things could get back to normal for him. Not anytime soon, buddy, I thought.

After I turned the TV to Animal Planet for Merlot’s entertainment, I was off. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I drove down Robin West’s long dirt driveway. I noted a new padlock on the barn and saw that the blinds on the house were all closed. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought no one was home. I slid from behind the wheel of my minivan and felt a few splats of rain hit my shoulders. I hurried to the porch before the dark clouds released the storm that was about to hit.

I knocked on the door and at the same time shouted, “Robin? It’s Jillian.”

Nothing at first, and then I saw the blinds crack on the window to my right. I heard Jack yell, “Mom it really is Miss Jillian.” His voice sounded muffled for some reason.

Seconds later, the door opened. Robin wore heavy-duty rubber gloves and had a surgical-type mask hanging around her neck. “Hi, Jillian. What brings you here?” Her smile was tight, her voice strained.