"I don't mean anything like that," he said. "I just mean you don't look so hot. You're welcome to my place."
"You still rooming with Tony?"
"No. He's married. The rent got too high so I'm over on the East Side now. But seriously, I'll sleep on the couch. No problem."
"Thanks, but I don't know when my mother's coming in and I left Jill with a neighbor so—"
"Who's Jill?"
Good God, why had she mentioned Jill? She'd never intended to. But somehow it had slipped out. Damn. Well, she couldn't take it back now. She had to tell him something.
"My daughter."
▼
Rob hoped he didn't look as shocked as he felt. "A daughter? You have a child?"
Automatically, he reached for a cigarette, then remembered she'd asked him not to smoke. He really needed one now.
"Yes. Jill Marie. A real little beauty."
Kara's mood had lightened visibly with the change in subject. Her eyes were alight with love.
Why should he be so stunned? He and Kara had had no contact in ten years. He had never married. Was that why some part of him assumed that Kara too had remained single?
"Wait a sec. You signed in at the morgue as Kara Wade. That's your maiden name."
"It's my married name, too."
"You married a guy with the same last name?"
"No, Rob," she said with exaggerated patience. "I simply kept my name when I got married. There's no law that says I've got to take my husband's name."
"Oh." He remembered how Kara had been into women's lib. Apparently that hadn't changed. "How old's your little girl?"
"Hmmm?" Kara seemed to come back from faraway. "Jill? Oh, she's eight."
Eight?
"You didn't waste much time, did you!" he blurted, then wanted to kick himself. "Sorry."
"That's okay." Kara smiled. "No, I guess I didn't. He was an old high school beau who'd been carrying the torch for me all the time I was away."
"Imagine that."
Rob remembered carrying the torch for Kara a long while himself, hoping she'd come back, or at least call. Hoping…
"It's true," she said. "We just sort of picked up where we left off."
Rob tried but couldn't keep the edge off his voice. "He's not a cop, I take it."
"No. He was a safe, sane, staid insurance salesman."
"Was?"
"He was killed a year after we were married. His car got caught between a granite cliff and a jack-knifing tractor trailer on a snowy night on the Penn Turnpike out near Pittsburgh."
"Jeez, I'm sorry."
She was looking at him, a hint of wonder seeping into her expression.
"You really are, aren't you?"
"Of course. I mean, that's awful. How could I be anything else?"
Her mouth worked. For a moment he thought she was going to cry, but she blinked her glistening eyes, swallowed, and seemed to get herself under control again.
She said, "That was a perfect opening for a cheap shot. And you owe me one of those."
Rob understood. One of her reasons for leaving him had been her fear of being a young widow.
"Maybe," he said, "but a dead husband and father should be off limits, don't you think?"
Kara nodded, swallowed again, and looked out the window, saying nothing.
In the silence, Rob's thoughts tripped back to the time they had spent together here in the city a decade ago. Had it been that long since he was a rookie and Kara was a Kelly Girl? After a two-year drift through CCNY, he'd finally settled on a field that really interested him. Despite all his mother's pleas to find something else, he'd decided to go into the family business—police work. And when the Wade twins came to town, he found a woman he could really care for—Kara.
Kara and Kelly, identical in appearance, but so opposite in attitude. Kelly, the free spirit, open to everything, she took to Manhattan like she'd been made for it, as if all her life she'd been waiting to be set free in The City That Never Sleeps. Kara, the thinker, the muller, did fine until her run-in with the necklace snatcher in Central Park. After that she began to see danger lurking in every corner. She started calling Rob's police career a death wish. Their last months became an endless argument, one long tug of war with a fraying rope. She wanted him to quit, go back to school, get a degree of some sort, and move out to the suburbs—Jersey, Connecticut, Upstate, anyplace but here.
He couldn't go. Rob the rookie loved the job, the excitement, the challenge, and loved the city. It was his city. He'd grown up here. He couldn't see what was so frightening about it.
Finally there was nowhere to go but apart. The immovable object stayed in New York. The irresistible force moved back to rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, saying she didn't want to be a widow at twenty-five.
Somewhere a dark god might be laughing at the irony of it all, but Rob found himself unable to squeeze out even a tiny drop of satisfaction.
Even now, after all these years, he found he still cared.
What a jerk he could be where she was concerned.
"I'll drive you to the station," he said.
▼
Rob drove her crosstown at a leisurely pace on Thirty-fourth, staying in lane instead of doing his customary bob and weave through the traffic. All around him on the street the cabs were playing their usual game of chicken with each other, while on the sidewalks the three-card monte players were set up and waiting for their daily quota of lunch-hour suckers. Rob badly wanted a cigarette.
"What are you doing with yourself these days?" he said to break the silence as they crawled past Macy's.
"Writing."
"Really? Novels?"
"Non-fiction. I do reviews, articles, criticism, that sort of thing."
"Would I have seen any of it?"
He couldn't remember seeing the Kara Wade byline anywhere.
"Not unless you're a regular reader of some of the feminist publications."
"Feminist? You write feminist stuff? I thought you said you wrote non-fiction?"
"Ooookaaaay," she said with a small, rueful smile. "I should have seen that one coming."
"So you're still into that stuff, though?"
"It's not something you're 'into' and 'out of,' Rob" she said, and he realized by her tone this was one serious subject for her. "If you really believe in something, you stay with it."
"Like being a cop?" he said.
There was something different in the way she looked at him, something new in her eyes.
"Yes. I guess so. I've never looked at being a cop as something a person could believe in, but I guess you can. But anyway, writing's what I do. I went to Franklin and Marshall when I got back home, went mostly at night, got a degree in Woman's Studies—"
Rob bit back a remark. Woman's Studies! Christ!
"—and began writing."
"You can make a living writing feminist articles?"
"No way. But the articles gave me enough credibility to land a contract for a book. And that's what I've been working on lately. In the meantime, I do clerical work at the local hospital—it's decent pay with an excellent benefits package, and it's mentally unchallenging enough to allow me to compose what I'll write when I get home at night. I still live on the farm. Jill and I get by just fine."
He had a feeling she was holding something back but didn't press. This wasn't the time or the place.
"And your mother…?"
Rob remembered that Kara's father had died a few years before she came to New York; he had met Mrs. Wade once. A big, jovial woman who didn't look at all like her twins.
"Mom got remarried shortly after Jill was born. She and Bert live in Florida now. I'm in the process of buying the farm from her. I'm paying her off a little at a time. Mom and Bert are flying up this afternoon for the…"