Jeff's lips compressed. "I probably know what it means better than you do, Dad," he said. He unconsciously placed his hand over Heather's, his fingers tightening as his emotions threatened to erupt. "It's over, Dad-they found me guilty, and there's nothing that can be done about it. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All I want to do now is get through the next seven months, and then get on with my life."
"What life?" Keith asked, his shoulders slumping tiredly. "You really think they're going to take you back at Columbia after this?"
"Keith, don't," Mary pleaded. "We should be giving Jeff our support, not-" Her voice broke in the sob she'd managed to hold in check until then. "Oh, God," she whispered, turning from her husband to her son. "I'm sorry, Jeff. I promised myself that no matter what happened, I wasn't going to fall apart."
"It's okay, Mom," Jeff told her. "If I'm lucky, I might be out in five months." He forced a wry smile. "Hey, think of it as if I'm just taking a semester in Europe or something."
Heather snatched her hand away. "How can you joke about it? Do you have any idea what it's like out there? Daddy says-"
The mention of Perry Randall made Keith turn on her, his eyes smoldering. "Your ‘daddy'? You really think any of us care what your ‘daddy' has to say?" Heather recoiled from the angry words, but Keith plunged on, finally finding a target upon which he could vent the frustration and anger that had been building in him over the months since Jeff's arrest. "Did it ever occur to you that one word from your father would have ended all this months ago?"
"He couldn't-" Heather began, but Keith silenced her.
"They don't have to prosecute anything they don't want to! The worst crooks in this city are walking the streets because they're good buddies with guys like your father! You think I don't know why he didn't do something about this mess? It's because people like him don't think that what happens to people like us matters. So what if Jeff's life is ruined? He doesn't care!"
Heather's eyes blazed and she stood up. "If that's what you think-" she began, but cut her own words short. There'd been tension between her father and Jeff's for a long time-a tension that had only increased as she and Jeff had begun to fall in love. "He's not our kind of people," her father told her over and over again. "People like us marry other people like us-not the son of the handyman." And she knew Keith's attitude was exactly the reverse-that he thought of her as nothing more than a society girl who would demand a standard of luxury Jeff would never be able to provide. She and Jeff had long since stopped trying to deal with either of their fathers on the subject, and now was certainly not the time to resurrect it.
She bent down and kissed Jeff. "I'd better go," she said, her voice dropping. "Maybe they'll let me come back later-"
Jeff reached toward her arm, but didn't quite touch it. "This isn't a hospital."
Their eyes met, then Heather's flicked toward Keith Converse for a moment. When he made no objection, she slowly sat back down. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I just thought my fath-"
"It's okay," Jeff cut in. His gaze shifted to his father. "Look, Dad, none of this is anybody's fault. It's not Heather's, it's not her father's, it's not mine. It's just something that happened. So let's just try to get through it, okay?" Keith Converse's jaw tightened, but he said nothing. "It could have been a lot worse-I could have gotten twenty years."
"And he can be out in five months with good behavior," Sam Weisman added.
"He shouldn't be in there at all," Keith insisted.
Jeff stood up and went to his father, felt the older man stiffen as he put his arms around him. "I'll be okay, Dad. I'll get through it, and so will you. But right now, there isn't anything you can do about it. You're just going to have to deal with the way things are."
Keith's arms came up and he embraced his son. "You be okay," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "Don't let ‘em get to you, all right?"
"You bet, Dad."
Jeff held on to his father for another second or two, and then the correction officer led him away.
CHAPTER 3
Eve Harris was sorely tempted to ignore the buzzing of her intercom. The day, as always, had proved to be a couple of hours too short, and even though she tried her best to keep to her schedule, she had, as always, failed. First, the City Council meeting had gone on an hour longer than it should have, which wouldn't have been fatal, since she'd learned on the first day of her first term on the council that no meeting of that body would ever end on time. Too many egos wanted the last word.
It was the meetings with constituents that always wound up completely destroying the schedule, because while Eve had a natural ability to screen out the more pompous of her fellow councilmen's pontifications, she had no ability whatsoever either to end a meeting with one of New York City's masses of the disenfranchised or to deafen herself to their complaints. In her first two terms, she'd earned a reputation for having not only the most accessible office on the council, but the best ears as well.
When her constituents talked-no matter how inarticulately- Eve Harris listened. It had always been so, from her first days at P.S. 154 up on 126th Street in Harlem, where all the other kids seemed to bring their problems to her, right through graduation from Columbia University, where she'd finished magna cum laude with a double major in sociology and urban planning. Nothing had changed, even after she'd married Lincoln Cosgrove and moved into Linc's huge duplex on Riverside Drive. She'd kept her job with the city, doing what she could to make life better for the poorest of its citizens, spending endless hours solving what problems she could, and just as many hours listening to problems for which there seemed to be no solutions.
But Eve Harris-who had refused even to consider hyphenating her name to include Linc's, let alone giving up her own-had always insisted there could be no insoluble problems in a city as complex as New York, no matter how unmanageable it might seem. It was simply a matter of finding the right minds, applying the minds to the problem, and implementing the solutions the minds came up with. Which was why, a year after Line's heart simply stopped beating on a beach in Jamaica on the first day of the only vacation they'd ever taken, Eve had agreed to run for City Council. Using only her own money and refusing any donation of more than ten dollars, she had easily gotten more votes than all the rest of the candidates combined.
Ever since, the doors to her office had been open to all the people who had no other access to the power structure of their city. She rarely worked less than sixteen hours a day, and never took a day off. And every day, it seemed as though there were more problems to be addressed, and less time in which to address them.
The intercom buzzed a second time, and Eve punched the button that would allow her assistant to speak directly to her. "What is it, Tommy?"
"Channel 4," Tommy replied. "You'll want to see it."
Barely taking her eyes from the final revision of the speech she was due to give that evening, Eve switched on the television and flipped it to Channel 4. She recognized the face on the television screen-Cindy Allen, who had nearly been murdered in the 110th Street subway station last fall. But it wasn't Cindy who was speaking-it was her husband. "-might as well have just let him go! How is anyone supposed to feel safe on the streets when-"
Her eyes still on her speech, Eve Harris switched the TV off and punched the intercom button. "How much time did he get?" she asked with no preamble. After five years as her assistant, Tommy would know exactly what she meant.