She frowned, and didn’t notice the narrowed look from Brad. “I don’t know where I was. I don’t think it mattered, that’s what I’ve figured out thinking it over. It didn’t matter where the stupid hammock was, it was just symbolic of having nothing to do for an afternoon. Or, I guess, as long as I wanted to have nothing to do.”

“I think you’re right,” Malory agreed. “He clicks into fantasies, lets us get a look at them, experience them. Mine, being an artist and married to Flynn. The perfect house, the perfect life.” She gestured across the table. “Dana’s, being alone on a tropical island without a care in the world. And for you, a lazy afternoon.”

“Pretty pitiful fantasy, compared to yours.” But Zoe smiled, relieved that her conclusion seemed valid.

“But he yanked you out of it, instead of giving you time to wallow,” Jordan pointed out. “Maybe he didn’t want to give you the chance to see it as false. Just give you a quick taste, then move on. A new strategy.”

“I think that’s part of it. But, well, take the second part. That was my mother’s trailer, and God knows I swept up plenty in there. I recognized the way it looked, smelled, the way my brother and sister were arguing outside. But I don’t know how old I was. Was I the way I am now? Was I a kid? Somewhere between?”

Thoughtfully, she shook her head. “What I mean is, I didn’t get a sense of myself, just the heat and the fatigue and the annoyance of it all. I just felt like this is all I ever do, clean up around this place, mind the children, and I’m so tired of it. I felt, you could say, particularly put upon and bitchy. I think it’s sort of symbolic, too.”

“Being trapped in a loop,” Brad supplied. “Always doing what needs to be done, and for somebody else, and never seeing an end to it.”

“Yes. Mama did her best, and she needed me to help out. But you get to feeling trapped. You get so you feel it’s not going to get any better, no matter what you do.”

“So you can lie around in a hammock and enjoy life, or you can sweat and run the same loop over and over.” Dana pursed her lips as she considered. “But those aren’t the only choices. It’s not that cut and dried. You’ve proven that yourself.”

“Some people might look at my life and think I’m just running a different loop now. I don’t feel like that, but it could seem that way. Then there’s the third part.”

“He wanted to scare you,” Malory said.

“Oh, yeah, and boy, mission accomplished. It was cold, and I was alone. It wasn’t one of those pretty wonderland snows. It was vicious and mean, the kind that kills you. And I was so tired, the baby so heavy inside me. I just wanted to lie down somewhere and rest, but I knew I couldn’t. I’d die if I did, and if I died, the baby died.”

Unconsciously, she pressed a hand to her belly, as if to protect what had lived there.

“Then the contractions. I knew what they were, you remember that pretty quick. But this was meaner, it wasn’t progress. The way labor pains are. It was an ending, an ending with all that blood on the snow.”

“He wanted to threaten you, through Simon.” Flynn’s face hardened. “It’s not going to happen. We’re not going to let him.”

“I think that’s part of it. Trying to scare me, using Simon to do it. And I think that’s one of the reasons he yanked me out of the last one, too, and told me to choose. I can tell you, as soon as I came back, saw Moe standing there growling, I was up and in Simon’s room like a shot.”

And shaking like a leaf, she remembered now. “But he was just all sprawled out the way he gets, one leg hanging off the bed and the blankets all wrapped around the other. I swear, that boy can’t be still even when he’s sleeping.”

“He was using Simon as another symbol.” Brad poured coffee, and since she hadn’t taken any for herself as yet, handed a mug to her.

Her gaze met his as she nodded, as the fear fluttered at the base of her throat. “That’s what I worked out of it, too.”

“A symbol for what?” Dana demanded. “Her life?”

“Her life, yeah,” Brad replied. “And her soul. Choose. Comfort, tedium, or the loss of everything she is. He threw down the gauntlet.”

“He did. But I think—I wonder if he doesn’t know Simon’s safe. Maybe he can’t see that he’s protected and that it won’t do him any good to try to threaten me that way.”

“You could be right. But,” Brad continued, “I’d say he’ll find out soon enough, then look for something else to use on you.”

“As long as it’s not my baby. Anyway, what happened made me think harder about the clue. It pissed me off,” she said with a quick laugh. “So I spent more time trying to work it out. I had this idea that maybe the Valley’s like my forest. The different things I’ve done or selected are like the paths.”

“Not bad,” Dana told her.

“It was something to work on. I took an hour early this morning and drove around, sort of tripping down memory lane. Trying to see it the way I did when I first came, and track how things changed for me.”

“Or how you changed them,” Brad put in.

“Yes.” Pleased, she gave him one of her rare smiles. “I don’t know if it’s the right direction, but I’m putting together places and, well, events, I guess, that seem important to me personally. If I gather them up in my head maybe one will stand out. If I start heading the right way, it seems to me Kane won’t like it. Then I’ll know.”

IT was hard to imagine herself in a pitched battle with anyone, much less a sorcerer. But she wasn’t going to back down at the first punch. If there was one thing she knew how to do, Zoe determined, it was how to stick it out.

Maybe she wouldn’t find the key, but it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t looked.

She spent Sunday evening plowing through notes, scanning the books they’d collected on Celtic myths, and tiptoeing her way around the Internet on the laptop Flynn lent her.

She didn’t know if she learned anything new, but the exercise helped line up what she did know.

The key, wherever it was, would be personal to her. It would relate to her life, or to what she wanted out of life. And in the end, it would come down to a choice. Though her friends, one or all of them, might be connected to it, she would be the only one able to make the choice.