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  “No.” Clea shuddered. “Did you see him today? What a fathead he grew up to be.”

  “We noticed.” Amy sounded a lot more concerned than the occasion warranted. “You still want to do the video, right?”

  Clea nodded. “All I need is film that shows I’m still bankable. When I talked to Leo, he sounded interested because he has this sequel he wants to make, but I don’t want to do that.”

  “He wants to make a sequel to Always Tomorrow?” Amy asked doubtfully.

  “I thought you were dead at the end of Always Tomorrow,” Sophie said.

  “Not Always Tomorrow,” Clea said. “Look, all you guys need to do is make me look good on tape.”

  “That’s not hard,” Amy said. “As long as we get the light right, you still look great.”

  “Thanks,” Clea said, as if she wasn’t sure that was a compliment.

  “And I’m still up for murder,” Amy said. “Although I think Chet in Iowa deserves it more. Maybe we could go on a spree. We knock off Frank, and then on the way to Iowa to kill Chet, we find Darrin and break his kneecaps.” She stopped, caught by a thought. “You know, that would make a great movie.”

  “Chad, not Chet,” Sophie said. “And that was fifteen years ago. I’m over it.”

  “You’re never really over it.” Clea looked out into the night. “You just learn to live with it.” She sighed. “Don’t you wish you knew then what you know now? Don’t you wish you could go back and fix it?”

  “I’m not sure I’d know what to say even now,” Sophie said. “ ‘Get your finger out of my pie’ doesn’t seem enough.”

  “How about ‘Yes, and he was lousy’?” Amy said. “You could at least make sure Chet didn’t get any more.”

  “Chad,” Sophie said. “It’s all right. Really. I’m over it.”

  “And what would you do if Chad showed up in the path of your speeding car?” Clea asked.

  “I’d run him down like the dog he was,” Sophie said. “And his little best friend, too.”

  “Well, don’t get confused and go after the mayor instead,” Amy said. “At least not until the video is done.”

  “I won’t do anything to the mayor.” Sophie thought of him as she said it, so carelessly confident that he was barely conscious. She found herself gritting her teeth, so she relaxed her jaw, took a deep breath and added, “No matter how appealing that might be.”

  While Sophie was drinking cider punch, Phin had gone home to his mother’s brick house on the Hill and found his little blonde daughter waiting for him on the spacious, empty porch, her hands on her nonexistent hips.

  “You’re very late,” Dillie told him in her precise, Tucker voice as he climbed the white stone steps. “Dinner is waiting.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “Did you take your vitamin today?”

  Dillie sighed with the exaggerated patience of a nine-year-old. “Yes. A Wilma. Jamie Barclay doesn’t have to take vitamins.”

  “Jamie Barclay is going to be sorry about that someday.” He kissed her on the top of her head and let his cheek stay there for a minute before he said, “Who is Jamie Barclay?”

  “Jamie Barclay moved in two houses down across the street on Monday. Jamie Barclay gets to walk lots of places alone. I’m old enough to do that. I could walk from here to the bookstore by myself.” Dill stuck her chin out, and her long pale hair fell away from her odd little pointed face.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Well, when can I walk by myself?”

  “When you get your driver’s license.”

  “You always, always say that.” Dillie scowled at him. “That’s when everything happens.”

  “It’s going to be a busy day,” Phin agreed. Since he wasn’t planning on letting her get her license until she was twenty-one, he wasn’t worried.

  “Well, I already know about babies so we won’t have to do that,” Dillie said. “Grandma told me some stuff a long time ago, but then Jamie Barclay told me a lot more today.”

  Phin bent down to look at her. “Is Jamie Barclay a boy or a girl?”

  “A girl.” Her voice was full of admiration. “She knows a lot.”

  “Wonderful.” Phin straightened again. “I thought I told you not to talk to strangers. And she’s probably wrong, so don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay. I have an idea,” Dillie said, switching gears on him. “A good idea.”

  “Okay,” Phin said cautiously. The Tucker porch didn’t have any chairs because the Hill was not the kind of place where people sat on their front porches and chatted, so he sat down on the top step, and Dillie sat down beside him, a featherweight in a white T-shirt and tan shorts.

  “I was thinking,” Dillie said, “that you and I could go live over the bookstore. Where you used to live.”

  “Dill, there’s only one room that’s livable up there. The rest is storage. We couldn’t get all your stuff in there, let alone mine.”

  “I could get rid of some of my stuff.” Dillie stuck her chin out nobly.

  “That would be tragic.”

  Dillie shifted in her chair. “It could be just us. We could be . . .” She stared into space, searching for the right word, narrowing her gray eyes and pursing the cupid’s-bow mouth she’d inherited from her mother, and Phin felt the instinctive parental ache that still took him by surprise after nine years: How was I lucky enough to get this child, and how can I ever keep her safe enough? He hadn’t wanted to get married, he hadn’t wanted a baby, and he sure as hell hadn’t wanted to be a single father. And now he couldn’t imagine life without her.

  “We could be private,” Dillie said finally.

  “We’re not cramped here,” Phin pointed out. “There are fourteen rooms. It’s a wonder we don’t lose each other.”

  “We have to be with Grandma Liz all the time,” Dillie said. “I really love Grandma Liz but I would like it to be just us family. If it was just us, we could have hot dogs. And paper napkins. And dessert when it’s not the weekend.” She put her hand on his arm, and said, “Please?” looking up at him with intense gray eyes, and he looked down to see a smear of purple on his shirt sleeve.

  “Blackberry?” he said.

  Dillie pulled her hand back. “Grape. I had toast ’cause you were late.” She turned her hand to look at the jam-smeared edge of it. “It was goopy.”

  “So it was.” Phin handed her his handkerchief. “Paper napkins, huh?” This wasn’t one of Phin’s priorities, but if it had come to loom large in his daughter’s life, it had to be dealt with.

  “That’s just an example.” Dillie licked her hand to dissolve some of the jam and then scrubbed at it with Phin’s handkerchief.

  Phin sat back and considered the situation. It had made sense to move in with his mother when Dillie was born because somebody had to take care of the baby. But Dillie wasn’t a baby anymore. And it must have taken a lot for his preternaturally polite daughter to say, “I want out.”

  They could rent a house, he supposed, but since he owned the house by the river his mother-in-law lived in, and the bookstore house, and Liz had this semimansion on the Hill, it seemed like a waste of money. And if he and Dillie moved, who’d take care of her during the day while he ran the bookstore? She’d end up back here on the Hill with Liz anyway, which was the way his mother wanted it. “She’ll be a Tucker,” she’d told Phin when he’d brought the baby home from the hospital. “Leave everything to me.”

  Thinking about it now, he could see Dillie’s point. Being a Tucker was often a pain in the ass.

  “Compromise,” he said, and Dillie sighed. “How about if we stay at the bookstore one night a week? Like a sleepover. We’ll have hot dogs and dessert and no napkins. And we can try to put the overstock into two rooms instead of three so you can have your own room.”

  Dillie tilted her head, considering it, looking pensive and delicate in the evening light. Phin knew she was a tough little kid, he’d seen her on the softball field, but still her thinness shook him