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  Cam's face lowered toward hers. "We're going to ruin the waffles," she murmured, and then she buried her fingers in his hair and pulled him close.

  He was amazed anew at the image of her body. Her skin seemed to glow. His hand spanned the distance from her breasts to her hips. He told her he loved her, and it was not a confession, but a prayer.

  Mia was on top of him, her head thrown back and her unruly hair making spiral shadows on his chest, when the back door that led directly into the kitchen opened. She had heard it somewhere in the back of her mind, along with Kafka's paws padding along on the carpet upstairs and the temperature rising a degree outside. But, as with these other things, when Cam was filling the rest of her senses she was not inclined to pay attention.

  Ellen MacDonald stood three feet away, a spare key in one hand and a plate in the other. Her cheeks were as pale as the angel food cake she had brought for Cam. A treat, because Allie was not there.

  "Something's burning," Ellen said, and then she threw the cake down on the counter and left without another word.

  Because he didn't want anyone around who was liable to eaves drop, Graham asked Jamie to meet him at the foot of the pass in the Berkshires that made Wheelock so picture-perfect. There was a path there that eventually fed into the Mohawk Trail, but for a good ten miles before that it was just a dirt road used by ambitious teenagers on neon-painted mountain bikes. With the few inches of snow that had fallen over the past week, Graham knew he'd be assured of privacy, and it was finally time for his client to tell him the truth.

  Jamie knew why he was there; knew he was going to have to talk about it with Graham sooner or later and in much more detail than he'd gone into for his voluntary confession. The two men walked in silence for half a mile, their heads bent against the wind, their hands buried deep in their parkas. "When did she ask you?" Graham said.

  "First? In January. We were in Quebec. It was after the chemotherapy, but before the radiation treatments for the eye. I sort of laughed it off."

  "And then?"

  Jamie bent down to pick a twig out of the snow. He traced the footprint of a rabbit, white on white. "After her doctor's appointment that week in September. She went on a Friday--she always scheduled the last appointment of the day, because she wanted to put in a full day of work before hearing bad news. So she usually got home about six.

  "She didn't get home until after nine o'clock at night." Jamie smiled faintly, caught in a memory. "Of course by then I'd called every local hospital and police station looking for car accidents and hit-and-runs. She was carrying a box--a big one, I think it was a Stolichnaya box she must have gotten from the liquor store. She didn't say anything to me. She walked upstairs and started putting all her clothes inside it."

  What are you doing?" he asked. "What did the doctor say?"

  But Maggie continued to fold her clothes. She put the shorts in

  first, and he thought maybe she was going through her drawers and sorting them for the winter. But when she packed her underwear away, and the nightgown she had worn the evening before, he knelt down beside her and grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look at him.

  "Jamie," she said, "I'm not going to do this anymore."

  Do what? His mind grasped at straws. Fold clothes? Talk to him? He pulled at her hands until she came to sit beside him on the bed. "I don't so much mind the dying," she said. "It's not knowing what's coming next that's killing me."

  She asked him, flat out, to take her life. He told her he absolutely wouldn't do it. She said he was being selfish. He said she was being selfish too. She told him she had every right to be.

  She wanted him to do it then; he wanted to have one more weekend with her. She wanted to get everything in order so that he would not be cleaning up after she was gone; he forced her to put her clothes back in the drawer, saying a shadow and a memory of her were better than nothing at all. He told her he would pick the place, since he could not continue to live in Cummington if he always remembered it as the town where he had suffocated Maggie.

  On Saturday they slept late so that Jamie could wake up with Maggie's hair twined over his hands and his face. They had a picnic on the roof of their house, from which they could see nearly twenty miles. They went to a movie they did not watch and kissed and stroked each other in the silence of the very last row.

  On Saturday night they went to the very expensive restaurant where eleven years before, Jamie had asked her to marry him. They ordered the priciest entrees on the menu and they ate with their hands, holding ripped pieces of tenderloin and lobster to each other's mouths. They crashed a wedding party at the Red Lion Inn in Lenox and danced until the swing band went off to bed.

  On Sunday, they watched the sun creep over the Berkshires like an unfolding fan. They spent the day looking for the richest colors--the blues of a brilliant sky, the yellowest dandelion, the reddest fire engine--so that Maggie would be able to take them with her. They held each other on a black night when the moon was too embarrassed to appear, and gave names to the children they'd never had.

  On Monday morning they drove to Wheelock and checked into the Inn. Jamie bought a bottle of champagne from the bartender downstairs and they drank this and ate pizza and discussed how it would be done.

  They made love Monday night, passed out in exhaustion, and woke up still joined together.

  On Tuesday morning, Maggie kissed him goodbye.

  It took less than five minutes," Jamie said, shuffling his boots in the snow. "I used a pillow. She scratched at me in the middle of it, but this was something we'd talked about, and I wasn't supposed to stop. So I just leaned closer and whispered to her--you know, things I knew she would want to be thinking, and then she stopped moving completely."

  Without a word, Graham started back down the incline to the foot of the hills. He looked behind him when they reached the main roads of Wheelock Center. Jamie's face was red and chapped, his nose was running. Graham imagined he looked the same. It was another reason Graham had chosen this place for their interview. In December, coming back from the pass, you would never be able to tell if a man's face was raw with the cold, or if he had been crying.

  "Jamie," Graham said, turning to face his client. "I know you would do it over again. But would you do anything differently?"

  He watched Jamie's face fold in upon itself as he struggled with control. "I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself, too," Jamie answered quietly, "but I've never had that kind of courage."

  FOURTEEN

  When her son Cameron was sixteen, Ellen MacDonald had walked in on him with a girl. She had knocked on his bedroom door, like she always did, but it was a quick one-two, and then open. And on the bed, kneeling before each other, were Cam and a girl she had never seen.

  Cam's shirt was off, bur then again so was the girl's. His hands were fastened on the girl's breasts, and for a moment, that claimed all of Ellen's attention--with a middle-aged jealousy, she focused on those high, round globes that looked a way hers never would again. She must have made a noise, because the girl looked up and squeaked. Cam whirled to face his mother, his lips soundlessly moving over syllables he couldn't utter.

  For a long time after that, Ellen could not look Cam in the eye. It was not his shame, or her embarrassment, that strained their relationship. It was what she never would have believed secondhand; what, after all these years, still stood out in her mind like a red flag: that in a matter of seconds, she had watched her child turn into a man.

  Ellen had not stayed at Cam's house after finding him with Mia. She didn't trust herself. When this happened before, she had consigned the episode to a teenager's raging glands. This time was entirely different. And where she had once been silent, she now felt as if she was volcanic, ready to explode in her indignation.

  If she had known where Allie was, she would have called her. Instead, Ellen spent two whole hours trying to restore herself to a state of peace. Then, giving in to her anger, she took out her dowsing rods. She held them a