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  Mrs. McCrory beams and grabs Paige's hand, which is the nearest one. Paige, startled, gasps and almost overturns a vase of peonies. "Take it easy," Nicholas says dryly. "I don't have room in my agenda for an unscheduled heart attack."

  At this unexpected attention, Paige turns. Mrs. McCrory eyes her critically. "He doesn't bite, dear," she says.

  "I know," Paige murmurs. "He's my husband."

  Mrs. McCrory claps her hands together, thrilled by this news. Nicholas mutters something unintelligible, amazed at how easily Paige can ruin his good mood. "Don't you have somewhere else to be?" he says.

  "No," Paige says. "I'm supposed to go wherever you go. It's my job."

  Nicholas tosses the chart down on Mrs. McCrory's bed. "That is not a volunteer's assignment. I've been here long enough to know the standard rounds, Paige. Ambulatory, patient transport, admitting. Volunteers are never assigned to doctors."

  Paige shrugs, but it looks more like a shiver. "They made an exception."

  For the first time in minutes, Nicholas remembers Mrs. McCrory. "Excuse us," he says, grabbing Paige's upper arm and dragging her out of the room.

  "Oh, stay!" Mrs. McCrory exclaims after them. "You're better than Burns and Allen."

  Reaching the hallway, Nicholas leans against the wall and releases

  Paige. He wanted to yell and to complain, but suddenly he can't remember what he was going to say. He wonders if the whole hospital is laughing at him. "Thank God they don't let you in surgery," he says.

  "They did. I watched you today." Paige touches his sleeve gently. "Dr. Saget arranged it for me, and I was in the observation room. Oh, Nicholas, it's incredible to be able to do that."

  Nicholas does not know what makes him more angry: the fact that Saget let Paige watch him doing surgery without his consent, or the fact that his imagined angel was really just his wife. "It's my job," he snaps. "I do it every day." He looks at Paige, and that expression is back in her eyes--the one that probably made him fall in love with her. Like his patients, Paige is seeing him as someone who is flawless. But he has a sense that unlike them, she would have been just as impressed if she'd watched him mopping the hospital's halls.

  The thought chafes around his neck. Nicholas pulls at his collar and thinks about going right back to his office and calling Oakie Peterborough and getting this over. "Well," Paige says softly, "I wish I were that good at fixing things."

  Nicholas turns and walks down the hall to see another patient, a transplant recipient from last week. When he is half inside the room, he glances around, to find Paige at the door. "I'll change the damn water," he says. "Just get out of here."

  Her hands are braced on either side of the doorway, and her hair is working its way out of her braid. Her volunteer uniform, two sizes too big, billows around her waist, falls to her shins. "I wanted to tell you," she says, "I think Max is getting sick."

  Nicholas laughs, but it comes out as a snort. "Of course," he says, "you're an expert."

  Paige lowers her voice and peeks into the hallway to make sure no one is around. "He's constipated," she says, "and he spit up twice today."

  Nicholas smirks. "Did you give him creamed spinach?" Paige nods. "He's allergic."

  "But there aren't any welts," Paige says, "and anyway it's more than that. He's been crabby, and, well, Nicholas, he just isn't himself."

  Nicholas shakes his head at her and takes a step into the patient's room. As much as he doesn't want to admit it, when he sees Paige standing in the doorway, arms outstretched as if she is being crucified, she looks very much like an angel. "He's not himself," Nicholas repeats. "How the hell would you know?"

  chapter 40

  Paige

  When Astrid hands Max over to Nicholas that night, something still is wrong. He has been crying on and off all day. "I wouldn't worry," Astrid says to me. "He's been a colicky baby." But it is not his crying that bothers me. It's the way the fight has gone out of his eyes.

  I stand on the staircase while Nicholas takes Max. He hoists the diaper bag and some favorite toys over his free arm. He ignores me until he reaches the door, about to leave. "You might want to get a good lawyer," he says. "I'm meeting with mine tomorrow."

  My knees give out under me, and I stumble against the banister. I feel as if I have been swiftly punched. It isn't his words that hurt so much; it is knowing that I have been too late. I can run in circles until I drop, but I cannot change the course of my life.

  Astrid calls out to me as I pull myself up the stairs to my room, but I do not listen. I think about phoning my father, but he'll only

  lecture me on God's will, and that won't give me any comfort. What if I don't happen to like God's will? What if I want to keep the end from

  coming?

  I do what I always do when I am in pain; I draw. I pick up my sketch pad and I draw image after image on the same page until it is nothing more than a dismal black knot. I flip the page and do this all over again, and I keep on doing this until little by little some of the rage leaves my body, seeping through my fingertips onto the page.

  When I no longer feel I am being eaten alive from the inside, I put down my charcoal and I decide to start over.

  This time I draw in pastels. I rarely use them because I'm a lefty and they get all over the side of my hand and make me look strangely bruised. But right now I want color, and that is the only way I can think of getting it. I find that I am drawing Cuchulainn's mother, Dechtire, which seems natural after thinking of my father and the whims of the gods. Her long sapphire robes mist around her sandaled feet, and her hair flies behind her in a sleek arc. I draw her

  suspended in midair, somewhere between heaven and earth. One arm reaches down to a man silhouetted against the ground, one arm reaches up toward Lugh, the powerful god who carries the sun.

  I make her fingers brush those of her husband below, and as I do it I get a physical jolt. Then I lengthen her other arm, seeing her torso twist and stretch on the page as she reaches into the sky. It takes all the effort in my fingers to make Dechtire's hand touch the sun god's, and when it does I begin to draw furiously, obliterating Dechtire's porcelain face and the solid body of her husband and the bronze arm of Lugh. I draw flames that cover all the characters, erupting in fiery sparks and bursting across the sky and the

  earth. I draw a blaze that feeds on itself, that shimmers and flares and sucks away all the air. Even as I cannot breathe anymore, I see that my picture has turned into a holocaust, an inferno. I throw the scorching pastels across the room, red and yellow and orange and sienna. I stare sadly at the ruined image of Dechtire, amazed that I have never before seen the obvious: when you play with fire, you are likely to get burned.

  I fall asleep fitfully that night, and when I wake, sleet is rattling

  against the window. I sit up in bed and try to remember what has awakened me, and I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know what is coming. It is like that feeling I used to have about Jake, when we were so closely connected that I could sense when he stepped into his home at night, when he thought of my name, when he needed to see me.

  I jump out of bed and pull on the pants and shirt I wore yesterday. I don't even think to find socks, tying up my sneakers over bare feet.

  I gather my hair into a tangled ponytail and secure it with the

  rubber band from a bag of gummy fish. Then I pull my jacket off the doorknob and run downstairs.

  When I open the door, Nicholas stands before me, assaulted by the ice and the rain. Just beyond him, in the yellow interior light of his car, I can see Max, oddly silent, his mouth in a raw red circle of pain.

  Nicholas is already closing the door behind me and pulling me into the storm. "He's sick," Nicholas says. "Let's go."

  chapter 4 1

  Nicholas

  He watches the hands of people he does not know poke and prod at his son's body. John Dorset, the resident pediatrician on call last night, stands over Max now. Every time his fingers