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arranged in military precision, were some pieces of men’s clothing: heavy canvas trousers, boots without a bit of mud on them.
    “My, my, we are neat, aren’t we?” she murmured, smiling, then frowned at the twin bed so near his. No more than three feet separated the beds. She did hope this old man wasn’t the type to make childish passes at her. She’d had enough of those in school. “Just give me a little kiss, honey,” toothless men had said to her as their aged hands reached for her body.
    Laughing at the silliness of her fantasy, Miranda went to the kitchen and looked inside. Six pots and pans. Perfectly arranged, spotlessly clean. The drawers contained a matched set of stainless steel cooking utensils that looked as though they’d never been used. “Not much of a cook, are you, Mr. Taggert?” she murmured as she kept exploring. Other cabinets and drawers were filled with full jars of spices and herbs, their seals unbroken.
    “What in the world does this man eat?” she wondered aloud. When she came to the last cabinet, she found the answer. Hidden inside was a microwave, and behind the tall door in the corner was a freezer. It had about a dozen TV dinners in it, and after a moment’s consternation, Miranda laughed. It looked as though she’d been hired to cook for the missing Mr. Taggert as much as anything else.
    “Poor man. He must be starving,” she said, and she cheered up at the thought. The beds so close together had worried her, but the empty freezer was reassuring. “So, Miranda, my girl, you weren’t brought here for a sex orgy but to cook for some lonely old man with a broken arm. Poor dear, I wonder where he is now.”
    She didn’t waste time speculating but set to work hauling in supplies. She had no idea what Sandy had brought on those two mules but she soon found out. Packed in dry ice, in insulated containers, was nearly a whole side of prime beef and a couple dozen chickens. There were bags of flour, packets of yeast, some canned goods, and bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. With every item she unpacked, she felt more sure of what her true purpose here was, and thinking of someone who needed her made her begin to forget how easily Eli had said he didn’t need her for the next two weeks. He’d told her in detail how very much he wanted to travel with Chelsea and her parents to the south of France, then on to Greece aboard some Italian prince’s yacht.
    “All in just two weeks?”
    “It’s a really fast boat,” Eli said, then disappeared into his room.
    With a sigh, Miranda put a frozen chicken in the microwave to thaw. She would not let herself think how Eli needed her less every day. “My baby is growing up,” she said to herself as she removed the chicken and began to prepare a stuffing of bread cubes, sage, and onion.
    “Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’re not dead yet. You could meet a man, fall madly in love, and have three more kids.” Even as she said it, she laughed. She wasn’t a heroine in a romance novel. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous with a figure that made men’s hands itch with lust. She was a perfectly ordinary woman. She was pretty in a dimpled sort of way—an old-fashioned prettiness, not the gaunt-cheeked style that was all the rage now. And she was—well, face it, about thirty pounds overweight. Sometimes she consoled herself that if she’d lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, men would have used her as a model for a painting of Venus, the goddess of love. But that didn’t help today when the most popular models weighed little more than ninety pounds.
    As Miranda settled down to prepare a meal for her absent patient, she tried to forget the loneliness of her life, to forget that her precious son would soon be leaving her to go to school and she would be left with no one.
    Two hours later she had a lovely fire going in the big stone fireplace, a stuffed chicken roasting in the never-before-used oven, and