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it again in her eyes, a flash of intensity like a stab of sunlight reflecting off water. Despite people starting to look their way, he found himself taking her arm. The memory of her pained expression on the terrace when he had asked “what if”, made him confess, “I talked about our past because when I saw you again I could think of little else.”
    Mariah jerked away. “Save your sweet talk for Sylvia.”
    “It’s not talk. It’s the truth.” Emotion rising, he took a chance that their shared history still had the power to cause her pain. “Tell me you don’t feel the same … without lying through your teeth.”
    Spots of color rose in her cheeks. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. It never has.” She took a half step toward him, and he imagined he could feel the force of her anger. “Tell me you haven’t been dancing to your father’s tune all your life … without lying through your teeth.”
    Walk away, he thought, as they both did eight years ago. The hell of it was he didn’t want to.

     
    Rory moved closer, and Mariah retreated until the window wall was cold against her back. “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “Proving I don’t always do what my father would like.” His voice sounded husky. “You should have figured that out when I invited you to the party.”
    “There are plenty of reasons I could have been invited. Only one is sentimental.”
    “I invited you because I wondered how it would feel to share the same room with you again. Oh, I admit I believed I wouldn’t remember the way the sunset brightened your hair.”
    She cut in. “I remember a lot of things. I remember you married Elizabeth.”
    “Are you accusing me of leaving you?” He sounded incredulous. “Your roommate at UCLA told me a dozen times you wouldn’t talk to me after Father …”
    “Called me a slut and a whore?” Her raised voice was drawing an audience. “How fitting we each have own version of reality. The plain fact is, no matter what we once wanted, our fathers destroyed it before we were born.”
    Rory stepped back as though he’d been slapped.
    Letting the glass support her, she watched his rawboned figure march toward the table where Sylvia Chatsworth waited. How dare he be angry? She was the one who should be upset at him for bringing up the past when he was involved with another woman.
    After months of fall semester at UCLA with an ache in her chest that wouldn’t go away, Mariah had told her roommate she’d take Rory’s next call. A week passed without him trying again. She decided to phone him, but he’d told her he planned to live off campus with fraternity brothers, and his name wasn’t in the listings. A dozen times, she picked up the receiver to dial Davis Campbell’s house. A servant would answer; she’d pretend to be someone else.
    Another week went by. A look at her school calendar said the Thanksgiving holiday was next Thursday. She’d go home, find Rory. Tell him she loved him, that they could make it without their families.
    The Sunday before Thanksgiving, the
San Francisco Chronicle
carried Rory’s wedding announcement. Mariah found it when she got home to Stonestown on Wednesday night, opening the kitchen trash to drop in a soft drink can. Wrapped around some vegetable peelings was a photo of Rory with a woman she recognized as his childhood friend Elizabeth, their pictured faces darkened by tomato juice. While her father watched TV in the living room, she slid down the side of the counter to land in a heap on the kitchen floor. Hugging her knees with her arms, she hoped the sounds of a late night talk show muffled her sobs.
    Rory had never been worthy of her trust.

     
    On the drive to her fashionable North Beach townhouse, Sylvia was quiet. Too quiet, Rory suspected, but he enjoyed the silence. As they approached her building, she pulled a remote from her evening bag and opened the street level garage.
    Inside her place, he watched her go into her kitchen and pour two