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father left before Brad was born and never came back. In all her twenty-four years, Lauren had only wondered a few times about her father: what he was like, why he left, if he was still alive.
    When she was fifteen she wrote a composition for English about a girl who was abandoned by her father when she was young and grew up to be a nurse. Years later the nurse was treating a terminally ill patient who was homeless and had lost his memory. The doctors wanted to let the welfare patient die, but the nurse took pity on him and did all she could to keep him alive. She cared for him tenderly, as if he were an infant. In the end he died anyway. When the nurse went through his few belongings, she found a picture of herself as a baby and a newspaper clipping of her marriage announcement. The man was her father, and even though he wasn’t capable of being a responsible parent, he must have never stopped loving her.
    Lauren won a city-wide contest with that essay. It was the closest she had ever come to exploring her feelings about her birth father. Brad never knew him. Their mother married Stanford James Phillips, a Canadian with a strong temperament. He brought order to their family when Lauren was just beginning kindergarten, and he was a generous provider for them. Lauren and Bradley never doubted that Stan loved them or that he was crazy, head-over-heels in love with their mother. For all intents and purposes, he was their father.
    Brad considered him to be his only father. Lauren never had a problem calling him “Dad” or taking his name when headopted them. But somehow, through the years, she and Brad had bonded in a way she never had with her mother, nor Brad with Stan. Lauren and Brad were in their own circle. And it was a small circle with only enough room for the two of them.
    The first thing Brad did after stuffing himself with every last pancake and Lauren’s omelet was to set up the computer and printer he had brought her. He told her they were about to enter the Web. They would now be able to e-mail each other daily at a minimal cost. Brad yammered on about how much it bothered him that Lauren hadn’t called to tell him about the broken engagement.
    “What if Mom hadn’t called me?” Brad challenged. “When were you planning to tell me? Christmas?”
    “I wouldn’t have told Mom if she hadn’t called,” Lauren said. Earlier that year their mom and Stan had moved back to Stan’s hometown of Victoria, British Columbia, after giving up on the five or so years of trying to start the walking horse business in Shelbyville. “Are you going to computerize Mom and Dad, too?” Lauren teased, clearing the breakfast dishes.
    “I’ve thought about it,” Brad said. “But I only had one spare computer, and I decided you needed it more than they did. I got it from my roommate. He upgraded and traded me this dinosaur unit for my mountain bike and a bunch of CDs.”
    “I still can’t believe you drove all the way here. In what? How long did it take you?”
    “I drove my truck. Did you know I bought a truck?” Brad said, ducking under Lauren’s narrow desk and plugging in the computer. “It only took a couple of days. Nice drive. Okay,” he said, kicking off his floppy loafers.
    “Your feet smell,” Lauren said.
    Brad ignored her and flipped a switch on the side of the monitor. “We have lift off.” He pulled the chair closer, and his fingers flew over the keyboard.
    “Rad?”
    “Hmmm?” His eyes were glued on the screen.
    “Nothing.”
    “Okay,” he answered.
    Lauren wanted to pour out her heart and ask her brother all the questions that had been chasing around in her brain that morning. Questions such as: What should I do now? Why should I stay in Nashville? Where would I move? Certainly not back to Shelbyville. And she had no desire to move in with her parents in Canada. Brad was wrapped up with his college life and friends in southern California. She couldn’t slip into his life. At least in