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wasn’t, you know, there to begin with.”
    Carver stared hard at the girl, trying with all his might to be sympathetic. But he could no more remember what it was like to be twelve years old than he could imagine a mother who wasn’t around. Ruth Venner had always been there for her kids, no matter what kind of demand they were making. She had been June Cleaver, right down to the pearl necklace. And although, thanks to his job, Carver knew a lot more about the world than most people, he still had trouble dealing with the whole neglected kids thing.
    “She traveled a lot?” he asked. “Who took care of you?”
    Rachel rolled her eyes again, and Carver thought that if she didn’t cut it out, they were going to roll to the back of her head and get stuck for good, and then where would she be?
    “It’s not that Mom wasn’t around,” she said. “It’s that she just wasn’t there. You know?”
    For some reason, Carver understood exactly what she meant, and he nodded.
    “I mean, they told you how she died, right?” Rachel asked.
    He nodded again. “Drunk driver.”
    “Did they tell you she was the drunk driver?”
    Carver looked up into clear, matter-of-fact eyes, eyes that held not a clue as to what their owner might be feeling. “No, they didn’t tell me that.”
    “Yeah, well, so now you know.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, the phrase all that came to mind.
    “Look, don’t get me wrong,” Rachel told him, her gaze dropping to study the toe of her boot. “She wasn’t a bad mom. She just wasn’t like most moms. She loved me and all that, but I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was the one who was supposed to be responsible.” She shrugged philosophically. “I learned to look after myself.”
    Carver hesitated only a moment before asking, “Do you miss her?”
    Rachel shrugged again—a gesture Carver was already beginning to realize meant that she was stalling until she figured out what to say—and stared at her feet some more. “Yeah. I guess so. She was pretty tight. All my friends liked her all right.”
    “How about you?”
    “I liked her, too.”
    Carver sighed and tilted his head back to study the ceiling. “Yeah, so did I. I’m sorry she’s gone.”
    The two of them sat in silence for some moments, until Rachel finally broke it by asking, “So, are you really my dad?”
    Carver turned his head to look at her, to see if there was anything of Abby in her at all. He was shocked to realize he couldn’t even remember what the mother of his daughter looked like. But there was a sprinkling of freckles over Rachel’s nose, and her eyelashes were impossibly long. He supposed she’d gotten those features from her mother. Everything else about her screamed Carver Venner.
    “Looks that way,” he said after a moment.
    “Mom told me you’re a journalist, too.”
    He cocked his head to one side thoughtfully. “What else did your mom tell you about me?”
    “Not much. Just that she met you in Guatemala, that you wrote for some left-wing magazine, that you were a greatkisser, and that she didn’t see any reason why you had to know I was around. She never told me your last name or where you lived.”
    He expelled a single, humorless chuckle, wondering if Rachel might have tried to look for him if she’d known who and where he was. All he said in reply though, was, “I guess she covered all the important stuff then.”
    Rachel dropped her gaze to her feet again, tugging on a loose thread that pulled a small hole in her fatigues. “After she died, I found her stash of some of the articles you wrote. You work for that magazine, Left Bank, right? The one that’s getting sued by the GOP for defamation and slander?”
    Carver’s brows arched in surprise at they casual way she tossed out the question, as if she understood perfectly what the lawsuit involved. “You seem to know a lot about it.”
    “Politics were a pretty big deal to my mom. She thought the Republican party was made up