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head.”
    Peter sat across from her. He looked at home in the bar, with his navy suit and open-collared pale blue shirt. She was about to tease him for dressing too formally for a simple drink with friends, but she didn’t look any more casual. She had justified the effort of getting her black wool-blend slacks and red silk tank dry-cleaned and pressed this afternoon because she had been so scruffy the day before. Peter was putting the reputation of his business in her hands, and she wanted him to see that she cleaned up just fine. And, she had to admit, she liked the thought of looking her best when Jan saw her. She never put much effort into dressing for other women. She just showed up as herself, and no one had ever seemed disappointed. She wondered, briefly, why meeting Jan seemed different, but she didn’t want to examine the question too deeply.
    “Glad to hear it. You seemed a bit…tense yesterday.”
    “It was a long fucking drive,” Tina said, doing her best to warn him off the topic with her tone.
    Peter just laughed. “Yeah, with Gran at the end of it.” He quickly changed the subject. “I should have known you’d be musical. Our whole family is.”
    “My grandpa on Mom’s side was a fiddle player and music professor. That’s where I get it,” Tina said stiffly.
    “I know. Your dad studied with him at WSU, where he met Aunt Kathleen. I mean, your mom. But we all play something. Piano for Dad and Gran, clarinet for Mom, oboe for my sister.”
    Tina had a flash of recognition while he spoke. Christmas. She must have been four or five. She could picture Uncle Nick at the piano, with everyone gathered around him singing and laughing. She shrugged it off. One happy memory did not a family make.
    “So what about you?” she asked, twirling her drink so the melting ice chinked against the glass. “What’s your musical poison?”
    “Um, I played french horn in high school and college. I haven’t kept up with it, though.”
    Tina leaned her elbows on the table. He was a stranger to her, yet his mannerisms and expressions were too familiar. Too like her own. “You hesitated. Do you play something else, something I’ll think is funny? Panpipes? Bass guitar in a heavy-metal band? Are you a one-man band with a little monkey?”
    “Mandolin,” Peter admitted. “I’m in a period group, and we play all the local Renaissance fairs, Shakespeare in the Park, that sort of thing. And I’m so glad I could amuse you.”
    Tina wiped her eyes and tried to control her laughter. The idea of prim and proper Peter strolling around in leggings and a feathered cap was too funny. “Even better than I imagined,” she said.
    “Mock all you want, we have a great time. You should join us sometime this summer. We can always use another fiddle. And a few of us play at a pub called O’Boyle’s every Tuesday night if you want to come meet the gang.”
    Tina’s laughter faded a bit. O’Boyle’s was the pub she had noticed on her way to the nursery. So much for the hope she had found a private place to enjoy music and maybe some female companionship. Neither would be as much fun with her cousin hovering nearby.
    “Hey, is that your friend?”
    Tina had been distracted by her conversation with Peter, and she had forgotten about Jan. She turned in her chair and saw two women in the doorway. Jan. She hadn’t changed much in two years. Her hair was longer, curling slightly and hanging just past her shoulders, and she was wearing dark jeans and a white shirt, sheer enough to barely show the outline of her bra, instead of the silk outfit she had worn to Brooke’s rehearsal. But, otherwise, she looked the same. The gold tones in her dark blond hair made the gilded fixtures appear even shabbier by comparison, and her intense eyes—the same deep, washed blue as her jeans—seemed to be analyzing and measuring everything they saw.
    “Yep,” Tina said as she waved at Jan. She fought hard to keep from looking anywhere below