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worn up and held in place by tortoise-shell combs. Tess had tried the same style herself, but her hair always slipped from whatever moorings she used, and she had gone back to her serviceable, dependable braid.
    “Tess,” the woman said, studying her. “You look just as I imagined you. Well—not imagined, really. Crow had so many pictures of you.”
    He did? That was news to Tess. She had bought her first camera when she started working as a private detective.
    “Mrs.—Ms. Kendall?” She held out her hand.
    The woman ignored her hand and embraced her. “Call me Felicia.”
    “Felicia Kendall? But I’ve heard of you.”
    Felicia Kendall blushed, as if embarrassed by her fame. “I hope Crow wasn’t boasting.”
    “Quite the opposite. He made it sound as if his mother dabbled in ceramics as a hobby. But you’re Felicia Kendall. Your work is famous enough so that even a philistine like myself knows who you are. I remember when you received the commission for the new H. L. Mencken sculpture. Crow never said a word.”
    Felicia smiled warily. “Children see their parents differently than others do. I was always Mommy first. Which is as it should be.”
    “Does that mean that you put Crow’s needs ahead of yours?” That would explain much, Tess thought. His happiness, his trust in the world.
    “No, not at all. In fact, we always believed Crow would be happier if we were happy. We left Boston and came to Charlottesville for that reason, even though Chris’s career probably would have…traveled at a sharper trajectory if he had remained at Harvard.”
    Again, Felicia blushed for no reason Tess could detect. Happy parents make happy children. Tess wondered if her own parents had ever considered anything so radical. Not that her parents had been unhappy, but they had been more focused on their relationship with each other than their relationship with her. She had often felt like an outsider in their house, the sole disruption to what otherwise would have been an uninterrupted idyll of passionate fights and more passionate rapprochements.
    “Are you tired after your drive?” Felicia asked. “I’ve made up Crow’s room for you. Or perhaps you’d like a drink, a cup of tea or coffee? It’s still warm enough to sit out here, at least before the sun goes down.”
    Before Tess could answer, there were footsteps on the path, the scrape of the latch on the garden gate. Tess saw something catch light in Felicia’s face, and she wondered what it would be like to be that happy about another person’s comings and goings, even after twenty-five years.
    Then she saw Chris Ransome, breathing heavily, his face glowing after what must have been a long, glorious run. He was tall, like his son, with short black hair, the same pale, sharp face, and the same long legs.
    And he was at least ten years younger than Felicia Kendall. Possibly fifteen.
    “Tess Monaghan,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s a pleasure.”
    She did not take his hand, but stood looking at the couple standing together—the man so much like his son, the tall, handsome woman with her upswept dark hair and broad shoulders. She had seen this couple before. She had seen them reflected in the glass of her own terrace doors, in the windows of the shops in Fells Point. A younger version of this man, and a younger version of this woman, but still so much the same that she felt a convulsive shiver. Déjà vu was, she knew, simply a matter of the brain getting things in the wrong order. But she really had seen this couple, many, many times. “Imagine us just like this, on our Christmas card,” Crow had said the first time they had slept together, catching her by the hip as she rose naked from the bed, making her face the mirror over her bureau. It had been the most appalling thing anyone had ever said to her after sex. It had also been the most appealing.
    So now she knew: Crow had wanted a girl just like the girl who married dear young dad.

     

    That