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coat. Like her, he wore well-worn jeans, though his fit the hard muscles of his thighs like a glove. The ancient-looking canvas sneakers on his feet were thoroughly wet, which suggested to Maggy that he had been prowling through the woods for some time.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked.
    Despite an initial impulse to turn and run, Maggy stood her ground as he approached her and stopped just a couple of feet away where the path was dark and cool. A woodpecker suddenly began its distinctive hammering somewhere high above, but beyond casting a cursory glance upward neither of them paid it the least attention.
    “That’s the second time you’ve asked me that. If you’d stuck around last night, I just might have given you an answer. Now I think I’m going to let you figure it out for yourself.” He smiled at her, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile.
    “Nick …” she began desperately, only to be sidetracked when he reached into his pocket, pulled out a rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper and held it out to her.
    “Happy birthday, Magdalena.” His voice was dry.
    “What is it?” Maggy accepted the package gingerly, turning it over in her hands as she stared down at it. It weighed very little, but there was something about the expression on his face that warned her to be wary. Oh, the signs were subtle, the merest crease in his forehead and glint in his eyes, but she had known him too well: whatever was in this package was not something she was going to like.
    “A thirtieth-birthday present from me to you.” He reached into his coat, fished in an inside pocket, and extracted a pack of Winstons and a book of matches. Tappingout a cigarette, he returned the pack to his pocket then lit the one he held with a flick of a match.
    “You never used to smoke.” Maggy was surprised at the disapproval she felt as she watched him. For an instant, just an instant, she was the young Magdalena again, and Nick was her mentor and her world. The girl that she had been then would have snatched the cigarette from his mouth and stomped it underfoot, treating him to an angry tirade as she did so. But then, the boy he had been would never have smoked. He hadn’t been an angel, but he had never done drugs, never gotten drunk, never smoked. In his vicinity, at least, she’d never done those things either. Nick would have tanned her backside if he’d caught her the few times she had experimented with alcohol and pot behind his back—or at least he would have tried. She would have put up a heck of a fight.
    Ah, Nick. Her heart ached suddenly for what might have been. If only—if only—but the die was cast and her path chosen with no possibility of turning back. She’d made her choice twelve years before, and now she had to live with the consequences no matter how painful she might find them.
    Another of Tia Gloria’s sayings was that the wheels of God grind slow, but they grind incredibly small. She felt as if they were grinding her into particles smaller than dust at that very moment.
    “I never used to do a whole hell of a lot of things,” Nick replied, returning the matches to his pocket and nodding at the package in her hand. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
    The glint in his eyes warned her again to be on guard even as her fingers ripped clumsily at the paper. And just as well, too, because what spilled into her hand as the paper tore were a videotape, a folded yellow business-size envelope—and four three-by-five, full-color photos of herself at seventeen, dancing nude.
    She dropped the package as if it were a live snake. Asthe contents scattered around her feet, she stared down at the one picture that landed faceup with as much dreadful fascination as if it were a cobra poised to strike.
    In it she was onstage in a dive that made the Little Brown Cow seem the epitome of class and sophistication. Her arms, raised over her head, sexily lifted away from her body the heavy fall of red-tinted mahogany hair