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his secretary looked up at them in surprise. “Where are you going?” she said.
    “Out. There’s something I need to do.”
    She glanced quizzically at Sarah, then at the clock, and raised her eyebrows. He dropped Kit’s photo and his handwritten note on her desk. Looping his scarf around his neck, he said, “I’d like you to make up some flyers for me. Nice big print. Three hundred copies. When you’re done with that, give Kate Miller’s office a call. Tell them I picked up a new girl last night. See if you can get her an appointment for sometime this coming week. Then I’d appreciate it if you’d call the O’Malleys and tell them something’s come up, but I’ll stop by later today, after confession, to see the baby.”
    “What about the altar guild?”
    He knotted the scarf, patted his pockets, pulled out gloves, car keys. “Tell them I have absolute conviction that they can make it through their meeting this morning without my input. If they need to discuss any burning issues, I’m free for a couple of hours tomorrow after ten o’clock Mass.”
    The secretary’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to mail the letter you wrote to the bishop, are you?”
    “No,” he said, pulling on his gloves. “The letter’s in the drawer, with all the others I’ve written to the bishop. We’re going out in search of spring.”
    “Spring?” she said, as though she’d never heard the word before.
    “You remember spring. The season that falls between those six months of winter and those six weeks of summer?”
    The girl looked at him, then at Sarah. Sarah shrugged apologetically.
You know him better than I do. You figure him out
.
    “Oh,” his secretary said, and smiled. “Spring.”
----
Chapter 3

     
    “Phaleanopsis.”
    Over the din that shook the Bayside Expo to the rafters, Sarah heard the priest speak, but his words were indecipherable. She stopped, turned, and found him absorbed in one of the exhibits. “Excuse me?” she shouted.
    “
Phaleanopsis
. It’s a rare orchid from ” The rest of his words were drowned out by the overhead loudspeaker announcing the winner in a raffle for a dozen bags of topsoil.
    “I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.”
    He shifted his coat from his left arm to his right, clearing a few inches of space beside him. Beckoning, he said something unintelligible that she loosely interpreted as, “Come and see.”
    She squeezed between an elderly woman with blue hair and a young couple pushing a squalling baby in a stroller. “This is like Mardi Gras—” she shouted “—only without the booze.”
    “What?”
    “I said—oh, never mind.”
    The flower arrangement was breathtaking.
Phaleanopsis
was exquisite, with petals of snowy white, daubed here and there with red. It looked like some fancy dessert, a frothy white confection dripping with raspberry sauce.
    “They grow these on Maui,” he said near her ear.
    “They’ re lovely.”
    “I’ve seen them in the wild. Simply breathtaking. Do you want to—”
    Once again, the hubbub swallowed his words. She shrugged apologetically, and he inclined his head in the direction of the lobby. She nodded, and they began working their way through the crowd toward the exit.
    After the saunalike conditions inside the Expo, the frigid March wind struck her damp skin with such stunning force that she gasped. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling on his gloves. “I should have realized opening day would be a zoo.”
    “I think it was the thirteen busloads of senior citizens from upstate New York that tipped the scales,” she said as they strode briskly across acres of parking lot. “But the exhibits were lovely. What I could see of them.”
    Eventually, they reached his little blue Saturn sedan. He unlocked the door and she climbed into the passenger seat, grateful for the reprieve from the biting wind. She sat shivering while the engine warmed. Fiddling with the heater, he said, “How long have you been in Boston?”
    “Since