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Evie, but she's like, what, eighty now?"
    Susan put her chin on her knees. "Sixty, and you're not calling Aunt Evie."
    "Well, if I had to, I would--or I'd call Dad's sister. She likes me. I mean, it'd only be for a little while."
    "You're not going anywhere."
    "I'm sorry if I've messed things up."
    Susan wanted to say that she hadn't. Only she had. The fact of Susan sitting in bed, missing Lily's warm body but unable to open the covers for her to snuggle, spoke of a huge mess.
    "Don't be angry," the girl whispered.
    "Why not, Lily?" Susan shot back. "My signature accomplishment last year was the establishment of a school clinic where students can be treated for things they don't want to discuss with their parents. That clinic is staffed by a real nurse, with a real doctor on call, either of whom could have given you birth control if you'd wanted to have sex. Do you realize that I pushed for this specifically to minimize student pregnancies?"
    Lily remained silent.
    "Mm," Susan concluded softly. "I'm speechless, too."
    "You're missing the point. This is not an unplanned pregnancy."
    "No, you're missing the point," Susan parried with a spike of outrage. "This town lives and breathes responsibility. This family lives and breathes responsibility. What you've done is not responsible. You can talk all you want about knowing what you're doing and being a good mother, but you're seventeen, Lily. Seventeen."
    "You did it," Lily said meekly.
    And that, Susan realized, would haunt her forever. She had worked so hard to get past it, but here it was again. And now she had no idea what to do. She certainly couldn't call Rick. He had trusted her to raise Lily well, and she had failed.
    Heartsick, she turned away from the door and curled into a ball. She didn't know how long Lily stood there, only knew that she couldn't reach out to her, and by the time she rolled back to look at the clock, the doorway was empty.
    Susan rarely called in sick, but she would have done it the next day if she hadn't planned to meet Kate at the barn. Inevitably someone would see her going there. But Zaganack looked out for its own. If you were sick, people knew. Likewise if you were supposed to be sick and showed up elsewhere.
    The prospect of leaving school at ten kept her going, and when she finally ran down the stone steps and climbed into her car, she felt better for the first time that day. She would have walked if she'd had time; the barn wasn't far, and the November air was crisp, still fragrant with the crush of dried leaves. But she didn't want to lose a minute.
    No ordinary barn, this one had a past. Originally built on the outskirts of town to house horses, it had also hidden its share of escaped slaves heading to freedom north of the border. For years it had housed nothing but cobwebs and mice, but for Susan, Kate, Sunny, and Pam, who saw PC Wool as their own personal ticket to freedom, it held an appeal. When the last of the Gunn family died and the property went up for sale, the women lobbied for the barn. Envisioning it as a tourist attraction, Tanner Perry, grandson of Herman Perry and husband of Pam, had bought it and moved it closer to the rest of Perry & Cass. The tourist part had never quiet materialized, but the success of PC Wool more than compensated.
    Parking beside Kate's van, Susan ran inside, past stalls of raw fiber, shipping cartons, and computers, all the way to the back. There, tubs for soaking fiber and shelves of dye lined the walls. A separate section held newly painted wool, now hung to dry, while ceiling fans whirred softly above. A skeining machine stood nearby.
    Had she not been preoccupied, Susan might have admired a mound of finished skeins. A blend of alpaca and mohair, these were the last of the holiday colors she had conceived the summer before. Rich with dozens of shades of cranberry, balsam, and snow, they were the culmination of a year in which sales had doubled. Not only had PC Wool earned its very own section in the