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before midnight, waking both of them, and Sara had watched him fumble for the phone. When he saw the name in the ID, he sat up straight,instantly wide awake, and said, “What is it?” He had listened in silence for what had to have been five minutes, then he’d said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,” and hung up.
    He flung back the covers, got out of bed, and began to dress.
    “What’s wrong?” Sara asked, blinking sleepily.
    “Nothing. I have to go away for a while, that’s all. Go back to sleep.”
    “A while? How long does that mean? The wedding—”
    “Damn it, Sara, you’re not going to start nagging me again, are you? I know when the wedding is. How could I forget when I was the one who got stuck with all the work for it? Something’s come up and I have to go. I’ll be back for the wedding.” He grabbed his wallet and car keys off the dresser and left. Just like that, with no explanation.
    Sara had sat up in bed feeling like she’d just been through a tornado. She didn’t know what had happened, but Greg was gone, not taking so much as his shaving kit, and she didn’t know when he’d return.
    She couldn’t go back to sleep and as soon as it was daylight she began calling Greg, but he didn’t answer.
    Then, early this afternoon, Luke had run her out of her own apartment with his cans of noxious bug poison, saying he had to spray right then and that she could move into Tess’s apartment while he fumigated. Sara started to put her things into the guest room, but Luke had insisted she take Tess’s bedroom. “But why?” Sara’d asked. “I don’t need—”
    “The bed in the other room is bad. No springs,” Luke said as he went back outside.
    All in all, the whole thing was so odd that for a while Sara had thought a surprise wedding shower was being planned for her. But, hard as she looked, she saw no evidence of it.
    Sara heard the water running and it now occurred to her that she wouldn’t mind if Greg did hear that Tess’s brother had stayed in the apartment with her. “What else could I do?” she’d ask Greg, her lashes fluttering helplessly. She’d say, “It was nighttime and he had nowhere else to go. You can see that I didn’t have a choice.” When she imagined Greg’s anger and jealousy, she smiled on the way to the bedroom. Yes, it might be quite good to be able to tell Greg that another man had been alone with her.
    As she closed the door, she thought about the tussle she’d had with Tess’s brother. He could certainly move quickly! And when she’d been on top of him, she’d felt the man’s muscles. But later, he’d handled a teapot in a way that was worthy of a geisha. She was used to men like her father and Luke, who left their dishes where they lay.
    Sara was drifting into sleep when she heard him leave the bathroom, and she remembered that he hadn’t answered her questions about why he was there and why Tess hadn’t warned her he was coming. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll buy a lock for that trapdoor and one of us will leave.

3
    S ARA SLEPT LATE the next morning, and it was several moments before she remembered all that had happened during the night. Rolling onto her stomach, she looked at the floor. There was a small rug by the bed, but one corner of it was folded back, a testament to last night’s fiasco. She got up, moved the rug aside, and saw that the square cut in the floorboards was clearly visible.
    “I’m going to give Luke Connor a piece of my mind,” she said aloud. It angered her that he’d let her move into the apartment without telling her about the trapdoor that led to … To what? she wondered. That the man had come up through it meant it must lead down to an underground exit. So why didn’t everyone in town know that Edilean Manor had a secret tunnel? She could almost hear her cousin saying, “Then it wouldn’t qualify as a ‘secret,’ would it?” Luke could sometimes be maddening!
    Sara took her time dressing and was quiet