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which case, her sister was right.
    She’d rather be dead.
    “Do the police have any new leads?” she heard Gail ask.
    “Not that I know of,” Warren said. “None of the auto-body shops in the Philadelphia area have reported any vehicles being brought in with the kind of extensive damage you’d expect in an accident of this nature. No witnesses have come forward, despite all the publicity. It seems the car that hit her has vanished into thin air.”
    “How could somebody do something so awful?” Gail asked. “I mean, it was bad enough he hit her, but then to just leave her there like that …”
    Casey imagined Warren shaking his head. She saw his soft brown hair fall across his forehead and into his darker brown eyes. “Maybe the driver had been drinking. Probably he panicked,” Warren theorized. “Who knows what goes on in people’s minds?”
    “You’d think his guilty conscience would have gotten the better of him by now,” Gail said.
    “You’d think,” Warren agreed.
    Another silence.
    “Oh,” Gail exclaimed suddenly.
    “What?”
    “I just remembered something we talked about at lunch,” she elaborated, her voice tinged with sadness.
    “What was that?”
    “Casey said the two of you had been talking about having a baby, that she was going to stop taking the pill at the end of the month.”
    Casey felt a twinge of guilt. That was supposed to have been a secret, she remembered. She’d promised Warren she wouldn’t say anything to anyone until it was a fait accompli. “Do you want everyone to keep asking how it’s going every month?” he’d argued gently, and she’d agreed. Would he be disappointed, maybe even angry, she hadn’t kept her word?
    “Yeah,” she heard him say now. “She was all excited. A little nervous, too, of course. I guess because of her mother.”
    “Yes, her mother was quite something.”
    “That’s right. I forgot. You knew her, didn’t you?”
    “I don’t think anybody really knew Alana Lerner,” Gail said.
    “Casey almost never talks about her.”
    “There wasn’t much to say. She was the kind of woman who never should have had children.”
    “And yet she had two,” Warren observed.
    “Only because Mr. Lerner wanted a boy. She didn’t have much to do with them once she popped them out. They were pretty much raised by nannies.”
    “Nannies who were constantly being fired, from what I understand.”
    “Because Mrs. Lerner was convinced her husband was sleeping with them. Which he probably was. He certainly made no secret of his affairs.”
    “Some family.”
    “It’s a wonder Casey turned out so well,” Gail said, and then started to cry. “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t be. I know how much you love her.”
    “Did you know she was my maid of honor?” Gail asked, continuing before Warren could respond. “I married Mike right out of high school, if you can believe it. I was eighteen. Eighteen, for God’s sake. A baby. Mike was ten years older, and he’d just been diagnosed with leukemia. Everybody told me I was gonna ruin my life, that I was crazy to marry him. Everybody except Casey. She said, ‘Go for it.’ “Again, Gail’s voice was lost in a series of soft sobs.
    “She’s going to get better, Gail.”
    “You promise?” Gail asked, echoing Casey’s silent question.
    But before Warren could answer, there was a sudden flurry of activity. Casey heard the pushing open of a door, the approach of several pairs of sturdy shoes, multiple voices. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave for a few minutes,” a female voice announced. “We have to give the patient a sponge bath, adjust her position so she doesn’t get bedsores.”
    “We shouldn’t be more than ten, fifteen minutes,” a second, higher-pitched voice added.
    “Why don’t we go get something to eat in the cafeteria,” Gail suggested.
    “All right,” Warren agreed.
    Casey heard the reluctance in his voice even as she felt him being drawn from the