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spent the night a few times before Tony came home, babysitting (though that word was never used in Joe’s hearing) so Cheryl could stay late at the hospital. She hadn’t done it since, despite Cheryl’s frequent offers. Imagining them together was bad enough without actually seeing it.
    When had it happened? The time she had tripped over a teddy bear callously abandoned on the steps, and toppled into his arms? He had only held her for a moment before setting her on her feet and remarking, with a rueful grin, “If I’ve told Jerry once I’ve told him a hundred times not to leave his toys lying around. Lucky for Cheryl I arrived at the stragetic moment; you could have sued her for a hefty sum.”
    Or the time her car wouldn’t start and he had insisted on driving her to the mall to buy a new battery after he had diagnosed the old one as beyond repair. He had helped her install it too. Cheryl must have told him she didn’t have much money.
    Or just the first time she had set eyes on him, arriving home in mid-morning after a long and obviously unpleasant night on the job. Despite the fatigue that lined his face, he was certainly the handsomest man she had ever seen—fifties’ film-star handsome, the classic stereotype of the Latin lover of the old movies. But it hadn’t been his looks, it had been his manner, the way he smiled at Cheryl, the tenderness with which he held his little boy…
    And then there was Phil. Their relationship had gone sour so fast that its abrupt, ugly ending had left her groping for someone, something, to take…not Phil’s placebut the place she had hoped he would occupy. She had been trying to fill that place for several years, but in the other cases she had had sense enough to realize it wasn’t going to work before she became intimately involved.
    She had thought Phil would be different, but in the end it had been she who told him it was over. That was when things got ugly. His reaction had dealt the final blow to her infatuation. He wasn’t hurt, he was furious—that she had dismissed him before he could walk out on her.
    Tony was all the things she had wanted Phil to be, all the things she had deluded herself into believing that he was. Only one little problem there. Tony wasn’t available.
    When she got home the house was dark, not a light showing. She had shared the house with three other graduate students. Now that Phil had moved out there were only two, and both of them had gone home for the holidays. Rachel wasn’t worried about being alone, but she could have kicked herself for failing to leave a few lights burning. It got dark so early these winter days and the house was on a side street, several blocks from the commercial strip of Route 1.
    She opened the door and turned on the lights, including the one on the porch, and trudged wearily back to the car to get the bag of linens. This wasn’t a particularly bad neighborhood, but no neighborhoods in and around big cities were free of crime and she didn’t want to risk losing something that wasn’t hers. The bag weighed a ton. Or maybe she was just tired.
    Too tired, at any rate, to tackle the pile of reference books and notes on her desk. She hadn’t made much progress on the dissertation these past weeks; she’d been too busy and too preoccupied to concentrate. Too tired to cook, too. Not that she needed to; Cheryl forced enough food on her during working hours to make a healthy dinner unnecessary. Nibbling on crackers and cheese, shedecided to have a look at the discarded linens. That was research, of a sort.
    There wasn’t much of interest in the bag, though. The quilts were late in date, probably from the 1920s; Rachel had learned to recognize the cheap but cheerful cotton prints of that era. They would not rate as vintage classics even if they hadn’t been torn and stained. She scraped at one spot with her fingernail. This time the only