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years to get my PhD?”
    At Gabby’s house, the kitchen light flashed on. Distracted, he took a moment to answer.
    “They’d probably be okay with it. You know Mom and Dad.”
    “I know. But lately I get the feeling that they want me to meet someone and settle down.”
    “Join the club. I’ve had that feeling for years.”
    “Yeah, but it’s different for me. I’m a woman. My biological clock is ticking.”
    The kitchen light next door flashed off; a few seconds later, another flashed on in the bedroom. He wondered idly whether Gabby was turning in for the night.
    “You’ve got to remember that Mom was married at twenty-one,” Stephanie went on. “By twenty-three, she already had you.” She waited for a response but got nothing. “But then again, look how well you turned out. Maybe I should use that as my argument.”
    Her words filtered in slowly, and he furrowed his brow when they finally registered.
    “Is that an insult?”
    “I tried,” she said with a smirk. “Just checking to see if you’re paying attention to me or whether you’re thinking about your new friend over there.”
    “She’s not a friend,” he said. He knew he sounded defensive but he couldn’t help it.
    “Not now,” his sister said. “But I get a funny feeling she will be.”

Two
    G abby wasn’t sure how she felt after leaving her neighbor’s, and all she could do after closing her door was to lean against it while she tried to regain her equilibrium.
    Maybe she shouldn’t have gone over there, she thought. It certainly hadn’t done any good. Not only hadn’t he apologized, he’d gone so far as to deny that his dog was responsible. Still, as she finally moved away from the door, she found herself smiling. At least she’d done it. She’d stood up for herself and told him exactly how it was going to be. It had taken courage to do that, she told herself. She normally wasn’t very good at speaking her mind. Not to Kevin about the fact that his plans for their future seemed to go only as far as the next weekend. Or to Dr. Melton about the way she felt when he touched her. Not even to her mom, who always seemed to have opinions on how Gabby could improve herself.
    She stopped smiling when she caught sight of Molly sleeping in the corner. A quick peek was enough to remind her that the end result hadn’t changed and that maybe, just maybe, she could have done a better job of convincing him that it was his duty to help her. As she replayed the evening, she felt a wave of embarrassment. She knew she’d been rambling, but after being knocked down, she had lost her focus, and then her frustration had rendered her completely unable to stop talking. Her mother would have had a field day with that one. She loved her mother, but her mother was one of those ladies who never lost control. It drove Gabby crazy; more than once during her teenage years, she’d wanted to take her mother by the arms and shake her, just to elicit a spontaneous response. Of course, it wouldn’t have worked. Her mother would have simply allowed the shaking to continue until Gabby was finished, then smoothed her hair and made some infuriating comment like “Well, Gabrielle, now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, can we discuss this like ladies?”
    Ladies . Gabby couldn’t stand that word. When her mother said it, she was often plagued by a sweeping sense of failure, one that made her think she had a long way to go and no map to get there.
    Of course, her mother couldn’t help the way she was, any more than Gabby could. Her mother was a walking cliché of southern womanhood, having grown up wearing frilly dresses and being presented to the community’s elite at the Savannah Christmas Cotillion, one of the most exclusive debutante balls in the country. She had also served as treasurer for the Tri Delts at the University of Georgia, another family tradition, and while in college, she had apparently been of the opinion that academics were far less