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Blair into the hallway. “Where do you want to go?”
    â€œHow about the usual?”
    â€œSounds good. I’ll drive.”
    Dr. Cofield’s new secretary was the talk of the entire laboratory section, especially among the males. Initially Deborah had assumed with the others that Harvey Cofield had offered the position to Blair precisely two and one-half seconds after she had opened his outer office door.
    Women who had the ability to reduce men to drooling idiots had long aroused Deborah’s deepest suspicions. But the week before, after Blair had been on the job for ten days, Deborah had found herself facing an impossible deadline. Cofield had been off at some conference, Deborah’s own secretary had been sick, the files had been lost, and things had been generally coming apart at the seams. In panic she had asked Blair for help, and Blair had proved to be as efficient as she was beautiful. She typed well over a hundred words a minute, had a memory like a mainframe, and relished challenges. She also brooked no nonsense whatsoever from any of the men who ventured near her office. Beneath that honey-coated Tidewater accent rested a perception as keen as a surgeon’s scalpel and a patience as thin as piano wire.
    Since the deadline scramble, Deborah and Blair had made it out for a lunch and a dinner together. To their mutual surprise and pleasure, a friendship appeared to be in the making.
    â€œI don’t understand your illness at all,” Blair confessed.
    â€œJoin the club,” Deborah said. She wheeled the jeep into a parking lot beside an antebellum mansion. “Multiple sclerosis isn’t something anyone understands. You just endure it.”
    The Peterby Country Cafe was a hidden surprise in the countryside near Edenton. A Chicago couple had fallen in love with the scenery surrounding Carolina’s Inland Waterway and opened a city-style eatery in the mansion’s two front rooms. Blair had heard about it from her aunt, with whom she lived in Edenton. She and Deborah had tried it for the first time together and immediately claimed it as their own.
    As they walked toward the entrance, Blair said, “I just feel like a friend ought to have a better handle on something this important.”
    Deborah smiled her thanks. “The best description I can give you is in a name they gave MS a while back. They called it the invisible disease. There are no symptoms that anyone can see, and even the internal symptoms vary so widely that experts cannot always pinpoint the cause.”
    Once they were seated, Deborah said, “Mind if I ask you something?”
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œWhy don’t you go on for a higher degree? Quite frankly, you’ve got ten times the smarts of some of the people on my staff.”
    â€œI’ve thought about it.” Blair used long fingers to draw back her long, honey-colored hair. “But I decided I would be doing it for other people and not for myself.”
    â€œCome again?”
    â€œDon’t get me wrong, I admire you and what you’ve done with your life. But having a profession and rising up in the world just never has interested me all that much.” She turned anxious. “Does that sound just awful?”
    â€œI’m not sure.” Deborah watched the waiter set down their iced teas and sipped before asking, “So what is it you want out of life?”
    â€œAll the old-fashioned things,” Blair answered briskly. “A home, a good husband, lots of kids, some dogs, maybe a couple of horses if we can afford them. I know this will probably cost you your appetite, but there’s not a thing I’d like more in the world than to be a good mom.”
    â€œWhy are you here?”
    â€œYou mean, why am I sitting here a single woman, or why am I working for Pharmacon?”
    â€œBoth, I suppose.”
    â€œI’ve had my share of maybes.” Her face took on a pinched look.