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moment. Melanie was impressed. Not everybody could stare down Bernadette.
    “Her one previous assignment was IAB,” Ray-Ray said, “and
they
wouldn’t even keep her. We got her because the lieutenant owed Jimmy Mulqueen a favor. This chick is wicked connected.”
    “Bridget does happen to come from a family that has quite a few members on the job, including Deputy Commissioner Mulqueen,” Bernadette conceded.
    “Who’s her father,” Ray-Ray put in.
    “If you want to be the one to tell him his little girl isn’t good enough for this case, be my guest. There’s a nice traffic post in Queens that needs filling. You want my advice, keep your mouth shut and give her some rap sheets to run. Meanwhile, I’m making it up to you with the other new team member.”
    “Who’s that?” Melanie asked, taking a sip of her Starbucks.
    “You’ve worked with him before, Melanie. Dan O’Reilly from the FBI.”
    Ray-Ray and Bernadette both stared at her as she choked on her coffee, turning bright red, unable to catch her breath.
     
     
    OF COURSE, Dan had always taken her breath away, from the very second they met. But that was something she’d been trying to put out of her mind.
    The phone on the credenza rang, and Bernadette got up to answer it. Ray-Ray turned to Melanie, who was still wheezing.
    “You okay?” he whispered.
    “Yuh,” she managed through her choking fit.
    “This guy incompetent, too?”
    “No, no. He’s very good. It’s just…” She trailed off into another round of hacking.
    Ray-Ray nodded as if he understood. “Got it. Hate the fuckin’ Feebs myself. I was hoping they were off narcotics permanently, post-9/11, but now they sleazed their way back in with this narcoterrorism BS.”
    Bernadette returned to the conference table.
    “Okay,” she said, sitting down, “they’re here. They’ll be up in a minute.”
    A
minute
? Melanie was nearly hyperventilating. Bernadette couldn’t know what she’d done by assigning Dan O’Reilly to this case. In fact, her boss probably thought she was doing Melanie a favor, had doubtless handpicked Dan precisely because she thought he and Melanie worked well together. What a disaster! Little did Bernadette know.
    It was months since the two of them had seen each other, but Melanie still had it bad for this man. The second they met, she’d felt like something big was going to happen between them. And it started to, but then it got all mucked up. She sobbed herself to sleep some nights, regretting that she’d ever let him go, longing for him, wondering if she should try to call. Here she was divorcing Steve, the father of her child, and yes, she was sad about that. But it was Dan she cried for. And the worst part was, it was her own fault.
     
     
    DAN HAD ARRIVED before the baby-sitter. It was their first real date, and he brought her flowers. Melanie took them, nodding her thanks, then put them down distractedly on the hall table. She was on the phone with the pediatrician, still in her bathrobe with hair wet from the shower. Maya was in her arms, burning with fever. Her ears again, the third time in a month. She screamed so loudly that Melanie could barely hear the doctor on the other end of the line
.
    “Sorry,” Melanie mouthed to Dan. “What can I do, Doctor? Please, she’s really bad right now.” Watching her daughter suffer, Melanie felt more helpless than she ever had in her life. Dan’s presence, which she’d been so looking forward to, now seemed like an unwelcome distraction.
    “I don’t like to do it, but I’ll phone in a stronger antibiotic tomorrow. Give her the Motrin and the ear drops, and bring her in in the morning,” the doctor said.
    Melanie hung up and turned to Dan, meeting his eyes desperately over Maya’s writhing body.
    “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but I can’t go out. I already sent the sitter home.”
    His face fell. “I’m so disappointed. I made a reservation at a real nice place. Italian—”
    Maya