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eyes moving from Rob to his mother. He frowned, as if trying to puzzle something out, and when he at last took the hand that had been extended to him, Katharine could sense his reluctance. “Nice to meet you,” he said.
    As they headed toward the baggage area, Katharine knew that despite his words, Michael wasn’t sure if he was pleased to meet Rob Silver or not.
    She suspected that he was leaning toward “not.”
    “They actually pay you to work out here?” Katharine asked as Rob Silver turned his dusty Ford Explorer onto a four-lane highway that seemed to lead straight up the vast mountain that made up the southeastern half of Maui. The car’s windows were wide open, and though the trade winds were blowing, the breeze held none of the bite of the harsh winter gale that had been lashing through the streets of Manhattan when they’d left the day before.
    Rob gave her a mischievous glance. “Can I take that as an offer that you’ll work for free?”
    “Fat chance,” Katharine replied. “I’m a poor working mother, remember? The happily starving student you used to know is long gone.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Rob drawled. “Doesn’t seem to me like you’ve changed at all.” Catching the look that came into Michael’s eyes in the rearview mirror—a look made up of equal parts suspicion and disapproval—Rob dropped the flirtatious note from his voice. “Actually, I’m not sure what’ll happen when I’m done with my project out here. I’ve got some feelers in at the university, butI suspect there are at least ten people I’d have to kill to get to the top of the list.”
    “How much longer does your grant run?” Katharine asked.
    In the backseat, Michael turned and gazed out the window at the cane fields that lined both sides of the road, tuning out the conversation droning on in the front seat. Couldn’t they ever talk about anything but money? Sometimes it seemed like that was the only thing his mother and her friends were really interested in.
    Except for Rob Silver. From the moment he’d seen the way Rob Silver looked at his mother, Michael was pretty sure he knew what that man was interested in. And he was very sure that Silver and his mother hadn’t just been friends back in college. He’d also understood that as far as Rob Silver was concerned, nothing had changed.
    Funny how his mother hadn’t said anything about
that
when she’d been trying to convince him that coming to Maui was such a great idea. Now, as the Explorer rolled through the fields, he was beginning to understand what she’d meant. Sure it was great for her—she got a good job, and plenty of money, and a man he could tell she was interested in, based on the way she’d looked at him at the airport.
    So here he was, in a place where he didn’t know a single soul except his mother, and with only about three months of school left. Too much for him to talk his mom into letting him skip the rest of the year—he’d already tried that one—but not enough to give him time to make any friends, despite what his mother had said. He could still hear her: “Of course you’ll make friends. It’s not like New York. It’ll be easy.”
    But it wouldn’t be easy. Easy? Michael wished hismom could understand how hard it really was to meet a whole new bunch of kids. Kids who might not like him. Or who might make fun of him the way they used to when he was sick all the time. Well, he wasn’t sick anymore, so maybe things would be different. Maybe he wouldn’t be quite as lonely as he thought. He sure hoped not.
    His reverie was interrupted by the sight of a great plume of smoke billowing off to the left. “What’s that?” he asked.
    “Sugarcane fire,” Rob Silver explained. “They burn the fields to make it easier to harvest the cane. That way they’re not hauling a lot of extra vegetation around. You’ll get so you automatically close the windows whenever you see it.”
    “How come? It’s gotta be half a mile away.”