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smiled.
         “And I laughed so hard, and I helped him back in the boat and he laughed so hard too. And then he looked at me with his beautiful blue eyes and said ‘I guess you can tell I’m not much of a sailor after all, huh?’
         “And I told him, ‘ya think?’
         “And we just laughed and laughed. And ever since then I’ve called your Daddy my sailor. And you, little sir, are just like your Daddy in every way. So you’re my little sailor.”
         “Daddy is pretty silly sometimes, isn’t he?”
         “You’ve got that right.”
         “Do you think I can ever ride on a boat someday?”
         “Oh, yes. Your Daddy and I will make sure of that.”
         “But I don’t want to fall in the water. I don’t know how to swim.”
         “Well, we’ll make sure to teach you how to swim too. As soon as we can find a lake and a boat, we’ll do both.”
         Markie was satisfied with that and went off to play.
         Hannah stayed behind, in deep thought, with a wry smile upon her lips.
         She was remembering that day on the lake, and the part of the story she hadn’t told little Markie. She hadn’t told Markie that once Mark was out of the water, he was chilled by the late afternoon breeze, and began to shiver.
         She didn’t tell Markie that his father’s apartment was many miles away, but that hers was close by. And that she offered to take him back to her apartment so she could wash and dry his clothes.
         Or that he walked around in her ratty old pink housecoat while the laundry was being done. The housecoat had once belonged to her grandmother, and she couldn’t bear to part with it.
         But she had to admit that it looked good on Mark that night.
         That was the night she and Mark had made love for the first time, and he didn’t go home until late the next morning.
         But that was a part of the story that little Markie didn’t need to know.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 8
     
         It was the third day since the assault on the mine. Hannah hadn’t been back to the security console and still had mixed feelings about letting the men in the tunnel die. But she resolved to herself that she would not interfere. As guilty as she felt about men dying such a horrible death, she’d accepted the fact that they as a group were safer for it.
         And she owed her allegiance to her friends and family. Not to a gang of criminals who’d have done them harm.
         At the bank of monitors, Mark stood shoulder to shoulder with Sarah and Bryan, watching the camera feeds from the tunnel.
         There were only two patches of heat now. The others had died, and their bodies had cooled to the point that they simply vanished from the screen.
         They were unsure which two of the men were left. They knew none of their names, of course, nor their positions within their group.
         “We think the one on the left was one of the diggers, but we’re not sure. They kind of got mixed up when they started crawling around together at the end of the first day.”
         Bryan observed, “Well, whether he was a digger or not, he’s not digging any more.”
         It was a true statement.
         The two remaining men alive in the tunnel had given up and abandoned all efforts to escape what would soon be their tomb. Now they just sat in the silent darkness and waited their turn to die.
         Inside the tunnel, Alvarez leaned up against the side of the tunnel and dozed off and on. He’d scratched at the pile of rock and dirt and salt for twenty straight hours. He ignored the fact that he quite literally wore his fingers to the bone. The pain was inconsequential in his desperation to get out, and the dirt packed tightly against his fingertips helped deaden the nerves and slow the bleeding. When it was finally apparent to him that he was getting nowhere, he’d taken a deep breath,