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I tell Annie, trying to sound unconcerned. “She must be working.”
    “You should hurry up and marry her,” Annie says. “Then she can be my real mom. Then she can live here.”
    I can’t help but feel some resentment. When the Herald offered Caitlin a plum assignment investigating further sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Boston, she almost turned it down. The job meant at least two months away from Natchez, and though we talked about flying to see each other on weekends, we knew that probably wouldn’t work out. But the offer came from a renowned editor for whom Caitlin had worked as an intern while at Radcliffe, and I sensed that if she said no, she would eventually resent it. I’m glad she took the assignment, but our fears about visiting have proved true. The sum of our recent contact? I’ve flown to Boston once, and she flew down to Baton Rouge for a weekend with Annie and me.
    “She works this late?” Annie asks.
    Lately it’s become more and more difficult to reach Caitlin at night. “It’s not that late for grown-ups. Maybe she’s working undercover.”
    “Yeah, she does that sometimes,” Annie says thoughtfully. “Like a spy.”
    “Yep. Now, shut those eyes.”
    Annie opens her eyes as wide as possible, then giggles like a two-year-old.
    I poke her in the side. “You’re a pain in the you-know-what.”
    More giggles. I give her a kiss, then walk into the hall and descend the long staircase. “See you in the morning!” I call.
    “Not if I see you first!” she yells back.
    In the kitchen, I raid the refrigerator and construct a colossal turkey po’boy. I only had a salad before the school board meeting, and I’m starving. To keep my mind off Drew and his problems I click on CNN, but there’s no escaping. CNN makes me think of Caitlin, and thoughts of Caitlin bring me back to Drew.
    The essential problem that has kept Caitlin and me from marrying is our age difference. At thirty-three, she is very much in the midst of proving herself in her chosen profession, which requires her to leave Natchez often. At forty-three, I’ve already succeeded in two different careers, and the only thing I have left to prove is that I can raise my daughter well. Having endured the problems that come with a ten-year age difference, I can’t help but view Drew’s dream of a real life with Kate as absurd. Did he plan to divorce Ellen and commute by air between Natchez and Boston in order to see Tim? He couldn’t have continued practicing medicine in Natchez. The local society women would have risen as one to boycott his practice and ostracize the former darling of St. Stephen’s Prep. How would Drew have introduced Kate to fellow doctors in Boston? This is my wife. She just graduated—from high school. Of course, Drew wasn’t concerned about such mundane matters. He loved Kate, and the rest of the world could go to hell.
    But now the world may have its way with him. As the CNN anchor reads a litany of global crises, I make a list of the threats Drew faces. First, statutory rape. Given the age difference between him and Kate, he could get twenty years in Parchman prison. And since Kate was his patient, he could lose his medical license. Even if he doesn’t, the mere rumor of such an affair in Natchez could kill his practice. If Kate was raped, and physical evidence links Drew to her corpse, he could be charged with capital murder for homicide during the commission of another felony. In Mississippi, conviction for capital murder brings with it the very real possibility of death by lethal injection.
    If Kate was in fact murdered, the police have a tough job ahead of them. By carrying her body to the emergency room rather than leaving it where they found it, the fishermen who found Kate deprived investigators of any chance to examine her body in situ. They might have lost or destroyed critical evidence. And since Kate was found wedged in the fork of a tree during high water, the actual crime scene is probably