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Linda said. “But what did the answer turn out to be?”
    â€œThat if I told her I’d be doing it for myself instead of her. I’d be paying for my catharsis with her disillusionment. The harder choice was bearing the burden myself. I wasn’t a slut, but I wasn’t chaste, either, the way she thought of chastity. So I’d live with the knowledge that I wasn’t as wonderful as Grammy Seton thought I was.”
    â€œSo you’re saying I shouldn’t tell Peter? Base my marriage on deceit?”
    â€œYour call, best friend, not mine,” Melissa said as tenderly as she could. “Deceit poisons marriage, but so does full disclosure. In Psych 101, most of the class would give the same answer Siebern did, and I’d be in the majority. But this isn’t a class, it’s your life, and Peter’s. You’ve gotta know. Just remember that whatever choice you make, I’m on your side.”
    â€œThat means a lot more to me than Reverend Siebern’s Power Points,” Linda said. “Now, why don’t you go down and see how the repair job is going while I get myself dressed?”
    â€œAre you sure I can’t stay up here and help you?”
    â€œNo, thanks. You’ve already helped me plenty.”
    Melissa nodded and withdrew. She edged her way gingerly down the stairs, feeling clumsy and uncertain in the long, itchy, unfamiliar dress. Jesse Davidovich was just coaxing a misshapen bolt segment off the bit of a compact, hand-held drill that Rep would have recognized as a Dremel tool. She noticed that Davidovich had moved the stack of typescript carefully to the coffee table and arranged a drop-cloth around the base of the stairs.
    â€œI’ll be a while yet,” Davidovich said with only the briefest glance up from her work. “Hey, neat dress.”
    â€œThanks,” Melissa said, strolling over and impulsively grabbing a fistful of pages. “I’ll go out to the deck and stay out of your way.”
    â€œThat thing is a future book, isn’t it?” Davidovich said as she inserted a different bit, with sandpaper on the end, into the Dremel tool.
    â€œIt wants to be one,” Melissa said.
    â€œIt hit me when I moved it out of the way. I thought, oh wow, I’m looking at, what, like a thousand hours of a writer’s life just sitting here. Like, that miter box over there? My dad made it for me when I passed my apprenticeship exam. Took him two days, and every time I get ready to cut a perfect angle on a piece of quarter-round with it, it’s like part of dad himself is right there, helping me. Just like a piece of the writer is here, ready to tell us a story.”
    Davidovich noisily sanded the base of the newel capital for ten seconds, then blew sawdust away from the wood. She offered a bashful smile to Melissa, whose expression suggested the surprised delight of revelation.
    â€œSorry about running off at the mouth like that. I just got on a roll and started riffing. Your eyes must be glazing over.”
    â€œNot at all. I went months at a time in graduate school without hearing a metaphor as elegant as that one.”
    â€œZoom,” Davidovich laughed, passing her right hand over her head.
    As Melissa headed through the dining room toward the French doors and the deck beyond them, she caught herself actually sashaying in the period clothing. She was intrigued to note that seating herself at the redwood table on the deck required a rather formal bit of body language. She smiled and started to read Luther Battle’s opus.
    It didn’t start out like Melissa’s idea of a Civil War romance. No wasp-waisted belles tearing their crinoline into bandages while they bravely waited for news from the front. It began instead with a southern officer returning home through a bleak landscape in January, 1865, the war not yet over, his empty left sleeve silent proof of courage under fire at Cold Harbor. As he