Birthright

you’re going to lose her a second time. She doesn’t love us.”
    Her lips trembled. “How can you say that to me? She does. Deep inside, she does. She has to.”
    “I hate saying it to you. I hate hurting you. I’d rather step aside again, walk away again, than cause you a single moment’s pain. But if I don’t say it, it’ll only hurt you more.”
    He took her arms, firmed his grip when she tried to step away. As he should’ve done, he thought now, all along. He should have firmed his grip on her. “She feels sorry for us. She feels obligated to us. And maybe, if we give her enough time, enough room, she’ll feel something more.”
    “I want her to come home.”
    “Honey.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “I know.”
    “I want to hold her.” Wrapping her arms tight around her waist, Suzanne rocked. “I want her to be a baby again so I can just hold her.”
    “I wanted that, too. I know you don’t believe me, but I wanted that with all my heart. Just to . . . just to touch her.”
    “Oh God, Jay.” She lifted her hand, brushed a tear from his cheek with her finger. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
    “Maybe, just this once, you could hold me instead. Or let me hold you.” He slipped his arms around her. “Just let me hold you, Suzanne.”
    “I’m trying to be strong. I’ve tried to be strong all these years, and now I can’t stop crying.”
    “It’s all right. It’s just us. Nobody has to know.” It had been so long, he thought, since she’d let him get this close. Since he’d felt her head on his shoulder. Since she’d put her arms around him.
    “I thought . . . the first time I went to see her, I thought it was enough to know that our baby was safe and well. That she’d grown up so pretty, so smart. I thought itwould be enough, Jay. But it wasn’t. Every day I want more. Five minutes back, then an hour. A day, then a year.”
    “She’s got beautiful hands. Did you see? They’re kind of nicked up—from her work, I guess. But she has those narrow hands, with long fingers. And I thought, when I saw them, I thought, Oh, we’d have given her piano lessons. With hands like that she ought to play the piano.”
    Slowly, carefully, she eased back. Then she framed his face in her hands and lifted it. He was weeping—silent tears. He was always silent, she remembered, when you expected a storm of grief or of joy.
    She remembered now he’d wept just like this at the birth of each of their children. With his hand clinging to hers, with tears running down his cheeks, he’d made no sound.
    “Oh, Jay.” Going with her heart, she touched her lips to his damp cheeks. “She plays the cello.”
    “She does?”
    “Yes. I saw it in her motel room, and there’s a little biography of her on the web, attached to some of the projects she’s worked on. It says she plays the cello. And that she graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon.”
    “Yeah?” He tried to compose himself, but his voice was thick and broken as he dragged out a handkerchief. “That’s a tough school.”
    “Would you like to see the printout? There’s a picture of her. She looks so intellectual and serious.”
    “I’d like that.”
    She nodded, started to walk to the computer. “Jay, I know you’re right, about her coming to us, about her defining what we’re going to be to each other. But it’s just so hard to wait. It’s so hard when she’s this close, to wait.”
    “Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard if we waited together.”
    She smiled, as she once had smiled when her best friend gave her her first kiss. “Maybe it wouldn’t.”
    I t took some maneuvering. It always did when it came to Douglas, Lana thought. Yet she’d not only engineeredanother date, but had talked him into letting her meet him in the apartment over the bookstore.
    She wanted to see where he lived, however temporary it might be. And she thought they might start working on defining what this thing was they had going between them.
    He called out a “come in” when she knocked on the outside entrance. It was, she surmised, a Woodsboro habit not to lock doors. It wasn’t one she’d picked up, even after more than two years. Too much city girl, she decided, as she opened the door.
    The sofa in the living room had a baggy navy blue slipcover, and the single chair with it was a hunter green with worn arms. The choices seemed to have nothing to do with the rug, which was a brown-and-orange braid.
    Maybe he was