Birthright

breathe. I don’t know what I felt, what I feel. I can’t identify it. But I started thinking, what would they be like, what would my parents be like, what would I be like if none of this had happened? If she hadn’t turned away for that few seconds, and I’d grown up . . . here.”
    When she started to move away, Jake tightened his grip, held her in place. “Just keep talking. Pretend I’m not here.”
    “That minor in psych’s showing,” she told him. “I justwondered, that’s all. What if I’d grown up Jessica? Jessica Lynn Cullen would have a keen fashion sense. She’d drive a minivan. Probably working on her second kid by now. Maybe a fine arts degree, which she uses to decorate her house, tastefully. She thinks she’ll go back to work when the kids are older, but for now she’s president of the PTA and that’s enough for her. Or maybe she’s Jessie. Maybe Jessie stuck. That’d be different.”
    “How?”
    “Jessie, she’d have been a cheerleader. Bound to be. Captain of the squad. Probably had a crush on the captain of the football team, and they were a pretty hot item through high school, but it didn’t last. Jessie, she’d’ve married her college sweetheart, picking him out of the several guys who liked to sniff around her because she was so exuberant and fun. Jessie keeps scrapbooks and works part-time, retail, to help supplement the income. She’s got a kid, too, and enough energy to handle all the balls she has to juggle.”
    “Is she happy?”
    “Sure. Why not? But neither of those women would spend hours digging, or know how to identify a six-thousand-year-old tibia. They wouldn’t have a scar on their left shoulder where they fell on a rock in Wyoming when they were twenty. They sure as hell wouldn’t have married you—points for them.”
    She glanced back over her shoulder. “You’d have scared the shit out of them. And for all those reasons, including having the bad judgment to marry you, I’m glad I didn’t turn out to be either one of them. I could think that even when Suzanne was sobbing in my arms. I’m glad I’m who I am.”
    “That makes two of us.”
    “Yeah, but we’re not very nice people. Suzanne wants one of those two women—her Jessica, her Jessie. More, she wants the child back. I’m using that to push her to help me get the answers I need.”
    “She needs them, too.”
    “I hope she understands that when we get them.”

Fourteen
    C allie worked like a demon, logging ten-hour days in the sweltering heat, probing, brushing, detailing. She dug in the muck churned up by a vicious thunderstorm and stewed in the summer soup August poured into Maryland.
    At night she composed reports, outlined hypotheses, studied and sketched sealed artifacts before they were shipped to the Baltimore lab. She had a room of her own, with a sleeping bag tossed on the floor, a desk she’d picked up at a flea market, a Superman lamp she’d snagged from a yard sale, her laptop, her mountain of notes and her cello.
    She had everything she needed.
    She didn’t spend much time downstairs in what they called the common area. It was, she’d decided, just a little too cozy. As most of the team spent evenings in town or at the site, Rosie tended to make herself scarce—obviously and regularly—leaving Callie alone with Jake.
    It was just a bit too much like playing house, just a bit too much the way it had once been when they’d burrowed in together in a rental or a motel during a dig.
    Her feelings for him were much closer to the surface than she’d wanted to admit. And managed to be dug deeperas well. The fact was, she realized, she’d never gotten over Jacob Graystone.
    He was, unfortunately, the love of her life.
    The son of a bitch.
    She’d known they’d be tossed together again on a dig. It was inevitable. But she’d thought she’d have more time to resolve her emotions where he was concerned, and she’d been so sure she could handle those emotions. Handle Jake.
    But he’d stirred up everything again, then added the unexpected to the mix. He was offering friendship.
    His own brand of friendship, she mused as she doodled on a pad. You could never be sure if he’d pick on you, kiss you or pat your head as if you were a child. But it was a different path from the one they’d traveled before.
    Maybe it was because of all that had happened to her since coming here, but she wondered where she and Jake might have ended up if they’d tried a couple of other