Three Fates

her arms. “There now, Felix.”
    He could think of nothing but the strength in the young widow’s face, in the innocence of her son’s. “She was hurt, so she asked me to take the boy. To save the boy.”
    “You saved them both.”
    “I don’t know why I did it. I was only thinking about saving myself. I’m a thief. Those things you took out of my pocket? I stole them. I was stealing them when the ship was hit. All I could think about when it was happening was getting out alive.”
    Meg shifted beside him, folded her hands. “Did you give her your life jacket?”
    “It wasn’t mine. I found it. I don’t know why I gave it to her. She was trapped between deck chairs, holding on to the boy. Holding on to her sanity in the middle of all that hell.”
    “You could’ve turned away from her, saved yourself.”
    He mopped at his eyes. “I wanted to.”
    “But you didn’t.”
    “I’ll never know why.” He only knew that seeing them alive had changed something inside him. “But the point is, I’m a second-rate thief who was on that ship because I was running from the cops. I stole a man’s things minutes before he died. A thousand people are dead. I saw some of them die. I’m alive. What kind of world is it that saves a thief and takes children?”
    “Who can answer? But there’s a child who’s alive today because you were there. Would you have been, do you think, just where you were, when you were, if you hadn’t been stealing?”
    He let out a derisive sound. “The likes of me wouldn’t have been anywhere near the first-class deck unless I’d been stealing.”
    “There you are.” She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dried his tears as she would a child’s. “Stealing’s wrong. It’s a sin and there’s no question about it. But if you’d been minding your own, that woman and her son would be dead. If a sin saves innocent lives, I’m thinking it’s not so great a sin. And I have to say, you didn’t steal so very much if all you had for it were a pair of earbobs, a little statue and some American dollars.”
    For some reason that made him smile. “Well, I was just getting started.”
    The smile she sent him was lovely and sure. “Yes, I’d say you’re just getting started.”

Two
     
     
     
     
    Helsinki, 2002
     
    S HE wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d studied the picture of her on the back of her book, and on the program for the lecture—would it never end?—but there was a difference in flesh and blood.
    She was smaller than he’d imagined, for one thing. Nearly delicate in her quiet gray suit that should, in his opinion, be a good inch shorter at the hem. From what he could see of her legs, they weren’t half bad.
    In person she didn’t look nearly as competent and intimidating a woman as she did on the dust jacket. Though the little wire glasses she wore onstage added a sort of trendy intellectual tone.
    She had a good voice. Maybe too good, he thought, as it was damn near putting him to sleep. Still, that was primarily the fault of the subject matter. He was interested in Greek myths—in one particular Greek myth. But Christ Jesus, it was tedious to have to sit through an hour’s lecture on the entire breed of them.
    He straightened in his chair and did his best to concentrate. Not on the words so much. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Artemis turning some poor slob into a stag because he’d seen her naked. That only proved that women, goddesses or not, were peculiar creatures.
    To his mind, Dr. Tia Marsh was damn peculiar. The woman came from money. Great gobs and hordes of money, yet instead of sitting back and enjoying it, she spent her time steeped in long-dead Greek gods. Writing about them, lecturing about them. Interminably.
    She had generations of breeding behind her. Blood as blue as the Kerry lakes. But here she was, giving her endless talk in Finland, days after she’d given what he assumed was the same song and dance in Sweden, in Norway. Hyping her book all over Europe and Scandinavia.
    Certainly it wasn’t for the money, he mused. Maybe she just liked to hear the sound of her own voice. Countless did.
    She was, according to his information, twenty-nine, single, the only child of the New York Marshes and, most important, the great-great-granddaughter of Henry W. Wyley.
    Wyley Antiques was, as it had been for nearly a hundred years, one of the most prestigious antique and auction houses in New York.
    It was no coincidence that Wyley’s