“Just let me know if you find any more letters, okay?”
“Of course.”
Callie hesitated a minute, then decided there was no time like the present to get into a subject she’d been deliberately avoiding. “Mother, I’ve been wondering about something. Would you like to make a trip home with me next weekend?”
“You mean to visit the farm?”
Callie was startled by the odd mix of hopefulness and fear in her mother’s expression. “Not exactly,” she explained. “I have to do a publicity appearance in Iowa City. I was thinking you might want to go along and see some of your friends, maybe spend a little time with Eunice and Tom.”
“Just for the weekend, then?”
“Yes.”
Regina shook her head firmly. “No, you go on along. I’ll be just fine right here.”
Callie didn’t know what to make of the hasty refusal. Her gaze narrowed as she tried to read her mother’s mood. “Are you sure? Don’t worry about the expense.”
“It’s not that. I just don’t feel much like bouncing halfway across the country and back again for a day’s visit with people I just left behind.”
“You’re not homesick, then?”
“I miss the farm sometimes,” she admitted. “Not much else.”
Callie regarded her with astonishment. “Really?”
Regina’s smile came and went in a heartbeat. “Don’t look so shocked, girl. You’re not the only one capable of seeing that life for what it was.”
Even as Callie tried to absorb the meaning of that, her mother gathered up the mail she’d finished, set it on a table by the front door for Callie to take out in the morning and put the rest away.
“I think I’ll be going to bed now.” She leaned down and kissed Callie’s forehead. “Don’t stay up too late.”
Callie had the feeling, though, that the shock at her mother’s totally unexpected, soft-spoken revelation about the way she viewed the farm would keep her awake for hours.
* * *
A little over a week later, Callie was all alone in Iowa City. Not only had her mother continued to refuse to go, but Jason had balked at making the trip, as well. He’d said it would be bad PR for him to be seen trailing around the country after her.
“People will begin to think I’m exerting some sort of Pygmalion-like control over you, that I’m afraid to let you loose in public on your own,” he’d told her.
“If that’s not the most ridiculous, self-serving remark I’ve ever heard,” Callie shot back. “If you don’t want to go to Iowa, just say so.”
“I thought I had.”
“Only if I read between the lines,” she countered.
“Which you have,” he reminded her.
She couldn’t believe he was bailing out on her now. “If you leave me to deal with my sister on my own, I will never forgive you.”
“I’ll risk it,” he’d said smoothly. “Have a good trip.”
“Have a good trip,” she mimicked as she prepared to walk out to the makeshift stage in the middle of the mall and confront what looked to be three hundred or so fans being worked into a frenzy by some local DJ. If Eunice and Tom were out there, Callie hadn’t spotted them yet. With a little luck, their car had stalled en route.
This was the last of the scheduled mall appearances. The first two had gone every bit as smoothly as the bowl-a-thon, so the only thing that could possibly account for the butterflies in her stomach was the prospect of seeing her sister.
She dreaded it, no doubt about it. But if she allowed herself to get too worked up over spending time with Eunice, she’d head for the closest exit. She settled for running through a familiar litany of curses aimed at Jason instead.
She really didn’t intend to forgive him for abandoning her. All that Pygmalion garbage was just that, so much hastily improvised nonsense to explain the fact that he was distancing himself from her again.
Even in the few weeks they’d known each other, she’d begun to detect a certain pattern. Every time it appeared that their relationship was actually developing into something serious, he took not just one step back but a dozen or more. Now he’d managed to put several hundred miles between them.
He must be feeling very safe back in his sterile, lonely New York penthouse about now. At least, he’d better be lonely, she thought with a sudden, unexpected flash of pure possessiveness. She realized that until just that instant she had never considered the possibility that a man as desirable as Jason might have other women in his life. How naive! Women probably threw themselves at him hourly. It was hardly sensible to assume that he never caught a single one of them. He was probably cheating on her at this very instant with some glamorous actress or some brainy executive. Could a man even cheat on a woman to whom he’d made love but no promises?
A nudge from the PR assistant assigned to her for the mall event snapped her out of her wild imaginings barely an instant before she would have snatched up the nearest phone and made a call she would wind up regretting.
“You’re on,” he pointed out, gesturing toward the steps leading up to the stage.
Callie plastered a smile on her face and made her entrance to thunderous applause. She spotted half a dozen familiar faces in the crowd, women she’d gone to school with mostly, along with their husbands, some of whom had been in the same class. Once she wouldn’t have envied them at all. In fact, she would have mocked them for choosing such a safe, dull path for their lives. But as she spotted one couple with an infant, another with a baby in a stroller and one or two with toddlers, an odd sensation spread through her. It felt an awful lot like longing.
What was happening to her? Was she losing her edge? Was it living in this
