Chapter One

      Life and unloving parents had conspired to arrange a different outcome.

      It was approaching the dinner hour on a Friday evening in October as thirty-four-year-old Cate Anderson, now an English teacher at Beckwith Consolidated High School, ran off a stack of fliers on the school’s balky, outdated copy machine. A widow since the death of her husband, Larry, from complications of leukemia three years earlier, she wore a charcoal-gray sweater set, a Pendleton plain wool shirt she’d bought in a Minneapolis thrift shop when her teenage son, Brian, was still a toddler, and recently resoled penny loafers. The second pair she’d managed to ruin that week, her panty hose had a run in them.

      Designed and produced with the principal’s blessing on behalf of a recently organized Save Our Jobs, Save Our Town committee, the fliers represented an effort to boost attendance at a rally that would take place in the town library on Monday evening. According to recent news stories, Mercator, the new corporate parent of Beckwith’s only industry, Beckwith Tool and Die, was in the process of deciding whether to expand the plant or close it.

      Without it, this town will dry up and blow away, Cate thought. She was trying to imagine what her father, her mother-in-law, Beverly Anderson, and her best friend, Brenda Lawler, all of whom worked at Beckwith Tool and Die, would do for a living if the plant closed when Brenda abruptly knocked on the media room’s glass door.

      Cate motioned for her to enter. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to think of it, how’d you get into the building? By now the outside doors are usually locked.”

      Brenda’s expertly made-up hazel eyes glittered with excitement. “Hank Whittaker was mopping up in the front hall,” she answered. “I pounded on the glass…told him I had to talk to you right away.”

      “From the look on your face, maybe I ought to sit down,” Cate suggested, trying to suppress the sudden apprehension she felt.

      For once Brenda didn’t laugh or tell her she was exaggerating. “Actually,” she agreed, “that might be a good idea.”

      Incredibly, her friend was serious. What on earth could she possibly say that might cause me to lose my balance? Cate wondered apprehensively, pulling up a stool.

      “Is this about you and Dean?” she asked. “Please don’t tell me the two of you are getting back together! When I think of the black eye he gave you last month…”

      Dean was Brenda’s soon-to-be ex-husband. Brenda shook her head. “It’s like I told you…I’m not going to take any more of his bullying. When he stopped by day before yesterday to pick up some of his things and suggested we fool around, I ordered him out of the house.”

      “Then what’s this about?”

      Brenda bit her lip. “Danny Finn’s back in town. I thought you’d rather hear it from me instead of some busybody gossip.”

      Astonishment pierced Cate to the quick as a thousand images competed in her head—Danny pelting her with snowballs. Handing her a bouquet of wild flowers he’d picked in the woods. Kissing her senseless. Unaware of the gesture, she hugged herself as she thought about the way he’d held her during the homecoming dance her senior year while her classmates had whispered about them. The way they’d made love, in his car and at the mound, settling all the questions of the universe.…

      It isn’t possible he’s back after so many years, she told herself. I must be dreaming this.

      As always, whenever she imagined coming face-to-face with Danny again, she remembered the look he’d given her on the night they’d tried to elope, as her parents had ushered her out of the Clermont County Jail, past the interrogation room where one of the deputies was still questioning him. The prospect of seeing him again and cringing afresh at his unwarranted judgment of her was almost more than she could take.

      No matter how many times he told me he loved me, he hated me that night, she thought, flinching as if from the misery of a scab being picked from a wound. Does he still? Or has what happened ceased to matter to him? What will he say or do if we run into each other?

      Daunting as the prospect was, it was even more demoralizing to imagine how their lives might change if Danny met Brian and guessed the boy was his. The resemblance was striking if you looked for it. Maybe he wouldn’t. She could only hope. She groaned inwardly at the prospect of Danny making demands. Brian’s confusion and hostility. Her son’s custody becoming a war zone. The battle that could result would spread through Beckwith like a forest fire if one of the town gossips made the connection.

      “It’s been seventeen years. What’s Danny doing here now?” she croaked.

      “He’s the Mercator executive assigned to evaluate Beckwith Tool and Die,” Brenda answered, a world of sympathy in her voice. “Carl Fosse announced it at the plant this afternoon. There was a storm of talk over it, I can tell you. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that most of Beckwith looked down on the Finns. Now here’s Danny, returning as a corporate executive with the power to put everyone out on the street.” She paused. “When we heard the news, your dad looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

      Maybe he will, Cate thought, hunching over on her stool. He’s never stopped hating Danny or condemning me for loving him. If he has to be polite, take orders from the man he believes led his daughter astray, it might actually kill him. The explosion that would occur if Danny fired him was almost beyond imagining.

      She knew that, whatever form her father’s outrage took, he’d make her pay. So would her mother. They always did. Meanwhile Brian and her in-laws stood to get hurt.

      Her forehead lined with sympathy, Brenda put her arms around Cate. “Sorry I had to be the one to tell you,” she apologized. “But you were bound to hear about it from somebody. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility of meeting him. At least with me you don’t have to pretend…put on an act about your feelings.”

      Cate nodded in agreement. “Where’s he staying?” she asked. “In one of the motels out on Route 32?”

      Brenda shook her head. “According to his old boss, Zeb Miller, who pumped gas for him this evening, he plans to stay at his grandmother’s place. One of the part-time checkers at Clingers’ Market said she saw his fancy car in the driveway out there on her way in to work. Apparently, he phoned ahead and had the electricity turned on, because there were lights in some of the windows. Funny, isn’t it, considering he’s been gone so long and the way he always felt about that wreck of a place, that he’d go straight home to roost?”

      Cate had to admit it was. Meanwhile, it seemed that the news about Danny’s return was getting around. Imagining him at his grandmother’s farmhouse, thinking about the past and listening to the crickets, made her want to weep. He was so achingly close. Part of her wanted to run to him, let him absorb the pain his absence in her life had produced.

      She wouldn’t do it, of course. They were strangers now, as foreign to each other as if they’d grown up on opposite sides of the planet. Her knowledge of him was seventeen years out of date.

      “Do you think he’s come back to punish Beckwith for the way it treated him and his family?” she asked. “That he’ll close the plant without listening to a word anyone might say in its defense?”

      Brenda