Page 38 (2/2)

“Hi It’s irls called in sick, so I probably won’t reat, about your car Keir’s terrific, isn’t he? Okay, gotta go Talk to you tomorrow Maybe we can meet for lunch, you think? Ciao”

The machine clicked off Dawn pressed her hand to her throat “You really have to stop this,” she said softly

A blinking light on an answering machine didn’t have to mean bad news There were a thousand reasons for soes Sales and insurance She and Cassie were in touch almost every day In her heart, she knew all that In three years Mrs Wilton had only phoned a couple of tis, like To new sneakers or jeans

It was just that she’d had this—this uneasy feeling all afternoon, the sense that so, exactly Maybe just off-kilter At work, she’d looked up a couple of ti her but nobody ever was, except for a harried reception clerk who had couest with blue hair and a free drink card was driving everyone crazy, insisting she could swap the card for dinner at La Chanson

Dawn unzipped her skirt and hung it alongside her jacket

Her -tailed cat in a roo chairs She would have told her to knock on wood three times or spit over her shoulder, whatever Dawn had never been able to keep Orianna’s endless superstitions straight, nor had she wanted to She’d never wanted to be like her mother in any hich made it even harder to understand how she’d ended up with a man like Harman

To hell with Harman He was out of her life, and hadn’t she pro to waste anotherabout him?

She snatched up the phone, stabbed the progra Horse Ranch Mrs Wilton answered on the second ring Yes, To What was new? Well, he’d decided he wanted to be a cohen he grew up Or maybe a fireman, but only if firemen could ride horses, too

Dawn laughed as she i up the phone, she felt fine again She had to stop seeing shadohere there weren’t any That man who had helped her today, for example So what if he’d asked her where she was from? She’d asked him the sa

He was a nice guy, that was all Nice, and nice-looking Definitely nice-looking No question about it Her Good Samaritan hat Cassie would call a hunk

She took the pins from her hair and shook it loose, stripped off the rest of her clothes and stepped into the shower There was a tiht away When she was fifteen, sixteen, before Har aware of those things Other girls her age at Queen City High School had been standing in little knots, eyeing the boys and giggling for quite a while before she’d wanted to eye them herself

Of course, she never had

Dawn rinsed off and wrapped herself in a towel

She didn’t belong to any of those cliques There was a pecking order even in that squalid town, and she was at the bottom of it She would have died of embarrassh embarrassment would have been the least of her worries if her ht her Orianna had set out the rules the day Dawn first got her period It was just about the saan to develop and her waist to curve in above her hips

“You’re a woman now,” she’d said