COLE STOOD NEAR THE FRONT YARD OF THE PLACE OF HIS birth, a four-room shack with rotting boards for a floor—an ugly scab on a piece of barren earth.

His birthplace. His heritage.

He wasn't certain why he had come. His mother hadn't survived this place, so there was no reason to think anything of hers would be here for him. Perhaps he'd come to confront its ghosts and then to burn it down…

There were no happy memories to preserve here; the only bearable ones were of his mother. She had died just after her forty-second birthday, while he was in his first year of college. He'd been with her for the birthday before that, though. He'd hitched a ride to town to buy her a birthday present, and he was late getting back. The house had been quiet, and for a minute, he'd harbored the false hope that his father was drunk in the barn or preferably further away than that. He'd almost reached his mother's room when his father's voice had uncoiled like a bullwhip from a darkened corner of the front room. "Where the hell you been, boy?"

He had reached for a light switch to dispel the gloom while mentally gauging his father's mood as ugly but not physically brutal. He'd been an expert at gauging his father's moods, because any mistakes in that regard would have dire results, not just for Cole, but for his mother.

"I had to go to town."

"You're a fucking liar. You've been over to Jeffersonville with your asshole uncle, lettin' him fill your head with all his fancy notions. I told you what I'd do to you if I caught you hangin' around with him again. You're just askin' for a lesson, boy!" Cole downgraded his mood to potentially brutal. As a child, he'd thrown up from sheer terror at moments like these. Later, his primary fear was that someday, he'd kill the man and spend his life in prison for it.

His father's attention was diverted by the flower-printed gift wrap on the box Cole was holding. "What the hell is that?"

"It's a present for Ma. It's her birthday."

Amused by the sentiment, his father reached for it. "What'd you get her?"

Cole held it back, out of his reach. "Nothing you'd want—a fancy brush and mirror."

"You bought her a fancy brush and mirror?" he taunted. "A fancy brush and mirror for that skinny old crow? That's even funnier than you thinkin' you're gonna become a fancy fucking college boy." His disposition improved by that, he picked up the bottle of whiskey from the table beside him, and Cole went into his mother's room.

She was dozing, propped up on pillows, her face turned away from him. On the scarred table beside her was a plate with a half-eaten sandwich. Cole turned on the lamp and sat down beside her hip. "Is this all you had for dinner?"

She twisted her head on the pillows and looked at him, blinking her eyes to adjust to the light. She smiled, but even her smile was somber. "I wasn't hungry. Was that your father yelling a few minutes ago, or did I dream it?"

"He was yelling."

"You shouldn't upset your father, Cole."

Her continual, lifelong submissiveness to his father's ugly disposition and vile temper was something that Cole had never understood. He hated the fact that she continually tried to placate the man, to make excuses for him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from berating her for not standing up for herself and defying him. She wouldn't leave him, and Cole wouldn't leave her there.

"I brought you a birthday present."

She brightened, and for a moment he could almost imagine the dark beauty that his Uncle Cal said had once been hers. She lifted the present and shook it a little, prolonging the excitement; then she carefully removed the wrapping paper and opened the box. "It's so beautiful!" Her gaze flew to his face. "How did you pay for it?"

"Why should I pay for it when I can steal it?"

"Oh, Cole, no!"

"I was joking! C'mon, Ma, if I stole it, do you think I'd wait around to get it gift-wrapped?"

She relaxed back onto the pillows and held the mirror up to study her face. With girlish embarrassment, she confessed, "I used to be very proud of how pretty I was, did you know that?"

"You're still pretty. Listen, Ma. Things are going to get a whole lot better in a couple years after I get out of college. I've got big plans, and Cal thinks they'll happen if I want them bad enough to work hard. In a few years, I'll build you a special house out at Cal's place—one that's made of stone and cedar with lots of windows—and I'll put it over on the side of that hill with big porches all around it, so you can sit up there and look out all day."

She seemed to press back into the pillows as if she were trying to hide, her fingers clutching at his arm. "Don't go dreaming dreams! When they don't come true, that's when you end up like your pa. That's why he's like he is. He used to have dreams."

"I'm not him!" Cole said, appalled by her reaction. "I'm nothing like him." The only time his father ever talked about "dreams" was when he was looking for an excuse to go on a drunken tirade and he couldn't think of any other reason.

The orange truck died when she turned off the road, and Diana left it there and walked, picking her way through deep ruts that constituted a driveway. She saw Cole ten minutes later when she rounded a sharp bend—a tall, solitary man standing with his shoulders squared, completely motionless except for a breeze that ruffled his hair. A few steps more and she had a clear view of her husband's birthplace, the home of his youth. What she saw made Diana feel like retching. She'd expected something unappealing; she hadn't been prepared for squalor. The house was a rotting wooden shanty that crouched at the base of a hill and was surrounded by broken fences and decades of accumulated litter. In blinding contrast to his surroundings, Cole was immaculately groomed, with brown loafers polished to a mirror shine, pressed khaki slacks, and a pristine white oxford shirt with the cuffs folded back on his tanned arms. He reached behind his neck to massage the muscles at his nape, and his shirt stretched taut across his broad shoulders. Shoulders that Diana wanted to put her arms around and lay her cheek against.

He didn't seem aware that she was there until she was right beside him, and then he said in a dead voice, "You shouldn't have come here." He looked at her then, and Diana swallowed in shock at the transformation. His face was completely expressionless; a face made of stone, with a jaw of iron and eyes of cold steel. And now she understood where that hard core had been forged. It had been here. It had given him the strength to break free of this place. "I had to come," she said simply, watching his face begin to relax as he broke free of the grip of this place. "You had to know I had been here and seen it."

"I see," he replied, his heart aching with tenderness. "And now that you've seen it," he added with an attempt to sound indifferent, "what do you think?" He turned to walk away, expecting her to come with him.

What did she think? In response, Diana did the only thing she could think of to vent her wrath and express her opinion. Looking around on the ground, she picked up a heavy rock and with all the force of her raging animosity, she hurled it. Cole turned to look at the exact moment the rock blasted through the front window. In open-mouthed shock, he stared at her beautiful, irate face and then at the broken window of the hellhole he had lived in. "That," she informed him, daintily dusting off her hands after having thrown a pitch that would have done credit to Sandy Koufax, "is what I think of it."

Cole's shout of laughter exploded louder than the window. In a sudden burst of exuberant freedom, he swooped her up into his arms and tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of flour. "Put me down," she laughed, wriggling.

"Not until you promise."

"Promise what?" she giggled, squirming.

"That you will never, ever, get mad enough to throw anything at me."

"I cannot make a promise I may not keep," she advised him solemnly.

He whacked her on the backside and continued down the road. He started to whistle. She started to laugh.

The merry sounds rolled backward to the hovel he had lived in. The only remaining piece of glass left in the window frame in the house crashed to the dirt floor inside it.

The lighthearted days and passionate nights became a routine during the rest of their stay at Cal's.

When the time to leave arrived, Cal drove them out to the airstrip and watched while the plane took off, his hand lifted in a wave. His heart felt heavy in his chest because they were leaving, but it did not feel weak. It felt very strong.

Diana's heart did not feel quite as strong when Cole left her at her apartment so that he could continue on to Washington. "I miss you already," she said. "This two-city living arrangement isn't going to work."

Cole tipped her chin up. "We'll work things out in a couple of days, as soon as I get things settled in Washington. The time in between will pass very quickly."

She furrowed her forehead. "How can you say that?"

"I'm trying to convince both of us."

"It isn't working."

Cole crushed her against his length. "I know."

"Don't forget to call me."

He smiled at that absurdity and held her tighter. "How could I possibly forget to call you, darling?"