DIANA DROVE HOME WITHOUT ANY CONSCIOUS EFFORT OR any awareness of doing so. At eleven, she was still sitting in the same chair, her legs tucked beneath her, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and spread over her lap to ward off a chill that had turned her hands to ice and made her shiver convulsively.

Corey was calling every fifteen minutes. Diana let the answering machine pick up because she could not move.

Cole was not calling at all.

She was incapable of shedding a single tear or of throwing up another time. She was completely empty.

Cole was not calling at all.

At eleven-fifteen, Corey called again, and this time she wasn't worried, she was frantic and angry. "Diana, if you don't pick up the phone right now, I'm coming over."

Diana actually made an effort to answer it, but Corey had already hung up. She arrived with Spence in record time and used her key to get into Diana's apartment.

"Diana?" Corey said soothingly, approaching her with great caution, Diana noticed—as if they both thought Diana had gone insane. Spence crouched down in front of her, handsome and caring. "Diana," he said gently.

"What did Charles Hayward say to you, honey?"

Corey crouched beside him, clutching his shoulder tightly, a brace against whatever hideous thing they were about to hear that had reduced Diana to such a mindless state.

Diana looked at both of them. "Oh," she said thoughtfully, "he said Cole molested Barbara and got her pregnant and Barbara had an abortion. Now she can't have any more children and that's why she's always been so unstable."

"Whaat!" Corey exploded, shooting to her feet.

Diana's gaze automatically followed her motion, and she tipped her head back. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Isn't that amazing?"

"—'Amazing'?" Corey said, shooting a hesitant look at Spence as he slowly stood up beside her. "Is that what you think it is?"

It happened then, the thing that Diana had subconsciously feared for hours—she started to laugh and she couldn't stop. "Cole wouldn't have laid a hand on Barbara! He lived in daily fear of us coming on to him. Remember how hard we all worked to get him to notice us?"

"I remember," Corey admitted, but her brows remained pulled together in a watchful frown.

"It's so funny… so hideously funny."

"Is it? Funny?" Corey said cautiously, but she was beginning to believe Diana was thinking far more clearly than she'd first imagined when she saw her curled up in that chair.

"Yes, it is!" Diana said, nodding emphatically. "It's hilarious. I know, because I was the one who kept the bets."

"What bets?"

"The bets!" she laughed. "Everyone, including Barbara, put money into a box, and the first one to get Cole to kiss her was the winner." Diana laughed harder. "I was the treasurer. And no one won!" Suddenly she turned her face into the chair and the laughter turned to wrenching sobs. "No one won!" she sobbed. "They're destroying him… and no one ever won!"