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“I’m glad he thinks so,” Annie said uneasily.

“Is that really why you’re so upset?” Helen asked, probing gently.

“I’m just…just upset, that’s all. Just out of sorts and far from home. Don’t you ever feel like you don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Oh, only eighty or ninety percent of the time,” Helen said.

They grinned at one another. Seeing Helen’s genuine smile made Annie feel a bit better.

The hot chocolate was delicious, and eventually Zach fell back to sleep. Annie watched drowsily as Helen took his empty bottle, picked him up, and put him back in his crib. Annie moved to get up, but Helen stopped her. “Stay a little longer, would you?”

Annie lay down on the bed and curled up onto her side, her head on her arm.

“I’m going to have to give him back soon,” Helen said, peering down into the crib. “His mother will get clean, and the state will return him to her. They always give the mother another chance.”

“Maybe you’ll get him back again,” Annie said sleepily.

“Maybe so. But I’ll have to undo the damage all over again, and he’s older now.” Helen went to the other side of the bed and lay down, her arms resting under her head. “It’ll only get harder.”

“How’d you get him in the first place?” Annie asked, letting her eyes close. “I mean, as a single parent.”

“Bruce and I applied together,” Helen said. “At first, I didn’t tell them he was gone, and then when the social worker figured it out, she decided he was doing so well that… Anyway, I have afriend in Social Services so I… I don’t usually work outside of the system, but he’s such a good kid.”

“I would’ve done the same thing,” Annie said reassuringly.

But then what wouldn’t Annie do if she thought it was in her own best interest?

* * *

The next time her pager went off, Annie was in the middle of a midterm. The only sound in the room was the scribbling of pens in blue books, and even though she’d figured out how to keep the device from beeping, it still vibrated loudly enough from inside her backpack that several heads popped up and swiveled around, looking for the source of the sound.

“Sorry,” she murmured, digging in her backpack and pulling out the pager. She didn’t recognize the number; she never did. She didn’t even know the number to the pager to give out if someone asked for it. She pushed buttons until the buzzing stopped. She had one rule, and it was not to be paged during class time.

She dropped the pager into her backpack and picked up her pen.

It went off again two minutes later.

“Problem, Miss Weaver?” her professor asked.

“Nope,” she said, silencing it again. This time, she stuck it down her shirt, nestling it against her skin in the soft cup of her bra. At least if it went off again, her body would absorb the sound.

Five minutes later, it buzzed. She ignored it.

She had one more paragraph to write and a conclusion, then she’d be done anyway.

Someone knocked on the classroom door. The professor looked up, perplexed. The door opened, and Deb stuck her head in.

“I’m sorry, Greg, but is… Oh yeah, there she is. Annie? Honey? There’s a call for you at the desk.”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something here,” she said. “Can you take a message?”

“They said it’s an emergency,” Deb said with a shrug.

For a moment she panicked, thinking of her parents, her brother, her niece, Helen and Kevin and Ashley and Zach. But then she remembered the buzzing pager. She smiled at Deb. “I’ll be just a moment.”

She scribbled out a half-assed ending to her essay and tossed her pen into her backpack. Everyone was still watching her as she closed her blue book, kicked her chair in, and tossed her essay onto her professor’s desk.