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“Of course I was afraid.”

Margaret Chase Smith seemed surprised by the question. “I had such butterflies in my stomach, I didn’t think I could actually go through to the end of the speech.”

“Then why? Why stick your neck out like that?”

Why ever stick your neck out like that?

“Because something had to be done about that man,”

Senator Smith replied. “And no one else seemed likely to do it.”

“But he’s still here. Wreaking havoc.”

“He won’t always be,”

said the senator from Maine. “His time is coming to an end; he just doesn’t know it. Now, if you’ll take those minutes back to MissHaskell—”

Claire obeyed, thinking that for the first time, she knew why MissHaskell and MissWing were lifers here. Because for every McCarthy this country threw at you, it also threw a Margaret Chase Smith. And by god, when you found one, you backed her up because she was going to find herself in a lot of tight corners.

Her words kept echoing through Claire’s mind, all day.

Something had to be done about that man.

Something had to be done.

“Mrs.Sutherland isn’t home,”

the housekeeper told Claire when she came by the Georgetown house with some flimsy excuse of gloves she had been asked to drop off. “She’s at the family home in Virginia, recovering from a minor car accident.”

Car accident , Claire thought. Of course the Sutherland family would need an excuse for why Sydney was battered head to toe. The wife plowed her Packard into a lamppost; women drivers, eh? sounded so much better to your future congressional colleagues than I beat her to a pulp when she found out I was a war criminal .

Claire mumbled some platitude and retreated from those immaculate front steps. After that, it took nearly a month of telephone calls—one a week, pretending to be a club chairwoman or a secretary for a fundraiser—before Claire finally heard the words she’d been waiting for: “Yes, Mrs.Sutherland is back in the District; may I take a message? She’s at the park with her son at the moment.”

Sydney should have been at one of the nice Georgetown parks, the ones with endlessly green grass even in October, where you saw more nannies pushing expensive baby carriages than actual mothers. But Sydney had come to Prospect Park just down the street from Briarwood House, of course she had—when Claire came dashing through the gates, there Sid was, poised and exquisite on a park bench in a scarlet swing coat and black patent pumps, watching her son chase ducks around the pond. So beautiful she brought Claire to a stop on the path with a feeling like she’d been kicked in the chest. How did I think I could know you without loving you?

“Gentle with those ducks, Bear!”

Sydney was calling to her son. “Be a teddy bear, not a grizzly bear. Soft paws—”

Demonstrating with a mock growl. Her face didn’t have even the hint of a bruise anymore, Claire saw, but if you knew her well you’d realize she was moving just a hair stiffly. As though her ribs still hurt, even if they no longer bore boot prints. And Claire nearly doubled over on the path with hatred for that gleaming bastard with his Yale vowels and his teeth and his Bronze Star. She’d have sunk him in the Prospect Park pond if she could, held him under until he stopped breathing and never lost a wink of sleep.

But she wasn’t going to think about Barrett Sutherland now. She took a deep breath, hands in her pockets against the growing autumn chill, and came up to Sydney’s bench. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

“Looking for a strawberry patch.”

Sydney smiled, but something had gone out of it—some essential, effervescent light. Claire wanted to weep, she wanted to reach out and pull Sydney’s head against her breast, but she couldn’t do any of those things. Instead she sat down on the bench at Sydney’s side.

“I missed you,”

she said in a low voice.

“I missed you, too.”

Claire looked at the triple strand of black pearls around Sydney’s long neck. “Nice rocks.”

Sydney stretched her chin upward a little as though the necklace were a noose. “Barrett likes to deliver his apologies via Cartier,”

she said tonelessly. “By now they should offer me a promotional: every fourth beating, I get free earrings.”

“Sid—”

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

Claire took a deep breath. “Not what I was expecting to hear, I have to admit.”

“Grace was right about something.”

Sydney looked down at her lap, where she was slowly strangling her fur-trimmed gloves. “Barrett’s never yet hit me so hard he didn’t care who knew it. But if he ever finds out about you, he will. And then he’ll come for you.”

She looked up, endless lashes glittering with tears. “I couldn’t ever bear it if he hurt you, too.”

“So you’ll just let him hurt you instead? Forever?”

“If that’s what it takes to protect Bear.”

Sydney’s voice was so flat, so dead. “I don’t know how to get Bear away, so I have to stay to protect him. And I can’t protect him and you.”

Sydney looked out over the duck pond. “Better go, Claire.”

There was a small, ugly part of Claire that wanted to. Walk away from this damaged, doomed woman and the trouble she brought in her wake; be selfish; stick to the plan Claire had clung to since she was sixteen. Look out for herself and no one else, because love was for suckers and happiness meant a well-stocked bank account and a house you bought cash in hand, not the gorgeous uncertainty of a woman’s smile.

Instead she reached into her bag, took out her worn bankbook with its precisely ruled lines, and placed it in Sydney’s hand. “Run away with me.”

Sydney stared. “What?”

“You can’t get away from Barrett because you have no money. I have money.”

Pointing at the balance. It had just tipped over the eight thousand mark a week ago. A moment she’d been anticipating since she was sixteen, but she’d been too sick with worry over Sydney to do more than blink dully at the milestone as it dropped in her lap. “We’ll leave together, you and me and Bear. Take a train to California or Florida, somewhere with blue water for my Bermuda girl.”

“He’ll find us, he—”

“He won’t find us! It’s a big country, Sid—if we take new names, get new IDs, stay out of the limelight, he’ll never find us.”

New names and papers to match wouldn’t be cheap, but she’d throw the whole eight thousand on the fire if it gave Sydney safety. “We’ll leave the country if we have to.”

“Even if he’d let me go, he’d never let Bear go. He’d never stop looking—”

“Isn’t that a risk worth taking, if it means your son won’t grow up in that house and turn out just like his father?”

Claire couldn’t stop herself seizing Sydney’s hands then. “You’ll pass as a widow, and I’ll be your sister-in-law who moved in with you after my brother died in the war, to help raise your son. No one will blink, believe me. We’ll be a family.”

Some part of her wondered if she’d gone completely crazy. Claire Hallett had gone from wanting no one, needing no one, to going down on one knee for a woman with a child in tow. “We’ll empty my savings and hock your jewelry; it’ll be enough for a future together.”

Sydney was shaking her head. “You’ve gone completely mad.”

“No, what’s completely mad is staying with that man until he kills you,”

Claire cried. “You have to get away. You have to get your son away. Come away with me .”

Maybe it wouldn’t work. The Sutherland family had money and connections; they could rally the newspapers and mount a manhunt. They probably would. But surely there was some quiet corner in this huge country where two women could hide, and live, and love. Surely with eight thousand dollars in the bank, they had a chance of finding it.

“Claire,”

Sydney began.

“Mama!”

Bear Sutherland came barreling up, hair mussed, hands reverently cupped. “Look what I found! The biggest snail you ever saw—”

He pointed out the snail’s retracting horns, the bands on the whorled shell, as Claire got her hitching breath back under control.

“It’s a very nice snail, Teddy Bear,”

Sydney said in a strangled voice. “Be very careful putting it back.”

“I’ll put it in the bushes, so it doesn’t get stepped on.”

Bear looked at Claire with his huge sunny smile. “Hi, MissClaire!”

“Hi, sport.”

Managing some kind of smile.

“My daddy says Mama can take me trick-or-treating this Halloween! I’m going as the Lone Ranger...”

Bear chattered about his costume, as Sydney’s hand stole out to smooth his dark hair and Claire’s shoulders still hitched with stifled tears. He really was a nice kid. How many little boys would have picked the snail up like a jewel, rather than stepping on it just to hear the crunch?

“I’ll never be able to get away,”

Sydney whispered as soon as Bear zoomed off still cradling the snail. “Not with Bear. I’m not allowed to take him out of school without his father’s permission, and if I so much as take him out for a walk Barrett wants to know exactly when we’ll be back. The housekeeper keeps tabs on me; she telephones Barrett if I’m late anywhere —”

“Halloween night,”

Claire said. “You’re already taking Bear trick-or-treating; that’ll buy you a few hours. As soon as the two of you go round the corner and out of sight, hail a cab straight for Union Station. I’ll take care of everything else, you just tell Bear that Tonto and the Lone Ranger are going on an adventure.”

For an endless, agonizing moment Sydney was silent, gnawing off her Revlon Cherries in the Snow lipstick, watching her son careen around the duck pond.

“Come with me,”

Claire pleaded. “We’ll live in an apartment with too-thin walls and have to make love in complete silence so the neighbors don’t hear. You’ll learn to cook on a hot plate and I’ll teach you to make Polish potato pancakes. We’ll drop Bear off at school in the morning and then go to the beach, and maybe the water won’t be as blue as it is in Bermuda, but I’ll wear that ridiculous two-piece suit you bought me.”

“Claire—”

Sydney’s eyes were brimming. “Do you know who you’re taking on? My husband would crush you if—”

“So?”

Thinking of Senator Smith’s clear gaze, the way she’d faced down a bully simply because something had to be done . Now Claire looked Sydney in the eye and said, “You and your child have rights. Just because your husband holds all the cards doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to protest. The right of independent thought. The right to call your goddamn soul your own.”

Sydney’s tears overflowed. “The right to a second chance?”

“This is the land of second chances, Sid!”

Claire heard Grace’s words fall out of her mouth and realized she believed them. She might have lost her childhood faith that it was the land of opportunity, but second chances? Yes. Opportunities were things that fell in your lap, but second chances had to be fought for—and you could always reinvent yourself in this country, if you were willing to claw your way toward a new path. You could always reinvent yourself, if you decided it was worth the fight.

This woman was worth the fight.

“I’m not much, Sid.”

Claire took a deep breath. “I lie and I cheat and I steal, and I’m not even sorry for any of it. God knows what you see in me. I can’t buy you Lanvin dresses or black pearls, and I can’t give you a huge pale green beach house in an island paradise, but I love you. I will take you away from that bastard you married and I will never tell you that you have to lose three pounds or leave off the suntan oil for fear of getting too brown or lay a single finger on you with anything but love. So come away with me. Come away with me, please .”

She sat there with her heart in her throat and her hands trembling, waiting for her entire world to shatter or to take flight. Watched as the faint hunch in Sydney’s long back straightened, as her lips firmed. Sydney looked at her, and there it was, faintly rekindled: the light in those dark eyes that made her so much more than just a pampered Georgetown political wife.

Sydney pushed the bankbook back into Claire’s hand. “Halloween. Union Station. Five o’clock.”