The Couple Most Likely To. Lilian Darcy

      The sound of sudden angry tears from one of the children stopped the cryptic conversation in its tracks. Nancy glanced over to where a junior staff member was trying without success to resolve a conflict between two four-year-olds. She gave a resigned exclamation. “I’d better deal with this one.”

      Stacey took a breath and turned back to Jake. “ID card first, then the tour?”

      “It’s your call.”

      “Let’s do it that way. The laminating machine acts up sometimes, and it’s already after four on a Friday afternoon. If we have to call the maintenance department to—” She realized she was papering over the tension between them with a level of tedious detail he didn’t remotely need, and stopped.

      What were Ella and Max doing?

      They were absorbed in their play, she saw. She resisted the need to give them another hug and a whole lot of I-love-you-I’ll-miss-you messages. She always tried to let them leave without too much fuss when they went for their weekends with John, because it wouldn’t be good for them to guess how reluctant she was to have them go. But, oh, it was hard.

      What had Jake seen in her face?

      “Are you finding this a little harder than you expected?” he asked quietly, opening the day-care center door for her. “Meeting up again, I mean.”

      “Yes,” she admitted honestly. “You haven’t changed, and yet…”

      “We must be reaching middle age. That’s when people start telling each other that they look exactly the way they did in high school, even though it was half a lifetime ago. You do, though, Stacey. You look really good.”

      “Thanks. So do you.”

      Her movement past him brought them close. For a moment, she felt his body heat. His male strength seemed to pull on her like a magnet. Her ex-husband was slighter in build, and Jake himself had been slighter seventeen years ago. This close, she wasn’t used to such a powerful contrast between a man’s body and her own. It unsettled her way more than she wanted, as did the faint scent of spice and musk that hovered around him.

      “It has been a long time,” she added. “H-how are you doing?”

      “Good. I’m doing great. I’m real good. I’m good.”

      Jake heard himself repeat his answer to Stacey Handley’s simple question not once but a full three times and wondered what the hell his problem was.

      Stacey seemed rattled, too, although less rattled than he felt. Her reference to being in touch over his employment contract told him that she must have known he would be starting here, while he’d had no clue that he would be seeing her. Filling in short-term for a colleague in Seattle, he’d landed in an overworked ob-gyn practice. When he’d applied for the position at Portland General he’d thrown most of the necessary paperwork at one of the practice’s admin staff, merely scrawling his signature a few times.

      Encountering Stacey in the day-care center felt like an ambush. His heart still beat faster. His head still spun.

      By mutual unworded agreement, he and Stacey had lost touch with each other years ago. He wasn’t surprised to find she was still in Portland but it was a definite jolt to learn that they’d be working under the same roof. They’d been through too much together to dismiss each other as long-ago high school classmates after a couple of polite questions about kids and careers. They’d defined each other’s lives through the choices that had driven them apart, with anger and guilt on both sides.

      It was a jolt to see her, all right.

      As if he didn’t have enough emotional stuff to grapple with, thanks to Jillian Logan’s determination to heal the decades-long rift between her family and his. He remembered almost every word of Jillian’s approach to him at the medical conference in Seattle several months ago—that stuff about healing and forgiveness, about doing what was right, not what was easy—but was she being naive? Theory could be a lot easier than practice.

      Accepting an ob-gyn position at Portland General would be seen by Jillian’s parents as an incredibly provocative gesture on Jake’s part if he and the other members of the younger generation couldn’t convince Uncle Terrence and Aunt Leslie that his intentions were good. Lawrence and Terrence Logan had turned their differing approaches to life into a chasm that had divided the two branches of the family for thirty years. The long-ago kidnapping of Uncle Terrence and Aunt Leslie’s eldest son Robbie had only made the chasm wider.

      “Let’s go to my office and get it all sorted out,” Stacey said, and for a horrible moment he thought she was proposing to go over the old ground from their own emotional past, and confront each other with all those things they’d never said to each other at the time.

      Then he realized she was still talking about the damned ID card.

      They passed through a couple of corridors, a lobby, an elevator. He didn’t take any of it in. Had the vague impression of new paint smell and pristine decor which told him the place had very recently been redecorated and remodeled, but realized as Stacey opened her office door that he’d have no idea how to find the departments he needed on Monday.

      They were taking a tour in a few minutes, of course, so it didn’t matter.

      This would mean more awkward time to spend in each other’s company, which mattered more.

      “Okay, photo first, so if you want to freshen up a little…I mean, you look fine. No spinach between your teeth.” Stacey fiddled nervously with the digital camera, and in the enclosed space of her office the awkwardness bounced back and forth between them and seemed to magnify itself.

      He had a sudden memory of the time they’d gone to one of those automatic photo booths to get pictures taken for their passports. They’d been planning to spend a year in Europe between high school and college, using a couple of different exchange programs to see places in more depth. They’d both been excited about it.

      Imagine. Three months digging up Roman ruins in Italy, as volunteer interns on an archeological site. Six weeks of intensive language lessons in Spain. Picking grapes, staying in cheap hotels, eating where the locals ate, making new friends. They’d gotten the passport pictures, then gone back into the booth to take some more, just for fun. They’d made faces into the camera, standing with heads close together, arms around each other, big, wide smiles.

      Oh, lord, it seemed like so long ago!

      Was Stacey Handley in any way the same person now?

      Was he?

      When she’d gotten pregnant with Anna she’d abandoned all those plans and dreams as if they’d never existed, and had revealed a hometown-girl side to her personality that had stifled and frightened him.

      He’d wanted Stacey.

      He wanted to go off into the sunset with her, hand in hand forever.

      But the going off part was important. He didn’t want to settle into marriage and a baby and spend the rest of their dull, suburban lives in Portland. They planned their wedding, but he had to hide how trapped he felt.

      And then they’d lost Anna at twenty weeks’ gestation. The doctors had called it a miscarriage, although having gone through labor and delivery on the maternity floor right here at this hospital, both he and Stacey had felt it was a stillbirth. No baby could live when it was born at twenty weeks. They didn’t know why it had happened. Sometimes, things like this just did.

      Distraught, Stacey had wanted to name the tiny baby and he had agreed. It was important. It was necessary.

      To this day, he thought of her as Anna. Little Anna. He never helped a patient through the loss of a baby without remembering. Anna Handley Logan. Their lost daughter.

      She would have been almost seventeen by now if she’d lived.

      But she hadn’t.

      So Jake had gotten what he wanted. The burden of a settled, responsible