Chapter One

Tami Taylor entered her new job as Dean of Admissions at Braemore College the way she entered everything in life – with a supreme self-confidence and idealistic vision that could only end in an eventual emotional beating.

Her husband watched with tight lips and offered her a strong shoulder when the first few light punches began to make tiny dents in her idealism, and when she came home in tears after her third month at the job, he held her close and told her she was going to pull through.

"I'm probably going to end up fired!" she muttered into his chest where they lay in their new queen bed in their small master bedroom. Braemore hadn't precisely set them up "college style" as Tami promised him, unless you were thinking first-year dorms when you thought "college style."

Her employer had given her a "housing expense" of $200 a month to "make up for the price differential," but the Taylors had found housing prices in Philadelphia to be 2.5 times as high as those in Dillon. Even with the two full-time jobs, they hadn't upgraded their dewelling. Besides, they were still helping Julie with college, if by "helping" you meant paying her full tuition and fees.

If anything, the new house was slightly smaller and certainly older than the house in Dillon had been. Their two-story, three-bedroom Philadelphia affair was thirty-six years old, and the floorboards of the front porch needed repainting. Eric was "getting around to it," just as he was "getting around" to putting up a fence so Gracie wouldn't wander off into the woods and creek that backed up against their lot. At least they had a little land, and the neighborhood was relatively safe, and they were zoned for a good elementary school. They'd have to move by the time Gracie reached 7th grade, however, because Tami had already deemed the junior high to be subpar.

"That's ridiculous," Eric told her now. "You're not going to end up fired because you lost one file."

"I should never have asked you to move."

"I'm doing fine with the Pioneers." Eric had entered his new job the way he entered everything in life – with caution and a slight concern that he might not be able to achieve what he wanted to achieve. And, as usual, he'd outperformed his own expectations and begun to revise those expectations in the process, with Tami's encouragement. His confidence was ballooning while hers was deflating.

"You still hate it here," she reminded him.

His arms tightened around her. "I'll get used to it."

"The committee rejects half the applicants I pull hardest for!"

"Well…" Eric replied cautiously, "that means they accept half, right? There's a limit to how many they can take, right?"

Tami knew what it was like to get a second chance in life, and she wanted to hand out a few more second chances. "Yeah, but…they said they wanted to hire me because of my ideas, because they were tired of the status quo, but they're still afraid to give up their admissions formulas. Why did they hire me if they don't want to listen to my advice?"

"That's how I felt half the time when I was an assistant coach."

"Well I'm not the assistant dean," she insisted, rolling away from him and onto her back. "I'm the Dean."

He propped himself up on one elbow and kissed her frowning lips. "You'll shake 'em up eventually, Dean Taylor. You always do." Then he lay his head down beside hers and turned his eyes up at her. "You're tense, babe. Want me to help relax you?"

She snorted. "I'm not in the mood to relax. But with a massage….I might get there."

[FNL]

Dean Taylor found the missing file. She'd accidentally shoved it in Gracie's backpack when she was getting her ready for preschool one morning. She'd been a bit frazzled and pressed for time that morning, because Eric was supposed to drop Gracie off, and he'd had to leave early for work at the last minute for an "emergency meeting" with his assistant coaches. It had something to do with an impending change in eligibility requirements. Tami didn't know. She went to his games, but she didn't follow his coaching adventures as closely as she would have in Dillon. Pemberton wasn't the town high school here, it was just one of 49, and she never had reason to set foot in it. No one talked about high school football in the grocery store check-out line. They never interrupted the national news with the local high school football scores. The Pioneers stadium had less seating than the Dillon Junior High stadium.

She was putting the newfound file in her office cabinet when there was knock at her door. Tami had a panel interview, but not for another thirty minutes. The candidate looked intriguing – he wanted to get a master's in English, but he'd only maintained a 2.0 average in his English minor in undergraduate school. He'd majored in math, and in that subject he'd earned a 3.84. His choice to pursue graduate studies in English rather than math therefore intrigued her. He'd also taken six years to get through college, working his own way through.

She opened the door to see a young, auburn-haired man with blue-green eyes. She'd gotten pretty good at determining the ages of college and graduate students, and she'd put this kid at 23, maybe 24. She observed he was well built and good-looking, but she didn't notice it in a creepy, cougarish sort of way. It was simply a factual observation on her part.

Clearly her secretary had already gone to lunch (Tami was supposed to be grabbing lunch herself) or this young man would not have made it to her door. "May I help you?"

"I'm Josh Sanderson. You're interviewee?"

"Your appointment isn't for another thirty minutes, honey. The panel isn't assembled."

"Dean Taylor, I was hoping I could speak to you alone for a moment."

Tami sighed. She'd been warned that students who were rejected would seek her out to beg for second chances, but she hadn't expected them to come to her before they'd even been interviewed. "That's not really proper protocol. The whole panel has –"

"- I'm withdrawing my application anyway. I just wanted to talk to you."

"What?"

He motioned inward into her office. "Please?"

When he was seated opposite her desk, Josh let his hands rest nervously on the knees of his jeans and swallowed.

"Now why would you want to withdraw your application?" she asked him.

"I got a job offer as a math teacher at a private high school. They don't need me to be certified or anything. But…I really only applied in the first place because I wanted to meet you."

"Meet me?" Now this was a peculiar turn of events.

Josh shifted in his chair. "My mom died recently. Before she died…she told me I was adopted. So, I got curious, you know?"

For some reason, Tami's mind turned to that moment four years ago when she and Eric sat on the couch, waiting for their fifteen-year-old daughter to come home, hoping Julie hadn't leapt into sex too soon. Back then, Tami was relieved to the point of tears to learn Julie hadn't.

And then Dean Taylor's memories flitted to a day when she sat in a parked car with Julie, who had at the time been chasing that dark-haired Swede. The Swede had humiliated Julie, and so Tami confessed to her about how, when she was fifteen, she had gone to a party and had sex with a boy and thought it meant something, only to find that the next day the boy acted like he didn't even know her.

That was two years before Tami's mother had sent her to live with her uncle in North Dillon, two years before she'd met Eric. Tami had been humiliated far more than Julie had been humiliated by the Swede (Julie hadn't slept with the boy, thank God). Tami had wanted her daughter to know it was possible to pick yourself up and move on from anything. But she hadn't told Julie the whole story. She hadn't told her daughter about the difficult decision and all the regret and pain that had followed.

"So I did some research, you know?" Josh said. He raised his eyes to meet hers.

Tami's head felt unexpectedly light headed. It was November, but the room was hot. The room was definitely hot. So hot Tami thought maybe she was going to faint.

"And…" the young man said, his voice trembling a little, then shoring up – "I think you're my biological mother."

Tami gripped the edge of her desk. "But….those records were sealed."