Author's Note: Hey, guys-I'm sorry it's taking so long to get back to Josh and Donna. I've gotten myself into a bind with the timing: I can't take you back to Josh talking to Sally until I finish up the stuff that has to happen before that. I'll try to get through it as quickly as possible. At least Donna shows up in the backstory here. . . .

Chapter 11:

For a moment, Noah had no idea what had happened. One minute he'd been stretched out on the floor of the back seat under a lot of shopping bags; the next he was draped across a strange woman's lap, staring up into her face. Sabrina stared back at him, shocked into silence. Max hadn't even looked over at her yet; his whole attention was focused on his crumpled car. "Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, fuck," he was muttering over and over, though not as loudly as before.

Sabrina made a gurgling noise that turned into, "What . . .? Who . . .? How . . .?" She didn't seem able to finish any of the thoughts.

Noah's mind finally clicked into focus. He saw the door handle beside him, reached for it, tugged it open, and tumbled out into the snow. The woman grabbed at him as he went, but all she could get a grip on was his hat.

Noah scrambled to his feet, hatless, and started to run. He saw trees ahead of him, woods, and headed for them, guessing he'd have a better chance of getting away from these people there than out in the open on the road.

He was still clutching the battered copy of Cat's book.

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Cat was beginning to feel a little forlorn. She was cold. Stamping her feet and jumping around wasn't helping much anymore. Pirates don't feel forlorn, she told herself. But that reminded her that Mrs. Maxwell had taken Swallows and Amazons away from her that morning. When teachers did things like that, you could usually count on getting your book, toy, whatever it was that had annoyed them, back at the end of the day. Knowing Mrs. Maxwell, Cat wasn't sure that she was ever going to see her book again. Sabrina was as likely to toss it in the first trash bin she came to as she was to give it back.

Cat still didn't know what she'd done wrong. She'd just been sitting there in the car-the little Kia the Maxwells had got her mother to do errands in-and reading, while her mother fussed over the Maxwell's baby, getting him out of his seat to take into the house, while Mrs. Maxwell was telling Mariana what she wanted her to do that afternoon, and trying to be heard over his yells.

Usually the Maxwells liked Cat to keep quiet and out of the way. When she wasn't at school, she spent as much time as she could out of the house, and when she had to be inside she stayed in the little room she shared with her mother, stretched out on the bed, reading. Whenever she did have to be in the same room as Mrs. Maxwell, she kept her head down and the woman ignored her.

But this time Mrs. Maxwell hadn't ignored her. Tyler had been howling, and all of a sudden Mrs. Maxwell had started yelling, too. She'd screamed that Cat was a useless little brat who never did anything to help. And then she'd snatched the book out of Cat's hand, and for a moment Cat had thought she was going to get slapped across the face. Mrs. Maxwell had stopped herself just in time. Then she'd gasped that she couldn't take all this anymore, and she'd jumped into the Jag and zoomed off down the driveway and away.

She'd come back a couple of hours later, Cat knew, but only to pick up Mr. Maxwell so they could go out to lunch. She hadn't given the book back. Cat really wasn't sure she would.

She wouldn't have minded so much if it had been something else-Cat's sandwich at lunch, or an ice-cream, or something. But Cat didn't own very many books. She loved every one the way another child might have loved a doll or a stuffed toy. They were her friends, her companions in distress, her magic keys to other worlds that were much more interesting and satisfying and fun than anything in the real world she'd ever known. Anything except the time she'd shared with Noah, and she wouldn't have had that without the book.

Cat had been a very early reader. With nothing else to do at home she'd mastered the art of getting through a long story, figuring out strange words and situations in the library books her mother borrowed, by the time most children were just beginning to learn their abc's. Her mother had found this book in a discard pile outside a used-book store in the city, and had brought it home to her.

From the moment she'd opened it, Cat had fallen in love. The book showed her children doing things she'd never imagined that life could include: sailing and camping and having adventures together in a big group of other children, some of them brothers and sisters, some just friends. They seemed very real to Cat. They weren't perfect, but they were nice in a way her small heart longed for: fair to each other, taking care of each other, and having so much more fun together than Cat had ever had with anyone in all her short life.

Living the way she did, Cat hadn't had a chance to make any friends. The other kids she met either teased her or ignored her. It didn't help that she was so much smarter than they were, though she herself wouldn't have identified the problem that way-not when she was four, anyway. She just knew that she didn't seem to have anything in common with other children she met, that she didn't like them much, and they certainly didn't like her.

It got worse when she started school. She might not have survived that, if she hadn't made one real friend by then.

She'd met Noah on the beach, the summer they were both four. The Maxwells always brought Mariana to Maine to look after things for them, and Cat of course came too. Tyler hadn't been born then, so her mother wasn't so busy, and during the summer she would get her work done in the morning and then they'd go to the beach together. Mariana would sit on a blanket and watch her daughter build sandcastles and play at the edge of the water.

Noah's mother did the same thing. She had a baby, a little curly-haired girl who was only one, so she was always playing with her, and keeping an eye from a distance while Noah amused himself farther off.

Both mothers were happy when their children found another child to play with on the beach. Mariana noticed when Cat started playing with the same boy every day, but she was far too shy to approach the boy's mother and try to start a conversation. Sometimes they saw each other and smiled or waved, and once in a while they exchanged a few words, but it never went beyond that.

Donna noticed Cat and Mariana, too, but she never sought Mariana out or got to know her. The extraordinary business of becoming famous for what Cliff Calley had threatened to do to her and what Josh had done to save her from it, of having a video of the worst hours of her life go viral and be seen by millions of people around the world and then having a movie made about them that was seen by millions more, had made Donna a little shy about talking to strangers. She was approached by so many of them that whenever she could avoid interactions with people she didn't know, she did.

She'd agreed to the movie, of course-had actually been more excited by the idea than Josh had been-but she hadn't realized then just how strange it would feel to have everyone she met recognize her and think they knew everything about her. And then when Josh became a U.S. Senator, there was another whole layer of fame added on for her to deal with-especially when she was in Maine.

She had plenty of good friends from her earlier life, and plenty of contact with other mothers at Noah's schools and programs. She made the effort to make playdates and get to know other families during the school year for his sake, but in the summer she let herself take a break from all that. She took the children to the public beach because she knew Noah needed company his own age, but she was happy just to sit in the sun and play with Sally, feeling the wind on her face and listening to the crash of the surf against the shore, knowing that her son was happily occupied close enough by that she could be sure he was safe, and yet far enough away that he could have some of the freedom he was beginning to need.

The first day they met, Cat hadn't thought Noah was going to be a friend. He'd come up to the castle she'd been building in the wet sand just beyond the waves, and she'd thought he was going to kick it over, like the other boys would.

"Don't you dare touch this," she'd growled at him. "It's a pirate's castle, and the pirates will get you if you do."

"I wasn't going to," he'd protested. And then he'd said, "What kind of pirates?"

"Amazon pirates," she'd said, because she'd already read Swallows and Amazons by then.

"Why Amazon?" he'd asked, because he hadn't. But he made his mother stop at the bookstore in the village on the way home that day, and they'd actually had the book in stock. (He never knew what a lucky stroke that was. The owner had a great fondness for English children's books in general, and Arthur Ransome's in particular.)

Noah was well into the book when they went to the beach the next afternoon. By the end of the week, he'd finished it.

He and Cat played together every chance they got after that. The glaciated rocks that jutted out into the water became their boats, their tents, their pirate havens. And when they said good-bye at the end of the summer, they knew that they were going to be counting the days before they could get together again.

Even at four, they had both had enough experience to know that a good friend was hard to find-especially when you were as unlike anyone else you met as Noah was, or Cat.

Now, four years later, Cat was waiting to see Noah at the bandstand in the park. He'd said his family always came there to see Santa on Christmas Eve. He'd promised honest pirate, so she knew he wouldn't let anything keep him away. She just wished he'd hurry up; she was getting so cold.

She went back to bouncing from one foot to the other, her hands dug deep in her pockets, the right one closed around the little package she had there for him.

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"What the fuck was that?" Max said.

"I don't know."

"It was a kid."

"No kidding." Sabrina wasn't trying to be funny, and Max didn't smile.

"How the hell did he get into the car?"

"I. DON'T. KNOW." Sabrina thought she was starting to hyper-ventilate. This was one of the most terrible days she'd ever had, almost as bad as going into labor with Tyler three days before her scheduled C-section had been.

Noah had landed on her with considerable force; she was feeling bruised and battered, as well as extremely hungry. She should have been eating François Gagnon's oysters and caviar by now. And she'd already had a terrible morning: Tyler crying and crying and not shutting up, and that girl just sitting there, not doing anything to help, her nose buried in her stupid book the way it always was. She was such a strange kid; she gave Sabrina the creeps. But Mariana was too good a bargain to let go. They could actually pay her less because of the girl-there weren't many employers who'd be willing to have the brat around all the time like that. Sometimes Sabrina thought she couldn't stand having her around any longer, though, and today had been one of those days.

"He must have been going to steal something. The car-there must be a gang of thieves, they put him into the car so he could open it up for them later. Maybe Gagnon's part of it. We should call the police. That his hat? They can identify him with that. What the hell is the matter with this phone? Oh, fuck it, we're in a dead spot. Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"I don't care about the police. I need something to eat."

"We'll have to get out and walk, then. We can't be too far from the village. I'll call the cops when we get there. And the tow truck, too. Maybe I can say it's the kid's fault we crashed the car. If he's one of Gagnon's, I can get the insurance to go after him for it. Or we could sue."

"If I don't get something to eat soon, I'm going to be sick."

"Well, we'll have to hike for it."

Max was wearing Italian leather shoes. Sabrina had on stiletto-heeled Mario Blahnik boots. They got out of the car and trudged miserably down the side of the highway, Sabrina wobbling on her feet and crying in frustration, and Max cursing all the way.

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