She realized two things that night as she lay with her arms wrapped around Woody.

The first was that she felt powerless to help him. Her mother had been murdered when she was a girl, and the tragedy of it had dragged her down like a dead weight for the past twenty-five years.

Woody had lost his mother, his father, and brother in circumstances that no one should have to suffer. And yet he was determined to bear it all with the same stoicism. She knew it could not be as easy as he wanted it to appear to be.

She wanted to reach into him and find that frightened and broken child that he refused to show her, but she knew that Woody Hoyt had not been allowed to be a child since his mother had died when he was only four, leaving him to raise Cal in the place of a grieving and distant father.

The second thing she learned was that her feelings for him had become confused in the muddle of grief and heartache that flew around her. She had managed to convince herself these last few years that she and Woody were nothing more than friends, the best of friends, but friends nonetheless.

Still, as he had taken her hand in the morgue office it didn't seem quite as clear as that, and now that she held him close to her as his body twisted with heated dreams, it was more unclear than it had ever been.

She waited until he was asleep until slipping away from him. She pulled an old afghan off the sofa and spent a restless night there, replaying the shooting from the night before over and over in her mind.

When she awoke the next morning, she heard him on the phone in the kitchen speaking in hushed tones. She stumbled in sleepily just as he hung up the phone.

"The funeral is the day after tomorrow in Kewaunee," he started quietly. "I've made arrangements with the airlines..." His voice trailed off.

"Oh." It was all she could think to say. She reached out for his arm, but he moved away before she could make contact.

"Coffee's on. I'm going to shave." He brushed past her into the bathroom. A half hour later, he had not returned. she grew worried and tiptoed to the bathroom door.

He stood there gripping the sides of the sink, staring into the mirror. "Woody?"

He flinched and hurriedly picked up his razor. "Do you need to get in here?"

"No." She paused. "If you want to talk..."

"Talking won't change things, Jordan."

"Well, sometimes it..."

"Please, just let me deal with this in my own way, Jordan," he interrupted and turned back to the mirror. "Believe me. I've been through this before."

She nodded and went back into the living room, straightened magazines, emptied the dishwasher, anything to stay busy, until he came back into the room. He stood for a moment in the kitchen with his hands jammed awkwardly in his pockets while she wiped down the counters.

"You don't have to do that, Jordan."

"It's okay. Coffee?"

"Sure."

She poured him a cup, and they both perched in uncomfortable silence on the stools at the kitchen island.

She cleared her throat and began hesitantly. "I was thinking. Maybe I could fly home with you to Kewaunee for the funeral."

He smiled weakly and reached out for her hand. "I'd like that."

XXXXXXXX

Kewaunee was as he had always lovingly described it, she thought on the drive from the airport. As the road twisted up to his Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob's old farmhouse, she thought it all seemed somehow frozen in time fifty years earlier.

Aunt Betty was a stout woman who wore an apron and wept empty, dramatic tears when they walked in the door. She grabbed Woody to her enormous bosom and dabbed at her eyes with a kleenex she kept tucked in the sleeve of her cardigan.

She sent them up to their rooms on the third floor. Woody stopped in front of one of the doors and pushed it open. "This was where Cal and I slept," he said quietly. "After my dad died, Cal and I lived here for a year or so until I graduated from high school." He gave a sad shrug. "Aunt Betty didn't really want us. She had five teenagers of her own to deal with. We were kind of invisible."

She felt her eyes begin to sting with tears, and it was the first of many times her heart split for him in the days that followed.

The funeral was almost unbearable. Woody sat rigid in the front pew. He never let go of Jordan's hand during the Mass. There were a few relatives and one or two of Cal's more reputable friends, but attendance was pitiful.

Later, the family members gathered for dinner at Aunt Betty's house. Jordan found herself with a soggy paper plate of potato salad, wedged on the sofa between two aunts.

"I always knew it would come to this," one aunt clucked. "That Cal was trouble from the get go."

"His parents are rolling in their graves, that's for sure," said the other.

Jordan looked up to see Woody in the doorway with his head dropped in shame. He backed slowly from the room, and then she heard the screen door in the kitchen slam behind him.

She excused herself and followed him out into the back yard. It had flurried earlier that day, dropping a thin white blanket across the farm. The sun had fallen, and the full moon lit the night sky a deep, brilliant blue.

The back yard dipped down through a thicket of trees, and the path led down to a pond at the edge of the farm. Woody was there skittering a stone across the broken crust of ice.

She said nothing but stood silently beside him. "Jordan..." he said without looking at her. "You're going to freeze without your coat." He skimmed another stone onto the pond.

There was a beat as he looked at onto the still water. Finally, he spoke. "We spent Christmas here one year when I was ten. The grown-ups all went to a caroling party and midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Cal had the sniffles, and they left me here all night to take care of him. I was ten. 'Woody can handle it. Woody is responsible,'" he spat sarcastically. "We were watching TV when he sneaked out of the house. When I noticed he was gone, I ran out wearing nothing but my pajamas. He was down here playing ice hockey. Just as I got here, the ice broke, and he fell in. I crawled across the ice and pulled him out with his hockey stick just before he went under. When they all found out what happened, everyone coddled poor Cal. He got hot chocolate in bed. He got made over all Christmas day. Me? My dad knocked me into next Tuesday for not keeping an eye on him." He threw another stone and it fell with a crack, leaving a spider web trail across the ice.

"Woody, I know this hasn't been fair..."

"Fair?" he snorted. "My mother died when I was four. Four. I barely remember what she looks like anymore. My died was murdered by some teenager when I was in tenth grade. I was left to raise Cal by myself, and I failed, and now he's dead. I failed, Jordan. I failed."

"Woody, it was wrong for anyone to expect a boy to raise his brother. And you didn't fail, Woody. Cal was a grown man. He made his own choices."

Woody shook his head and turned away from her, walking unevenly along the edge of the water. "I told my mother I would do my best. My dad looked up at me just before he died and asked me to take care of Cal. I swore I would."

Jordan staggered along the bank after him. "Woody, you did your best."

"My best?" He called back at her over his shoulder to her. "Did I? My best wasn't good enough, Jordan. I stood there and said I didn't have the money to save my brother's life. Was that my best?"

"Stop blaming yourself. You tried to save him."

"And it got him killed, Jordan." He was stumbling blindly along the water's edge now, his voice breaking with emotion.

"It wasn't your fault, Woody."

"What kind of man am I, Jordan? I stood there and was willing to let him die. What kind of person does that make me?" he raged with his fists clenched.

"You're a human being, Woody. And you're the best one I know." He came to an abrupt halt, his chest heaving breathlessly. She caught up with him and placed hand on his back. "Woody?"

He turned suddenly and swept her in to him with one hand on the small of her back. His hands were on both sides of her face, kissing her roughly. She found herself responding, swept up in the intense emotion of the moment, before she stepped gently away from him.

He looked back at her questioningly.

"Woody, I..."

She could make out the look on his face in the moonlight. What was it? Regret? Betrayal? He turned quickly and she watched, shivering in the darkness, as he disappeared into the black grove of trees.