Reset

by scotchplaid

B&W AUish. Set ten years after the end of Season Five. The Warehouse/world is in peril (yet again), and a reluctant H.G., who walked away ten years ago, is called upon to help save it and, in the process, perhaps save herself as well.

3. Chapter 3

A/N: Some occasional crude language. Probably a misremembered WH13 plot point or two, but this is all about B&W right?

She stayed in the car, leaving the engine running, and looked at Myka's house. It was older and less tract-like than she had expected. On the edge of the city, it was off a lane that wound up and down hills before leveling at the top of a ridge that afforded spectacular views of the Black Hills to the west and north. Myka had neighbors but none too near, and the house, a prairie-style ranch, had space to sprawl. Helena eyed first the bottle of wine on the passenger's seat, which was nice enough to present as a gift but not nice enough to upstage the meal, even if it consisted of chicken tenders and oven fries, and then her outfit, assembled from the offerings at the Rapid City Macy's, which, she concluded, were not only marketed to the well-to-do suburban mom - though Rapid City wasn't yet large enough to have spawned any suburbs - but also hellbent on making every woman look like one. Wearing navy blue capris and an off-the-shoulder French-striped sweater, Helena feared she looked like the middle-aged lead from a Nancy Meyers movie. Taking a breath to settle her stomach, which wobbled as if it were thinking of breaking away from her other organs, she shut off the engine and tried to walk to Myka's front door with a confidence that said she did this every day, only to be greeted by chaos as soon as the door opened. A large dog ran across the foyer with something hanging from its mouth, and Drew was in pursuit, shouting "Shep, c'mere!" Myka ushered her in with a lopsided smile. "Wait here while I go kill my dog." Something brown and smelling pungently of soy sauce streaked her shirt and jeans; she looked down at it and grimaced before jogging after her son and their dog.

Soon Helena heard growls erupting from deeper within the house, many of them sounding like they came from Myka. She returned, a raw, well-chewed chicken breast in her hand, Shep trotting complacently behind her, nails clicking on the hardwood floor. He approached Helena curiously, head cocked. She cautiously patted his head as Myka gave him a withering look. "Three obedience schools," she said, "and nothing took. I guess I should be happy he's no longer peeing in the house."

She led Helena through the foyer, which was bordered by a formal dining room on one side and an equally formal living room on the other, both having the funereal stillness of rooms used only on special occasions, and into a large, open area that seemed to extend the width of the house and combined the kitchen, a much more casual eating area, and a family room where Drew was sitting on a rug in front of the tv playing a video game. French doors opened onto the patio, and Helena could see that the table had already been set, had probably been set for hours. To her left, and she would barely need to stretch her arm out to touch it, was an island, crowded with bowls and cutting boards; at its base, the floor was littered with strips of red and green peppers and more chicken. Myka threw away the chicken breast she was carrying, sighed, and with her hands on her hips surveyed the damage. "I'll change, and then I'll try to figure out something for dinner." She pointed to Helena's bottle of wine. "Why don't you open that? There's a corkscrew in the drawer and wine glasses in the cupboard." She gestured vaguely to the cabinets that lined the walls behind them.

The corkscrew was easy enough to find, and Helena eventually located the wine glasses, after a few futile sorties into the cupboards; they were hidden behind a row of children's glasses ringed with various action figures. The popping of the cork caught Drew's attention, and he watched as she poured wine into the glasses. Individually they were familiar, Myka's serious expression and Pete's features, but combined as they were on Drew's face, Helena was struck by their unusual juxtaposition, as if Myka might want to put straws up her nose or Pete might want to watch a documentary on PBS.

"How's math camp?" Helena asked, intensely aware that it had been a long time since she had been around children.

Drew shrugged. "It's okay."

"What do you do in class?" Helena heard herself laugh nervously and cringed. "In my day, we probably would have been chained to our desks and forced to do long division." Wonderful. Could she sound any more ancient and out of touch?

He stared at her blankly. "We play games. They take us on a lot of field trips and stuff, to show us how we use math every day. And we get to build things." He sounded more animated about the last.

A promising trail into eight-year-old boyland. "What are you building?" Helena looked at the mess on and around the island. Surely she could find the broom on her own.

"Nothing yet." He pushed himself off the rug and she was aware of his silent surveillance as she searched what she thought were likely areas where Myka might keep a broom. "It's over here," he said, walking toward a slender cabinet farther along the wall, next to a door that Helena assumed opened to the basement stairs. Shep was a black shadow, albeit a snuffling one, beside him. Drew handed her the broom but held onto the dustpan, and he knelt on the kitchen tile, positioning the dustpan at the end of the projected trajectory of peppers and chicken. He squinted up at her. "We all have to build something by the end of camp. My friend Jacob's going to build a go-cart. Well, him and his dad. My dad said we could do something like that, but Mom said we should think of something more useful."

Of course Myka would take the practical view. Helena swept chicken and peppers into the dustpan, noting how Drew minutely moved the pan to keep to the track of the broom. Helpful, uncomplaining. It was dismaying behavior to see in a child his age. Somewhere in him there had to be a bedrock of resistance to chores and making "useful" things for school projects. "I think a go-cart would be fun." She paused, giving herself a moment to reconsider what she planned to say next, but how else were children to learn unless you put ideas into their heads? "I built a rocket once."

Drew's eyes grew big. "One that went into space?"

Helena nodded, taking the dustpan from him and emptying it into a wastebasket. Myka, returning to the kitchen, said, "And how did that go for you, Helena?"

"Not as well as I had hoped," she grudgingly admitted. Although she was still smelling peppers, she caught the scent of something lighter and sweeter, perfume. Myka was wearing perfume, and she had changed into dress slacks and a long-sleeved blouse. The blouse was pale blue, with a long, open neckline, which closed just above the swell of her breasts. Helena knew she was staring yet her smile couldn't have been less apologetic, and Myka suddenly, clumsily turned away from the smile, almost knocking over her wine glass.

"They're going to build a birdhouse," she said, her words sounding rushed. "I'm fairly confident that Pete can help him build it without injuring himself or Drew, and we can put it up in the yard when it's finished."

Helena's response was to sip her wine. Drew exhaled noisily in what might have been a sigh and slouched back toward the tv.

Transferring bowls and cutting boards from the island to the sink, Myka said, "It's something that can last, something that the birds will use, I hope, and something that's appropriate for a boy his age."

"I'm not objecting, Myka," Helena said, smiling over the rim of her wine glass at her.

"Yes, you are," Myka said. "You're all but screaming it." She bit her lip. "Just say it."

"It's boring, it's safe, and it's probably what every other child will bring to class, either that or a magazine rack. There, I've objected." Helena hesitated, a memory of Adelaide coming to her, asking for her help with an assignment that her art teacher had given the class. "Adelaide had to model something in clay for her art class. The teacher was looking for a pencil holder. Adelaide took a skyscraper to class, and Nate and I were both called in for a heart-to-heart. This is the kind of object lesson I provide when it comes to school projects."

"You didn't rail at the teacher at any point about stunting a child's imagination, did you?" Myka brought a dishrag with her to the island and began wiping down the countertop. As she neared Helena, Helena didn't step out of her way, and Myka halted, exasperation and amusement on her face.

"You always think the worst of me, darling," Helena said silkily. "It is true that, afterward, Nate said he would be the one to handle any further communication with Adelaide's teachers."

More seriously than Helena had anticipated, Myka said, "I never think the worst of you." Her wiping of the countertop became more aimless, and she looked away from Helena toward the patio. "Is it hard to talk about them, Nate and Adelaide?"

She would have to talk to Myka about Boone and especially about Adelaide, but not tonight. "No. Leaving was the right thing to do, but I have fond memories of them both." More about Adelaide than Nate, but Helena couldn't deny that he was a good man, just never the man for her. Noticing that the level of wine in her glass was low, she moved out of Myka's path, with an exaggerated step to the side and a sweep of her hand indicating that cleaning could proceed, which occasioned an eye roll from Myka. She poured more wine into her glass. "What shall we have for dinner now?"

"I'm low on options," Myka said. "It's either mac and cheese or frozen pizza. Your choice." As Drew's head shot up, Myka gave him the kind of stern look that Helena remembered her giving his father many times. "You've already eaten, buddy, remember?" Shep had also raised his head upon seeing Drew's sudden movement, and Myka shook a dishrag-covered finger at him. "As for you, you're just lucky I haven't banished you to the garage."

Shep's woof was equivalent to a shrug of the shoulders, and Helena said into her glass, "I see the exceedingly tight ship you run at home."

"Are you sure you really want to be challenging me?" Myka laughed, reaching for the wine bottle.

"You couldn't force me into the garage," Helena said. "I may finally be showing my age a little, but I can still take you down."

She had meant it as a joke. She had said it as a joke, hadn't she? It hadn't sounded suggestive to her as she said it, but Myka had reddened. "I was talking more about my cooking skills, trying to make something from scratch," Myka said. "You know, being the victim of some impromptu dish gone horribly, horribly wrong. . . although I can make a decent stir-fry, you can't really screw those up. You take a protein, some vegetables, and . . . ." She worried her lip again, seemingly less in frustration than in an attempt to stop rambling. "Let's go with frozen pizza."

They went with frozen pizza, and, as Helena had suspected she would, Myka relented and let her son have a slice. As Drew returned to his video game, slice in hand, Myka also relenting on what was apparently only an irregularly enforced rule about not eating in the family room, they carried their wine glasses, the pizza, and, tucked under Myka's arm, another bottle of wine out onto the patio. The umbrella over the table shaded them from the better part of the evening sun, although it failed to block the rays that seemed to skim the table, in lines more horizontal than diagonal, and which lit the back of Myka's hair.

How many times in the summer, when they stopped for gas or reconnoitered a building or just stood outside the Warehouse, had Helena seen the same transformation of brown into red, the curls seeming to snap in the sun like filaments? She looked away. "What I said earlier today, about not caring about any of you, it wasn't true. I was angry, and I lashed out." She hazarded a glance at Myka, who was regarding her steadily. "One of my many failings. Thankfully I limit that impulse to words these days." The breeze was slight, but it lifted one or two of Myka's curls, and Helena remembered, with more clarity than she wished for at the moment, how often when she had seen the wind play with Myka's hair, she had wanted to twine the curls around her fingers. "There's really nothing I can offer about why I didn't at least send you a line now and then that would make any sense."

Myka dropped her eyes and played with the stem of her wine glass. "You don't have to explain, Helena. It was. . .is a complicated situation. I thought about inviting you to the wedding, you know, but we had already fallen out of touch, and that's what it would have been, the wedding, a Warehouse reunion of sorts. Then Drew and the divorce, it seemed too much to put into a letter or e-mail. Or too little." She smiled faintly before raising her eyes to meet Helena's. "Now I'm overexplaining. I guess I'm saying no one's reading anything into this, your helping us out."

Helena flushed, hoping Myka would attribute the sudden color in her face to the quality of the light or the wine. Apparently she was so faithless a friend that none of them presumed she might be willing to reestablish a connection. Which she wasn't, she reminded herself. She could wince at their easy dismissal of her as anything more than a resource, but she couldn't blame them. She busied herself with her pizza; there was no response she was comfortable giving.

But she had underestimated, or forgotten, Myka's tolerance of the awkward social moment. She had never been consistent in choosing when she would pursue a conversation that seemed destined to plunge into a bog, but once she had made up her mind, she seemed oblivious to whether the waters would close over her head. "Have you been happy?"

Helena tried to take a small bite, but the cheese swept off the side of her slice. Neither alternative, cramming it into or pulling it away from her mouth, like an errantly popped piece of bubble gum, was attractive. Shrugging, she pulled the cheese away from her mouth and set it on her plate, surveying the denuded slice. A metaphor for her own life but no reason for Myka to know that. "Would you settle for content?"

Myka started to shake her head but stopped midway, taking a slice of pizza and pulling the topping away from the crust. She tilted her head back, opened her mouth wide, and pushed all of the cheese and pepperoni in. "No standing on ceremony," she said, her eyes level with Helena's once more, her mouth full.

Helena gave her a look of mock disgust. "You don't have to trample it to death, like your ex-husband." But she began plucking the pepperoni from the cheese on her plate and nibbling on them. "I like what I do, and I have companionship when I want it. I am rather a simple person," she said innocently, "when you get past all the mad genius, diabolical former agent rubbish."

"I've seen pictures of your companionship," Myka said with a wry look. "Is it serious?"

"Only to the extent that we both abhor the thought." Helena grinned as Myka rolled her eyes. "A little bird told me that you've found, ah, companionship as well."

"Thank you, Claudia," Myka muttered. She tore the crust away from her pizza and chewed one end contemplatively. "His name is Jeff, and we've been seeing each other for a few months." Holding the bottle of wine up, she tipped it in Helena's direction; at Helena's nod, Myka pulled the cork and poured a large amount into her glass.

As Myka poured even more wine into her own glass, Helena tried to remember the last time they had talked about men or relationships in general, with or without the assistance of alcohol. She couldn't; they had never girl-talked about relationships. Myka had told her about Sam, but that had been part of a more far-reaching conversation about coping (or, in Helena's case, failing to cope) with loss. As for Helena, she had never had a relationship of sufficient longevity, including her liaison with Christina's father, to merit discussion. Her one sustained attempt, with Nate, had come too late to share with Myka, had she even been so inclined, and turned into such a royal cock-up that she sometimes liked to believe it had been artefact-induced. How else could a single flirtatious battle conducted with wooden spoons during cooking class become an invitation to move in less than three months later? He had been attractive and personable enough and she had been lonely, but she had raised a higher bar for one-night stands.

"You're 'seeing him.' That sounds awfully casual for you," Helena observed, wondering why she was pumping Myka for more information. It couldn't possibly matter to her, other than in that vague way one always wished, or always pretended to wish, that a friend's new relationship would be a good one for her. By the time Myka reasoned her way to deepening things with Jeff or ending them, Helena would be long gone.

"It's still pretty new," Myka said. "And it's different now, dating, with Drew. Whatever happens, I have to protect him."

Helena knew that Myka hadn't meant to draw any parallel, but it was there. She had known Adelaide for less than two months when she had moved into Nate's house. The relationship with Nate had progressed quickly, not in a starry-eyed, head-over-heels way but in a manner that, on the surface, seemed more sane, a comfortable and comforting meshing of likes and dislikes, a mutual unspoken acknowledgement that loneliness should be counted among the seven deadly sins, and which had felt so easy, so unthreatening that Helena hadn't been put off by the fact that Nate had only casually suggested it, as he might a weekend getaway to wine country or Las Vegas. She recalled him shouting it to her while she was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. And she had just as casually accepted it, throwing her few possessions in a couple of moving boxes the following weekend.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest that you, that you and Nate were. . . ." Myka studied her wine as she stumbled over her words.

"Careless?" Helena supplied. "We were. We hurt Adelaide. It was the last thing I ever wanted to do, to hurt her, but I did." She paused, not wanting to dwell any longer on what happened in Boone. "Besides, darling," she said, deliberately injecting a theatrical archness into her voice, "there's nothing wrong in being with someone just for the sex. I trust that Jeff is more than competent in that regard."

The old Myka would have blushed furiously and sputtered that it was none of Helena's business. This Myka, not in the least flustered, said smoothly, "I don't kiss and tell."

"More's the pity." Helena quirked her lips teasingly. "Brief though my tenure was with Warehouse 13, I always thought you were undersexed."

That did hit its mark. Myka shifted in her chair and gave Helena a narrow-eyed look. "Darling, it was true," Helena exclaimed. "Pete had any number of encounters, shall we say, and that doesn't include Univille's veterinarian at the time. Even Claudia had some mopey teenaged boy trailing after her. But you, you could have been cloistered for all that you were away from the B&B of an evening."

"If I were you, I wouldn't throw stones," Myka said.

"I had other preoccupations," Helena said lightly but feeling her teasing smile grow stiff. "Doing my nails, planning the end of the world, that sort of thing." Boone was a minor embarrassment compared to the consequences of her pre-Yellowstone schemes and machinations. After all, she had only, simply, merely deserted a child in Boone, she hadn't been the agent of her death, not like those poor boys whom she had hired and sent to Egypt. Back then her insomnia had been fueled by the feverishness with which she was carrying out her plans, just tinged with, not steeped in, guilt. She became disquieted only when she would look out the window in the early morning and see Myka beginning her stretches. There was something about the crispness of her movements, her long, lean lines that would make Helena believe she could live in a world like this one, if it had no more than Myka running across the grass, bare legs working like scissors in the sun. She had never known until later, after Yellowstone, after Boone, that insomnia could bear down on one like a stone or that it could be more peopled by chain-dragging ghosts than Dickens had thought to plague his Scrooge with. Hoping her face wasn't betraying the direction her thoughts had taken, she worked her smile into a smirk. "And then once the Janus coin was employed, well, it's so hard to meet people when you're a hologram. Perhaps poor Emily Lake had better luck, although I would think her wardrobe and cat," Helena shuddered, "argue against it."

"How did you meet her?" Myka asked abruptly. "Suzanne, right?" Her narrow-eyed look had continued to narrow, to a particularly skeptical squint, as if she were preparing herself for a story so salacious that it could hardly be believed.

Never let it be said that Helena Wells ever left a woman disappointed. "A couple of years ago at a party a client hosted. I had been in Georgetown to appraise a number of items he and his much younger second wife were hoping to acquire to finish off a Victorian-themed nursery. They invited me to stay for the party, and Suzanne was one of the guests." Helena viewed the remains of the pizza. There were a couple of slices left, but the cheese had cooled and congealed, developing a skin that had the shiny hardness of a scab. "As the folder you have on me would have told you, she's a curator for a privately-funded art museum, the Farraday. My client was a donor. At any rate, we exchanged pleasantries, and thirty minutes later, her hand was up my skirt or mine was up hers, I forget which. We had been looking at my client's collection of early 20th century art. Now that I think about it, it must have been my hand up her skirt because she was the one who came next to the Klimt. Very apropos, but the painting was knocking against the wall so violently I was afraid it was going to drop to the floor." Helena spread her hands wide. "That was how we met."

Myka's eyes closed. "Helena," she murmured.

"You asked, darling." Myka opened one eye at a time, giving her a caustic glance with each. Helena shrugged in response. "I'm sure some of you thought Suzanne and I were in collusion." She tried to keep the tone mocking, but she could hear the anger left over from yesterday's meeting. "Yes, she and I were out to bring the world to its knees through a mass distribution of magicked pocket combs. Though I do have to admit that she would be a perfect co-conspirator. A woman with a large network of wealthy patrons and donors, many of whom would be willing to pay great sums of money for a new, exclusive entertainment."

"I can't answer for the others," Myka said, "but I've never thought you were involved." She frowned in puzzled contemplation. "It's not a right fit for you, it's too. . . small, somehow. The artefacts that are being copied, what they're being copied to, how many copies there are, it's more mercantile than I would expect of you."

"Thank you, I think," Helena said dryly. "But I'm not above wanting to make lots of money, Myka. It's a large part of why I do what I do now."

Myka began gathering their plates and the leftover pizza. "The last time we spoke, you were working as a quant for a hedge fund in London."

"I was managing quants for a hedge fund in London," Helena corrected her. "The fund prospered, I prospered. I had already moved on by the time the recession really took hold, but our fund did quite well, weathered it far better than most."

"No doubt the result of your superior foresight," Myka said, deadpan.

"Of course," Helena said matter-of-factly, smiling only after a deliberate pause. Myka smiled in response, shaking her head. "The greed and outright chicanery, it wasn't all that different from what you would have seen in the markets at the end of the nineteenth century. But some months before I had been spending time with a client, doing a lot of hand-holding, and he invited me to lunch at his home. He gave me the grand tour, showing off what he thought were some original Charles Voysey pieces." Feeling absurdly antiquated, as she did most times she referred to famous figures, long since dead, whom she had personally known, she said, tipping her wine glass to her mouth, "I knew Voysey and was acquainted with his work, they weren't his. I told the client that, he confirmed it with a more reputable dealer than the one he had bought the furniture from, and, thus, yet another 'new' career for H.G. Wells was born."

"A paramour?" Myka asked, laughing.

Helena choked on her wine. "There were some men whose virtue I refrained from testing, you know. He was one of them. Actually, he built a house in Kent for Charles, not long after I was bronzed." She said the last quietly as she set her glass on the table.

The something laughing and lovely in Myka's eyes quieted as well. "I'm going to take the dishes inside, and then we can get to work on our snag-and-bag. It's still light out, maybe we can work out here?"

"Has Homeland Security bugged your home too?" Helena asked derisively, remembering Claudia's excessive care to ensure their privacy during the meeting.

"I was thinking it was too nice to go in," Myka said, balancing the empty wine bottle on top of her stack. "On the other hand, I don't put anything past the DHS either, not when it comes to the Warehouse."

One in the bank of French doors fronting the patio opened, and Drew stepped out, blinking against the sunlight. "Mom, someone's here." He stood aside as a tall man walked past him, giving Drew an appreciative pat on his shoulder.

"Myka, sorry to barge in, but I was in the area and I've got something of yours I thought you might like back." He said it easily, as though, while he might not be accustomed to being in her home, he was accustomed to being around her. He was rangier than Pete, but there was a quality to how he carried himself that reminded Helena of Pete, or perhaps it was just the fact that he had dark hair. Helena smothered a sigh. Really, couldn't Myka have found a Jeff who didn't at all resemble Pete? Maybe one with dark blond hair or red hair. As he neared them, his eyes flickered over Helena, taking her in with little interest, before focusing on Myka. Well, that was unlike Pete. Helena stretched out her legs, crossing them at the ankle. The silent interplay between the two was interesting, Jeff, a grin spreading across his face, obviously glad to see Myka no matter the excuse, while Myka was uneasily shifting the dishes in her hands, a blush beating up into her cheeks.

"Hi, Jeff, thanks. Um, maybe you can leave it in the kitchen?" Myka still wasn't able to meet his eyes as hers wandered and settled, with relief it seemed, on Helena. "My friend Helena and I were just finishing dinner." She jerked her head with unusual gracelessness toward Jeff. "Helena, this is Jeff, a friend."

Helena smiled a hello, noting as he turned briefly toward her that he was younger than Myka. By several years. Her smile grew wider as she looked at Myka. Myka's blush intensified. Her discomfort wasn't lessened when Jeff said, "I'm pretty sure this is something you don't want Drew to see."

Helena couldn't stop the little laugh that escaped her. "Oh, dear, Myka. He must have one of your unmentionables."

At pains not to scowl, probably ferociously, at her, Myka said with a thinly veiled impatience, "I'm going into the house with Jeff for just a moment. You'll be fine out here?"

"Peachy keen, as they say," Helena said, resting her head against the back of her chair. "You take all the time you need."

She heard them talking in lowered voices, Myka's sounding no less impatient once she was away from Helena. The closing of the door left only the sounds of the breeze ruffling the top of the umbrella and birds crying their evensong to each other. Seeing Jeff hadn't bothered Helena but marking his resemblance to Pete, no matter how superficial, did, and she couldn't blame the sour surging in her abdomen, something that happened more frequently now than it did when she was younger, especially when she felt off-balance, on either the wine or the pizza. How divorced could you truly be if you were dating men who looked like your ex-husband? While her fling with Giselle, a French flight attendant whom she had initially flirted with during a layover in LaGuardia, was clearly some sort of rebound from the mess with Nate and Adelaide, Patrick, the married barrister in London whom she had taken up with after she had relocated there, had been completely unlike Nate, as brooding and biting as the latter had been pleasant and even-tempered. But then she and Nate had been together for less than a year while Myka and Pete had been married for over seven. There was a difference.

Restless, Helena pushed back her chair and walked past the end of the patio. Although the yard sloped down the edge of the ridge, the mown part of it stopped there. Perhaps Myka owned the land beyond the ridge as well, which would make this a fair piece of property she owned, enough land to do things with. Helena blinked, trying to chase the thought away. It didn't matter what Myka did or didn't own, what could or couldn't be done with the land. It wasn't as if Helena was going to be visiting again, once this mission or assignment, whatever you wanted to call it, was done. Trees formed a rough boundary line at the edge of the ridge, some scraggly and bent by the wind, but a few were tall, with generous branches that grew relatively close to the ground. Two of the trees were close together and without giving thought to what she was doing, Helena slipped her sandals off and, placing her arms into the fork of the trunk, hauled herself up, feet trying to grip the bark. If she stood in the center of where the trunk forked, there was a branch she could pull herself up to that should easily bear her weight. There was more inelegant scrabbling than she had anticipated, but soon she was perched on it and peering through the leaves at the view beyond. It, too, was more than she had expected, more compelling, additional ridges undulating toward the larger hills, which looked much closer from here than they had from the road.

She felt movement beneath her and spotted Drew pulling himself up the trunk of the tree. She eyed the branch she was on and moved farther down, slapping the space next to her. "Why don't you sit next to me?"

With an assurance she envied, he walked along the branch, only occasionally touching others near him for balance. He sat down beside her. "What are you doing up here?"

"Taking in the view. What are you doing up here?"

"I don't see many grown-ups climbing trees. I thought you might need help getting down." Pete's smile, no, this one was shyer and the earnestness in the eyes was much too unalloyed by humor to be Pete's. Myka. He was all Myka right now.

She drew in a long and dismayingly unsteady breath. "I was thinking this would be a marvelous tree for a tree house." Surely she hadn't said what she thought she had just said.

"Me too," he said. It was simply an affirmation of her opinion. There was no sudden eagerness in his face, no incipient expectation that she was promising him something. He had said it as if he had climbed this tree a million times and had the thought each time.

She should get down now before she said something they would both end up regretting, and what she was opening her mouth to say was going to be something cautionary and sensible. She was going to say, "Let's get down before your mother starts to worry" or something similar. But her arm, which really should be working with her other arm to keep her on the branch, was beginning to make a sweeping motion, as if preparing to draw a design in the air, and the words she was saying this very minute were not at all about climbing down from the tree. "You could integrate the flooring with the branches and work it all around the tree, I believe. You could put supports there and there," she said pointing. Then she looked up at the branches above them, smaller but still capable of supporting the weight of an eight-year-old boy.

Drew looked up at them too and before she could say anything to stop him, he was climbing farther up the trunk. She heard branches shake and felt a few leaves fly past her before she saw him, several branches above the one she was sitting on, his arm wrapped around a neighboring branch to hold himself steady. "We could have a pirate lookout here," he said excitedly. Now the eagerness in his face was unmistakable. "Maybe Dad and me could build this for my math camp project."

"I thought the project had to be something you could bring to class," Helena reminded him and felt annoyed at having to be an adult.

Drew looked crestfallen but brightened with a thought. "Maybe it's something Dad would help me build once math camp is over."

Helena tried to imagine Pete armed with basic woodworking tools. It was a frightening picture. "Perhaps it's something I can help out your dad with. I've built a few tree houses in my time," she said casually.

Drew appeared to be considering the offer. "You'd help us, really?" He was leaning over far too much for no more support than his little boy arm and the branch around which he had anchored it could provide.

Helena wasn't at all sure she could stop his fall should he slip, let alone catch him. She began to lift herself up, keeping her eyes on his. In the shade of the tree, his eyes were darker and she was looking through them and seeing another pair of eyes, as dark as her own, and she thought she might strangle on the breath in her throat. She hadn't seen Christina this clearly in years. She was looking at Helena the way she always had when she had grown old enough to understand that Mama went away on "assignments," excitement and uncertainty battling for dominance, with excitement almost always winning out. She disliked it when Helena had to leave her, but Mama always brought her back wonderful gifts and even better stories and the promise that someday she too would go away on assignments. And Helena had meant the promise, they would make their own adventures, safaris in Africa and journeys to the temples in India. When Christina was older.

"I promise," she said, her voice thick and foreign to her.

Then there was another voice, Myka's, but it was queer-sounding and unlike her normal voice too. "Why don't the both of you come down?"

Helena waited until Drew had half-slid, half-hopped his way back to the branch she was on, then she slowly climbed down the trunk, feet and hands seeking purchase. There was no graceful dismount; she more or less dropped down from the fork in the trunk, lurching some steps to the side simply to prevent herself from falling. As Helena pulled on her sandals, Drew jumped from the fork, easily sticking his landing and nonchalantly walking toward his mother. She hugged him to her with one arm; he squirmed away, saying "She's going to help me and Dad build a tree house. Did you hear her?"

"Yes, I heard her." Myka hadn't turned to look at her yet, her attention remaining with her son. "What have I told you about getting up in that tree?"

"That I shouldn't do it unless you or Dad are with me," he said unrepentantly. "But she was already in it, doesn't that count?"

"I should think it would," Helena began until, still without looking at her, Myka opened and closed her hand over the back of her shoulder. Helena quieted.

"For tonight, it'll count. But only for tonight." Then laugher began to bubble in Myka's voice. "I know that Helena looks like a grown-up, but she's not." With more firmness, she said, "Why don't you go on in? It's almost time for your bath."

Having achieved victory with the tree-climbing, Drew knew better than to protest the maternal reminder and with only the slump to his shoulders expressing his displeasure at the mention of "bath," he scuffed ahead of them toward the house. Helena started to follow him, but Myka placed her hand on Helena's shoulder, holding her back. Waiting a few seconds until Drew was safely out of earshot, she said, "I don't know which one you thought you were making that promise to, whether it was Christina or Adelaide, but you need to make it right with him and tell him that you're not going to help out with any tree house." She didn't say it unkindly, but there was a hardness to her voice that Helena could feel herself flinching from.

"I have every intention of keeping my promise to Drew," Helena said, glaring at Myka. Irritation and more than a little shame at having been caught overpromising made her stand up straighter, although that still made her three inches shorter than Myka, which meant that she was glaring mainly at Myka's nose. "It's only the big things I can't deliver on, Myka, you should know that." Tipping her head back, she searched Myka's eyes. They were hazel in the waning light, and Helena thought she saw something almost wistful in them before they returned her own glare. "It's not as though we're going to solve the puzzle tomorrow, I'll have time to hire the materials and the workmen and -"

Myka's laugh was so short and bruised-sounding that Helena heard it as a jeer. "He doesn't want you to have it built for him, Helena. He wants you to help build it, with him and Pete." Myka's face relaxed into a smile, and Helena knew she was seeing Pete trying to act as a master carpenter, then the smile faded as she focused on Helena again. "I think my son's starting to like you, Helena, and I won't have you hurt him, not even over something small."

"Like I hurt you," Helena said under her breath, hoping she had said it so softly that Myka hadn't heard her, but the sudden stillness in Myka's face told her otherwise.

"Like you hurt all of us, me, Claudia, Steve, Pete, Artie," Myka said, answering the remark and deflecting its more personal thrust at the same time.

Helena let it pass. She wasn't entirely sober, the evening was wearing on, and they still had the their plans for retrieving the artefact, whatever it was, to go over. But there was one thing they had to, she had to settle now. "I will stay here long enough to help build him a tree house. I built tree houses for myself and Charles when I was a child, and I built much more elaborate ones for Christina. It won't take that long, even with Pete's well-meant bumbling." She turned away from Myka and started toward the house. "You can count on me for that much."

"Damn it, Helena," Myka said softly, lengthening her stride to catch up with her. "Don't go into a sulk on me." Helena tried to pin her with a look, but Myka was laughing again; it was still bruised-sounding but more rueful this time. "Better you want to claw my eyes out than giving me the wounded puppy look."

"Wounded puppy, really?" Helena said. "I think you're mistaking me for Pete, which is even more of an insult."

"Sometimes I think the two of you are more alike than either of you would be willing to admit," Myka said, an odd note creeping into her voice.

"Having rebuked me for promising a tree house to your son, which I fully intended to carry out, and then having compared me to your ex-husband, you owe me a drink. Please tell me we haven't exhausted the supply of alcohol in your home." Helena kept up the tone of mock outrage. They were back to the patio now, the trees were behind them and that wound her promise to Drew had reopened behind them, for the moment, as well.

Myka led her to the pantry, where, from behind a stack of canned peas, she unearthed a bottle of scotch. "Childproofing," she said. "Drew hates peas." As Helena poured a couple of very large, make that giant, fingers into a juice glass and added a few ice cubes, Myka noted wryly that after the scotch was finished, there was only rubbing alcohol, and working for the Warehouse again couldn't be as bad as that. Helena only raised an eyebrow doubtfully in response.

Leaving her to retrieve the information on the artefact, Myka returned with a phone to her ear. Jacqui needed her help with a problem two of the newer agents had called in. Helena waved her away, taking a seat on the sofa in the family room. She sipped her scotch as Drew, done with one of the quickest baths on record and wearing Superman pajamas, plopped in front of the tv and started playing another video game. Shep, also a little damp, his fur occasionally sparkling in the light, stretched out on the rug next to him. Kicking off her sandals and curling her feet under her, Helena watched him play. The game was a car race, and Drew drove his car with a methodical precision that ensured he would place well but never win. Helena sighed, a little too loudly, because Drew paused the action to turn around and look at her.

"Would you like to play?" He asked, and Helena, who had intended to shake her head no because so far her interactions with Drew were seeming only to upset his mother, found herself sliding off the couch and taking a seat on Drew's Shep-free side. He passed her another controller and, as she briefly studied the device, he relaunched the game.

She chose a silver Ferrari, which appeared to meet with his approval, and as a surprisingly realistic-sounding starter pistol fired, she put her car into gear. For a few laps around the track, she let him set the pace and then tried to pass him on the next lap. He blocked her adroitly enough and she let the Ferrari hang back. She tried another pass on the following lap, at the same speed and from roughly the same position, and he succeeded in blocking her again. A few laps later, she increased her speed until she was right behind him and she feinted passing several times and each time he responded. From the relaxed set of his shoulders, she could tell that he felt he knew enough about her strategy, such as it was, that he didn't need to worry about her. Other cars in the game began to bunch around them in a pack, and as Drew let his car drift toward the wall, Helena spied a narrow gap between his car and a blue Lamborghini. She punched the controller, increasing her car's speed and plunged through the gap, clipping the back end of Drew's car and sending him careening toward the wall and spinning the Lamborghini into the center grass.

"Hey!" Drew shouted, as Helena took the lead and his own car scraped the wall. "That wasn't fair!"

"Of course it was fair, darling. It just wasn't nice." She looked at him curiously. "Don't you play this way with your friends?"

"Well, yeah," he grumbled, scowling at her. "But when I play with Mom or Dad, they don't -"

"They let you win," she cut in. She suppressed another sigh, looking at him. With a mother who only colored within the lines and, let's face it, a father who barely knew how to hold a crayon at times, Drew was severely disadvantaged. "You know life isn't like that, fair. And it's not just a matter of learning the rules of the game, Andrew. You have to learn how to bend them, to make them work for you."

He paid attention only to the fact that she hadn't called him Drew. "Only my mom calls me Andrew," he said, looking mutinously at her.

"That's the thing about grown-ups. They can call you whatever they want, and they can do whatever they want. Your parents are doing you no favors by letting you beat them all the time," she finished sternly. She had never been so indulgent with Christina. When Christina had insisted upon playing chess with her, Helena had shown her no mercy, only showing her the errors in her play once the game was over. But Christina had never thrown tantrums or upended the chessboard in frustration, she had simply lined up her pieces and, with a determination that had simultaneously tugged at Helena's heart and increased her admiration of her daughter's resolve, nodded her readiness for another game.

She waited to see how Drew would react. He set his mouth grimly and started the game over. "I'm not going to take it easy on you either."

Biting back her smile, Helena waited for the sound of the starter pistol. The races became less like races and more like stock car derbies as she and Drew banged each other's car around the track. Frequently Helena won, but not all the time, as the blue Lamborghini more than once sent her Ferrari into the wall or left her spinning in the middle of the track, taking out several other cars. She began to suspect that the Lamborghini was the game-maker's version of the house rules, the guarantee that the player was always at a disadvantage and the enticement for him to return to the game again and again. Eventually Drew became more interested in watching Helena battle it out with the Lamborghini, setting aside his controller and offering suggestions as she chased the Lamborghini around and around the track. After taking a long drink of her scotch, Helena set her controller down and motioned imperiously in the air. "Where's the programming for this game?"

Drew shrugged and gestured toward the console. "Maybe there, maybe in the disc. I don't know."

Helena crawled toward the tv and looked at the cable assembly connecting the console to it. Mumbling to herself she began to unscrew some of the cables. "If you ever find yourself at an impasse, young Andrew, as I seem to have found myself with that nefarious Lamborghini, don't give up." She hadn't noticed before how much like a cheap stage actor she could sound in her cups. Or like her grandfather. He had been known to bellow any number of Shakespearean soliloquies following a few after-dinner brandies. "Everyone can get out of her own Kobayashi Maru if she's willing to rethink the rules. And by the way, my mentor Caturanga had discovered that principle long before Star Trek." She began to crawl backward from the tv, the console still attached by a cable or two, before Drew, who had been on his stomach next to her, suddenly shot to his feet. "Oh, dear," Helena murmured.

"Drew, you were supposed to go to bed after your bath. Go, now." There was no indulgence in Myka's tone, and as Helena took in her eye-level view of Myka's feet, which, for feet, were really quite nice, somewhat on the long side but neither too narrow nor too wide, she heard two other sets of feet scampering from the family room and a woof issuing from the opposite side of the kitchen.

Helena sat up and placed the console next to her. Her gaze lifted as far as Myka's knees, which were clad in yoga pants. One of the legs in the yoga pants nudged the console closer to the tv. Then, as Myka bent to deposit a stack of folders on the sofa, Helena saw that she was wearing a simple scoop-necked top. "Is this a sleepover? Because I didn't bring the right clothes."

"It's turned into one because you're not sober enough to drive back to Univille, and I'm probably not going to be sober enough to take you. When we're done, you can crash in the guest room." Myka ran her hand through her hair, tugging at it. In the same brusque tone she had been using since she entered the family room, she said, "I need to go say goodnight to Drew. You can get started on the folders."

"Well, since I'm staying over, I'll just refresh my drink," Helena said, pleased she was pushing herself from the floor without stumbling.

"I should just turn myself into social services now," Myka muttered.

"I thought it was the Department of Homeland Security," Helena said. At Myka's glare, she said hastily, "Just joking." Pulling at her wrinkled sweater, she added, "Myka, what eight-year-old boy pays attention to bedtime? Had I known you feared I would be the instigator of his descent into juvenile delinquency, I would have stayed out on the patio."

"Believe it or not, he's always gone to bed after his bath, without my nagging him. I know it's weird, but it's Drew. But you come here and Shep steals a chicken breast, which he's not done before, I drink more wine than I've had in months, Jeff drops by, which is completely new, and with my bra sticking out of his back pocket no less, I find you and my son at the top of a tree -"

"It wasn't really the top," Helena interjected.

Another glare. "I'm the one speaking here," Myka said. "And then, then when I finally think things are settling down, I come out and I find you using a video game to give an Art of War lesson to a child. My child. My eight-year-old child, who thinks that the Fortress of Solitude is a place he can visit."

"If it makes you feel better, I'll let you -"

"What?" Myka interrupted, taking Helena's glass with her as she stomped to the kitchen. She rinsed it out and poured more scotch into it. "You'll let me kick your ass to Univille? We have to work together for the next several days, God, maybe weeks."

"I was thinking of something that might really hurt me, darling, like you making me dinner from scratch," Helena said mildly. She had followed Myka into the kitchen and opened the door to the freezer compartment. She dug out a couple of ice cubes and put them into the glass.

Myka watched her. "It always becomes a circus when you're around," she said helplessly.

"Stop pretending you hate it," Helena said, as Myka handed her the glass. "I bring the chaos and you find the order in it. It's how we work." She made the mistake of looking at Myka's eyes, more green now than hazel in the light. "I've missed it."

"So have I," Myka said, and, then, as if to stop herself from saying anything more, she spun on her heel and marched off toward her son's bedroom.

Sprawled out on the sofa, a pillow behind her neck, Helena was leafing through the folders, when Myka lowered herself to the floor next to her, a glass of iced tea in one hand. Iced tea smelling strongly of scotch. "It'll hardly act as a counteragent laced with booze, darling," Helena observed.

"Shut up and hand me a folder," Myka said. Taking the folder Helena offered her, Myka added, "Drew wants you to stay for breakfast. He said he would share his Cap'n Crunch with you."

"Cap'n Crunch?" Helena said slyly. "Isn't that corn syrup held together by a few grams of, I do believe it's corn? Oh, how the mighty have fallen."

"One box. And once he's eaten it, no more for several months. He's doing you quite the honor." Myka grumbled. "I suppose you made Christina clean her plate once she had received her daily dose of 'nature red in tooth and claw.' Children's boot camp provided by H.G. Wells."

"Hardly, darling. It was nineteenth century Britain. Mutton and porridge. Porridge and mutton. I couldn't even stomach it." Helena opened another folder. "And before you ask, Tennyson was a little too much before my time. I drew the line at octogenarians." She scanned the first page of the folder, then closed it. "Pete and another agent retrieved the 'lucky' dice of Nick Davalos, also known as 'Nick the Greek,' a couple of months ago from the home of an investment banker who had committed suicide."

"Stewart Afton," Myka supplied. "He was using the dice to make unsound investments with a number of pension funds he was managing. Initially the investments paid off, that's why the dice are lucky. But as happened to Nick, Stewart's luck changed, and the funds lost money. He ended up bankrupting one fund. We think that's why he killed himself, the firm was under SEC investigation, and he was about to be exposed."

"And you've seen things since then that would indicate the properties of the dice were replicated."

"I asked Jacqui and Claudia to keep an eye on the firm. The SEC closed their investigation after Stewart Afton's suicide, thinking the problem was limited to him. But a couple of other fund managers have been enjoying a string of successes lately, and these have been high-risk investments."

Helena opened the folder again, squinting at the print. She should have thought to bring her reading glasses. "It doesn't have to be a replicated artefact. Just because an investment is high-risk doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad investment, if the investor is sufficiently knowledgeable about the risks and takes the proper precautions. Maybe there's nothing more here than a couple of fund managers enjoying the fruits of their due diligence, or a run of luck. It happens."

"Thank you, Suze Orman," Myka said, turning her head to look up at Helena and flashing her a sardonic smile. "If you had actually read beyond the first few pages, you would have learned that Pete and Travis interviewed those two fund managers when they were retrieving the dice. They were friends of Stewart Afton."

"Reading beyond the first page is what I let others do," Helena said dismissively. Seeing that Myka remained thoroughly unimpressed, she said, "You want to go in now because we're at or nearing the two month anniversary of Afton's death, which is also when you think the additional side effects of the replicated artefacts begin to appear. If these two friends acquired copies of the dice from him or whomever Afton himself obtained the dice from, they could be at risk." At Myka's nod, Helena said, "So what's our plan? What's our cover story?"

Myka squirmed a little and took a drink of iced tea. "That's where working for the DHS has made things difficult. They don't like cover stories. When Pete and I were still in the field together, they never liked our flashing our Secret Service IDs whenever we thought throwing some weight around was necessary. We're supposed to say that we're investigating a potential terroristic threat and leave it at that."

"And people just open up then?" Helena demanded sarcastically. Myka lifted her shoulders and let them drop, expressing her opinion. "Obviously something like that will never work, if only because no one would take us seriously for saying something like 'terroristic.'" As Myka began to protest, Helena said, "Yes, darling, I know it's a real word, but that doesn't make it any less of a crime. We'll have to have a cover story." She moved her lips from one side to another as she thought. "Nothing's coming to me right now. Where's the folder on Mr. Afton's friends?" Myka pulled it out from under a pile of folders that Helena had discarded next to her on the sofa and gave it to her. "I promise I shall read this with care." Helena waggled the folder for emphasis. Myka again looked unimpressed.

Helena put the folder down as Myka quickly and with little effort raised herself to her feet. Were she to try to move from her position on the sofa with the same speed, Helena knew she would land face first on the floor. "Let me show you the guest room," Myka said.

"If you don't mind," Helena said, "I'd prefer to stay out here and let the television put me to sleep." Unlikely though the possibility was. Myka's expression softened, but she didn't say anything as she handed the remote to Helena. "However, if you could give me a toothbrush, I'd be most grateful."

Their goodnights were quiet and summarily dispensed with. As Helena should have guessed, Myka not only had spare toothbrushes but travel-sized tubes of toothpaste as well. She settled back onto the couch and found a movie channel playing old Laurel & Hardy shorts. If Myka was lean Stan Laurel with his diffident common sense that made her . . . . Her mother's side of the family had tended to gain weight later in life and not a few of the women developed tiny bottle-brush mustaches. God knows she already had the bluster down pat.

She must have fallen asleep at some point because a noise or maybe just the sense that someone was looking at her jerked her awake. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, blearily seeing Myka standing where the kitchen and family room met. A few lights in the kitchen had been left on at their lowest setting to serve as an ad-hoc night light, and they limned Myka's figure. Helena became very aware that Myka was wearing a thin sleepshirt, nothing more. Her face was in shadow, but Helena knew those hazel-green, green-hazel eyes were watching her, had been watching her, as she slept.

"Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?" Helena croaked.

"That's a misquote, Helena. It's 'Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me,'" Myka said, amused.

"I knew that, darling. I just didn't want to assume." Then, cheekily, "So are you?"

"If I ever want to seduce you, Helena, there won't be any question about it," Myka said, stepping backward into the kitchen. "See you in the morning."

The next time Helena awoke, she again felt eyes watching her, but as she stretched and reluctantly raised her head from her pillow, she saw two sets of eyes, both brown, but one obviously canine. "You snore, like Shep," Drew said gravely.

"Do I now?" Helena asked, sweeping a hand through her hair, touching the corners of her mouth. Drew nodded, out of his Superman pajamas and in cargo shorts and a polo shirt. She hadn't been looking for confirmation, but she should have expected that Drew, like his mother, would be slow to recognize a rhetorical question. She bent to search for her sandals, which only made the pounding in her head worse. "When you get to be my age, Drew, you make a lot of strange sounds in your sleep." Sleep. She had slept, which was unusual. She had slept before her middle-of-the-night exchange with Myka, and she had obviously slept after it. The conversation had happened, hadn't it? She wouldn't have dreamed that she quoted dialog from The Graduate. She only remembered the film because she thought Dustin Hoffman was a ninny for preferring Katharine Ross to Anne Bancroft. But why would Myka have gotten up in the middle of the night to watch her sleep? Perhaps Myka believed as Helena sometimes did herself that she existed simply as a figment of someone's imagination or nightmare. Mrs. Frederic's for instance, which would be only fitting.

Aware that Drew was still somberly regarding her, Helena turned to him, sandals dangling from her hand. "Was it a loud, rattling snore like this?" She sharply inhaled before letting her breath out in a snore that sounded like a coffee-maker gasping its last.

Drew laughed and shook his head. "No, not like that."

"It had a whistle to it," Myka said from the kitchen. She came around the island, wearing her summer jogging outfit, tank, shorts, baseball cap. "Long, trailing, with a whistle at the end." She grinned.

"Yeah," Drew said. "It was funny." He ran with Shep toward the table in the eating area and slid onto a chair, a bowl and a box of Cap'n Crunch in front of him.

"No running," Myka said reflexively. She came into the family room with a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. "You'll be needing this."

Helena took both with an appreciative sigh. "I'll just pop a couple of these, and then I'll be on my way."

Myka cocked her head, her eyes, under the brim of the baseball cap, alight with a challenging glint. "You're having breakfast with Drew, remember? He's been in and out of the family room for the past half-hour waiting for you to wake up."

Helena groaned and shook out some aspirin from the bottle. Ordinarily she would appreciate the view of Myka's long legs, which she had always thought were among her most attractive features, but not this morning. The thought of having to eat a bowl of Cap'n Crunch made both her stomach and the roof of her mouth ache in apprehension. "I'll need a big pot of tea," she said in a low voice. "I suggest you start that now."

Myka flashed her another grin, which, Helena observed, hadn't a glimmer of sympathy to it. After five minutes in the bathroom, which mainly consisted of groaning, splashing her face with water, and more groaning, Helena joined Drew at the table and covered the bottom of her bowl with a single layer of Cap'n Crunch. "You need more than that," Drew said and vigorously shook the box until the mound of cereal was equal with the blue stripe bordering the rim of the bowl.

"Thank you," Helena said faintly.

Drew laid a piece of paper between them on the table, which had a rectangle, clearly drawn with a ruler, that stood in for the tree house. It included two windows in the front and a door. Above it and to the right was a wastebasket-looking thing that Helena could only guess was supposed to be a crow's nest. "A cabin on a pirate ship and a lookout," he announced. "Could we build something like that?"

Helena studied the drawing, noting the differences between the crow's nest and the cabin, but she said nothing. Instead she smiled at him and said, "Yes, I believe we can."

Myka drifted over to inspect the drawing. "Hmmm, didn't see the crow's nest before." She stared at Drew, who guilelessly shrugged. "Where is it going to go?"

"Way up at the top," he enthused.

"I don't think so, buddy. The branches are too small. They couldn't support your weight."

Helena moved the piece of paper closer to her. "Do you have a pen or pencil?" Drew skyrocketed from his chair in search of one, Shep galloping behind him.

"Helena," Myka warned.

"Not at the top but not right next door to the tree house either." With a mock loftiness that Helena figured would still get under Myka's skin, she said, "A child should always have the opportunity to extend his horizons."

"We're talking about a metaphor, Helena. Drew doesn't need to see over the next hill."

"Says you," Helena muttered as Drew returned with a well-chewed pencil. Gingerly taking it from him, she began to add to the drawing, sketching in the tree as she remembered it. "Flexible support," she continued muttering, drawing lines radiating out from the crow's nest, like spokes from the center of a wheel. "Can't put additional stress on the tree. . . don't want the top snapping off in a high wind." She crooked her neck back, certain she could hear the blood drain from Myka's face. She met Myka's wary gaze and said soothingly, "I'll work it out, darling. Don't worry."

"I'm sure you will." Myka put her lips close to Helena's ear. "Because I'm going to be the one who puts you in it during a high wind just to see how you fare."

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

Drew had returned to his chair but was leaning so far over the table to see what Helena was doing with the drawing that his shirt was brushing the top of his cereal bowl and soaking in the milk. As Myka exclaimed, "Drew," Helena asked him, "Might I borrow this for a little while?" At his sober nod, which made her feel that she had just signed a contract bristling with failure to perform penalties, Helena folder the paper into a square and pushed it into a pocket of her capris.

Later, after two changes of Drew's shirt, three cups of tea, more aspirin, and a chase after a romping Shep, who had one of her sandals in his mouth, Helena finally arrived at the door to her car. Myka stood in front of the hood, her arms folded over her chest, a castellan ready to pull up the drawbridge once Helena backed out of the drive.

"Our flight to New York tomorrow morning is at seven," Myka said.

Helena saluted in acknowledgement, but Myka didn't appear to be reassured. "Are you going to warn me one more time about making promises to your son?"

"Do I need to?" Myka asked quietly.

Helena shook her head. She touched the piece of paper in her pocket. When she had looked at the drawing earlier, she had realized that the awkwardly drawn crow's nest was Drew's, but the cabin's straight lines and its windows were Myka's. No eight-year-old boy, not even Drew, would use a ruler and though he might add windows, he wouldn't think to draw them in the shape of a treasure chest. She wasn't promising only Drew, she was promising Myka, but she had always known that, hadn't she? There was no reason for her heart to be beating so fast, so anxiously. It was just a tree house, after all.