“Don't you have any other friends? Your kids are going to be sick to death of me by the time they grow up.”

“Too bad for them. Jack Hawthorne is Andrew's godfather. At least you two will finally meet. He thinks you've been avoiding him.” In all the years of Harry's partnership with him, the two had never met. But Tana had no reason to meet him, although she was curious to now. And when they met at St. Mary the Virgin Church on Union Street on Christmas Day, he was almost as she had expected him to be. Tall, blond, handsome, he looked like an ail-American football player in a college game, and yet he looked intelligent as well. He was tall and broad and had enormous hands, and he held the baby with a gentleness that startled her. He was talking to Harry outside afterwards and she smiled at him.

“You do that awfully well, Jack.”

“Thanks. I'm a little rusty, but I can still manage in a pinch.”

“Do you have children?” It was casual conversation outside the church. The only other thing they could have talked about was law, or their mutual friend, but it was easier and more pleasant to talk about the new godchild that they shared.

“I have one. She's ten.”

“That seems incredible.” Ten seemed so old somehow … of course Elizabeth had been thirteen, but Drew had been a lot older than this man. Or at least he looked that way. Tana knew Jack was in his late thirties, but he had a boyish air. And at the party at Averil and Harry's house later that day, he told funny stories and jokes, and had everyone laughing, including Tana, for most of the day. She smiled at Harry when she found him in the kitchen pouring someone another drink. “No wonder you like him so much. He's a nice guy.”

“Jack?” Harry didn't look surprised. Other than Tana and Averil, Jack Hawthorne was his best friend, and they had worked well together for the past few years. They had established a comfortable practice, and they worked in the same way, not with Tana's burning drive, but with something a little more reasonable. And the two men were well matched. “He's smart as hell, but he's very relaxed about it.”

“I noticed that.” At first he seemed very casual, almost indifferent to what was going on, but Tana had noticed rapidly that he was a lot sharper than he looked.

Eventually, at the end of the day, he offered her a ride home, and she accepted gratefully. She had left her own car outside the church in town. “Well, I finally meet the famous Assistant D.A. They certainly like to write about you, don't they?” She was embarrassed by what he said but he seemed unconcerned.

“Only when they have nothing else to do.”

He smiled at her. He liked her modesty. He also liked the long, shapely legs peeking out beneath the black velvet skirt she wore. It was a suit she had bought at I. Magnin just for her godchild's christening day. “Harry is very proud of you, you know. I feel as though I know you myself. He talks about you all the time.”

“I'm just as bad. I don't have kids, so everyone has to listen to stories about Harry and when we went to school.”

“You two must have been hell on wheels back then.” He grinned at her and she laughed.

“More or less. We had a hell of a good time, most of the time, anyway. And some nasty run-ins now and then.” She smiled at the memories and then smiled at Jack. “I must be getting old, all this nostalgia.…”

“It's that time of year.”

“It is, isn't it? Christmas always does that to me.”

“Me too.” She wondered where his daughter was, if that was part of the nostalgia for him. “You're from New York, aren't you?” She nodded her head. That seemed light-years away too.

“And you?”

“I'm from the Midwest. Detroit, to be exact. A lovely place.” He smiled and they both laughed again. He was easy to be with, and it seemed harmless to her when he offered to take her out for drinks. But everything seemed so empty when they looked around and it was depressing to go to a bar on Christmas night, she wound up inviting him back to her place instead, and he was perfectly agreeable to her. So much so he was almost innocuous, and she didn't even recognize him at first when she ran into him at City Hall the next week. He was one of those tall, blond, handsome men who could have been almost anyone, from a college pal, to someone's husband or brother or boyfriend and then suddenly she realized who he was and blushed with embarrassment.

“I'm sorry, Jack … I was distracted.…”

“You have a right to be.” He smiled at her, and she was amused at how impressed he was by her job. Harry must have been lying to him again. She knew he exaggerated a lot about her, about the rapists she fought off in holding cells, the judo holds she knew, the cases she cracked herself without investigator' help. None of it true, of course. But Harry loved to tell tales, and especially war stories about her.

“… Why do you lie like that?” She had challenged Harry more than once but he felt no remorse.

“Some of it's true anyway.”

“The hell it is. I ran into one of your friends last week who thought I had been knifed by a coke dealer in the holding cell. For chrissake, Harry, knock it off.”

She thought of it now and assumed he had been at it again as she smiled at Jack. “Actually, things are pretty quiet right now. How ‘about you?”

“Not bad. We have a few good cases. Harry and Ave went up to Tahoe for a few weeks, so I'm holding the fort on my own.”

“He's such a hardworking type.” They both laughed and he looked at her hesitantly. He had been dying to call her for a week and he hadn't dared.

“You wouldn't have time for lunch, would you?” Oddly enough, for once she did. He was ecstatic when she said yes, and they went to the Bijou, a small French restaurant on Polk, which was more pretentious than good, but it was pleasant chatting with Harry's friend for an hour or so. She had heard about him for so many years, and between her heavy caseload and her turmoil over Drew Lands they'd never met.

“It's ridiculous, you know. Harry should have gotten us together years ago.”

Jack smiled. “I think he tried.” He didn't say anything that indicated he knew about Drew, but Tana could talk about it now.

“I was being difficult for a while.” She smiled.

“And now?” He looked at her with the same gentle look he had used on their godchild.

“I'm back to my old rotten self again.”

“That's good.”

“Actually, Harry saved my life this time.”

“I know he was worried about you for a while.”

She sighed. “I made an ass of myself … I guess we all have to sometime.”

“I sure did.” He smiled at her. “I got my kid sister's best friend pregnant in Detroit ten years ago when I went home over the holidays. I don't know what happened to me, except I must have gone nuts or something. She was this pretty little redhead … twenty-one years old … and bang, the next thing I knew I was getting married. She hated it out here, she cried all the time. Poor little Barb had colic for the first six months of her life, and a year later, Kate went back again and it was all over. I now have an ex-wife and a daughter in Detroit, and I don't know anything more about them than I did then. It was the craziest thing I ever did, and I'm not about to do it again!” He looked extremely determined as he said the words, and it was easy to see that he meant every bit of it. “I've never drunk straight rum either since then.” He grinned ruefully and Tana laughed.

“At least you have something to show for it.” It was more than she could say, not that she would have wanted Drew's child, even if he hadn't had the vasectomy. “Do you see your daughter sometimes?”

“She comes out once a year for a month,” he sighed with a careful smile. “It's a little difficult to build a relationship based on that!” He had always thought it was unfair to her, but what else could he do? He couldn't ignore her now. “We're really strangers to each other. I'm the oddball who sends her birthday cards every year and takes her to baseball games when she's here. I don't know what else to do with her. Ave was pretty good about keeping an eye on her in the daytime last year. And they lent me the house in Tahoe for a week. She loved that,” he smiled at Tana, “and so did I. It's awkward making friends with a ten-year-old child.”

“I'll bet it is. The relationship … the man I was involved with had two of them, and it was odd for me. I don't have children of my own, and it wasn't like Harry's kids, suddenly here were these two big people staring at me. It felt awfully strange.”

“Did you get attached to them?” He seemed intrigued by her and she was surprised at how easy it was to talk to him.

“Not really. There wasn't time. They lived in the East,” she remembered the rest of it, “for a while.”

He nodded, smiling at her. “You've certainly managed to keep your life simpler than the rest of us.” He laughed softly then. “I guess you don't drink rum.”

She laughed too. “Usually not, but I've managed to do a fair amount of damage to myself in other ways. I just don't have any children to show for it.”

“Are you sorry about that?”

“Nope.” It had taken thirty-three and a half years to say it honestly. “There are some things in this life that aren't for me, and children are one of them. Godmother is more my style.”

“I probably should have stuck to that myself, for Barb's sake, if no one else's. At least her mother is remarried now, so she has a real father figure to relate to for the eleven months I'm not around.”

“Doesn't that bother you?” She wondered if he felt possessive about the child. Drew had been very much so about his, especially Elizabeth.

But Jack shook his head. “I hardly know the kid. That's an awful thing to say, but it's true. Every year I get to know her again, and she leaves and when she comes back she's grown up by a year and changed all over again. It's kind of a fruitless venture, but maybe it does something for her. I don't know. I owe her that much. And I suspect that in a few years she'll tell me to go to hell, she has a boyfriend in Detroit and she's not coming out this year.”