"I have shampoo sinks. And chairs," Zoe sobbed into the colorful square of cotton. "And—and you have paintings and statues and carved wooden boxes. Dana has books. Three months ago I had a lousy job working for a woman who didn't even like me. Now I have chairs. You put them together for me."

"You refinished the table," Malory countered.

"And found the baker's rack for the kitchen. Worked out all the track lighting, regrouted the bathrooms." Dana bent down to pat Zoe's head. "We're in this together, Zoe."

"I know, I know, that's just it." She mopped her face. "It's beautiful. All of it. I love it. I love you. I'm okay."

She sniffled, then let out a long breath. "God, I want to shampoo somebody." Laughing now, she sprang up. "Who wants to go first?" At the shout from downstairs, she shook her head. "Shit. Forgot. That's the boy from the flea market with my sofa. I paid him twenty dollars to haul it over here. I have to help him bring it up."

When she ran out, Malory turned to Dana. "She's got a lot building inside there."

"Yeah, she does. I wonder if any of us considered the pressure there'd be on the one who went last. Then you add in how close we are to finishing this." She held out her arms to encompass the salon. "She's got to be ready to pop."

"Let's make sure we're there when she does."

They went down to lend a hand with the sofa. When it was in place, Malory stepped back, cocked her head.

"Well… it's nice and long. And…" She searched for something else positive to say about the dull brown object. "It has a nice high back."

" 'Ugly as homemade sin' is the term you're after," Zoe supplied. "But just you wait." She started to open the box she'd brought up with her, then stopped. "Go on downstairs till I'm done."

"Done what?" Dana kicked the couch lightly. "Burning it?"

"Go on. Give me ten minutes."

"I think it's going to take longer," Malory warned.

The minute she was alone Zoe set to work. If there was one thing she knew, she told herself, it was how to go about making silk purses out of sows' ears.

When the transformation was complete, she stepped back, hands on hips.

And by God, she'd done it again. She went to the top of the stairs to call down.

"Come on up. Tell me what you think and be honest."

"The burning idea wasn't honest enough for you?" Dana asked. "Mal and I can do it for you if you're running short of time. Don't you have to get home for Simon?"

"No. I'll tell you about that after." She grabbed Dana's hand, then Malory's, and pulled them back into the salon.

"My God, Zoe. My God, it's beautiful." Astonished, Malory walked over to study the sofa. The dull brown lump was now a charming seat blooming with deep pink hydrangeas on a soft blue background. The cushions were plumped, and cheerful bows encircled the arms.

"It's more of a miracle," was Dana's take.

"I want to make a couple of footstools, use the same fabric, or maybe one of the accent colors. Then I'm going to get some padded folding chairs and make covers for them—just a drape thing, like you see at weddings, with a bow on the back."

"Maybe you could knit me a new car while you're at it," Dana suggested.

"It looks great, Zoe. Now are you going to sit down on it and tell us what happened today?"

"I can't sit yet. You sit. I want to see how somebody looks on it."

She wandered, studying the sofa from different angles. "It's just the way I wanted it to look. Sometimes I get a little spooked, because everything's going so right for me. And I start worrying that because it is, I'll mess up with the key. I know how stupid that sounds."

"Not really," Dana told her as she snuggled into the couch. "I tend to worry about what's going to mess up when things are at their best."

"I thought—I hoped—that I might feel something by going back to Morgantown. I, well, we went by my old apartment, and the salon where I worked. The tattoo parlor. Even went into HomeMakers. But it wasn't like yesterday. There wasn't this sense of urgency or understanding."

She walked back to sit on the floor in front of the sofa. "It was good to see some of it again, to remember. But it didn't grab at me. I lived there nearly six years, but it was—I realized it was like a transition. I never meant to stay. I worked there and I lived there, but my mind was always looking ahead.

"To here, I guess," she said quietly. "Where we were going to go, as soon as I could make it happen. Simon was born there, and that was the biggest thing in my life. But nothing else I did there, nothing else that happened to me there, was all that important. It was just… a gathering place."

"Then that's what you found out," Malory said. "The key isn't there for you. If you hadn't gone, spent the time looking, you wouldn't know that."

"But I still don't know where it is." Frustrated, she tapped a fist on her knee. "There's this sense inside me that I should be able to see, that I've got my head turned, just a little, in the wrong direction, and I'm worried that I'll be going along, doing what I have to do just every day, and miss it because I don't just turn my head and look in the right place."

"We all got discouraged, Zoe," Dana reminded her. "We all looked in the wrong direction."

"You're right. It's just that so much is happening on this side, it makes what's happening on the other seem so little. This place, and how I feel about it—how I feel about you. It's so big. Then I think how am I supposed to pull this key out of the air—then the next minute I know I can. I know I can if I only look the right way."

"You've been back to where you started," Malory reminded her. "And you've looked at where you waited, isn't that a way to describe your time before coming here?"

"I guess it is."

"Maybe you should look where you ended up. Where you are now."

"Here, you mean? Do you think it could be here, in this house?"

"Maybe, or somewhere else important to you. Someplace you had, or will have, that moment of truth. That decision."

"All right." Thoughtfully, Zoe nodded. "I'll try to focus on that for a while. I'll work here while Simon's with Brad."

"Brad has Simon?" Dana echoed. "That's the other thing." She shot Dana a baffled look. "We're coming back and I said something about picking him up from school, bringing him back here with me—trying to work out how I was going to manage this and that, and Brad says he'll pick him up. Saying no, that's all right, doesn't make a damn bit of difference. He'll pick him up at school, take him to HomeMakers for a bit, then over to his place, as it appears they've made some arrangement to play video baseball anyway. And why don't I just do whatever I have to do, and he'll drop Simon home about eight. Oh, and don't worry about dinner," she added with an airy wave of her hand. "They'll order pizza."

"Is that a problem?" Malory asked.

"Not a problem so much. It sure won't be for Simon, and I could use the time. But I just don't want to start depending on somebody. It's just another way to get into trouble. I don't want to start depending on him. I don't want to be in love with him. I don't want that, and I can't seem to help it."

With a sigh, she rested her head on Malory's knee. "What am I going to do?"

Malory stroked her hair. "Whatever comes next."

Chapter Twelve

Zoe stayed behind after her friends had gone home. She wanted to feel the building around her, the way she'd felt the woods the day before. What had it been about this house that had pulled her?

She'd been the one to find it. She'd been the one to crunch the numbers, even though a part of her hadn't believed she could make it work.

Still, despite the doubts, despite the odds, she'd pursued it, had plotted out in her head what had been a kind of fantasy at first. A kind of hope that had become her reality.

She'd been the first one of the three of them to walk through it, to begin to see what could be done. How it could be done. To stake a claim, she supposed, as she trailed her fingers over the wall in the central hall of the second floor.

Hadn't she stood here while the realtor had been yammering away about potential and commercial value and interest rates and known this was the place to build her future? She'd seen the dull beige walls, the chipped molding, the dusty windows, and had envisioned color and light and possibilities, if only she dared risk it.

Didn't that make it a moment of truth?

The house was one more thing that had drawn her together with Malory and Dana, that had made them a unit. Just as the quest united them. As they were each a key. Interlocked in the search for those answers to yesterday and tomorrow. Kane had come here, to tempt and threaten both of her friends. Would he come here to tempt and threaten her? Her fear of him was a living thing that beat inside her.

She stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the door. She had only to walk down the steps, go through that door, and step back into a world she understood and recognized and, to some extent, controlled.

Cars driving by on the street, people passing on the sidewalk. Ordinary life, going its ordinary way.

Inside she was alone, just as she'd been alone in the woods. Just as she was alone every night when she turned off the lamp beside her bed and laid her head on the pillow.

Those were her choices, and she couldn't fear what she had chosen to do with her life.

She turned away from the steps, turned away from the door and the world outside it, and walked the silent hall of what she'd claimed as hers.