And then we both heard Rob call up the stairs, “Hannah? Your mom’s here.”

And Hannah’s face crumpled.

“Mom?” She dropped all three videotapes down on the bed, turned around, and ran for the door. “Mom!”

A few seconds later, I heard her thumping down the stairs, and a woman’s voice say, “Oh, Hannah!” before she was interrupted by youthful, joyous screaming.

I stayed where I was, finishing the rest of my burger. When I was done, I got up, threw the wrapper in the trash, and started for the door.

But I stumbled and nearly lost my balance when my foot caught on something hidden beneath the detritus on the floor. When I looked down to see what it was, I saw a piece of paper with my name on it. So of course I had to stoop down for a closer look.

The paper turned out to be sticking out of an album—green leather with gold-embossed trim. When I picked it up, it was heavy. More paper came out of it. I saw that they were newspaper clippings, and that they’d come loose due to someone’s rough handling.

Someone who, I didn’t doubt, had thrown the album across the room in a fit of pique at me.

I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.

And when I opened it, I saw why she’d done it.

Seventeen

It was all about me. Every page in the album—and there were a lot of them, messily inserted and sloppily glued, even before Hannah had inflicted it with such bodily harm…. The work of someone not used to scrapbooking and with no interest in neatness or even in using the correct kind of adhesive, Rob seemingly having grabbed whatever was handy, including duct tape—was plastered with magazine and newspaper articles about me, starting from the very first story that appeared in our local paper and progressing to a piece that had appeared inThe New York Times after the start of the war on terror, on some of the unorthodox methods the government was using to combat terrorism.

There was even thePeople magazine article—the one I’d refused to take part in—about me and my family (“Though she’s the inspiration for a hit television show, Jessica Mastriani is surprisingly camera shy….”).

There weren’t just clippings, either. There were some photos, too. I recognized a few of them—snapshots Rob’s mother had taken of us at Thanksgiving dinner…even a picture of Ruth and me sitting on Santa’s lap in the mall, giggling like mad. Rob must have talked the photographer into letting him buy a copy of that one, since I know I hadn’t given him one.

But some of the photos I’d never seen before—like a black-and-white one of me, in the center of the book, looking off in the distance, seemingly unaware I was being photographed. I didn’t know where or when that photo had been taken, let alone who’d pressed the shutter.

The final thing in the book was the last piece ever written about me—an announcement in our hometown paper of my winning the scholarship to Juilliard. My mom must have submitted that. She’d been so proud—prouder that I’d won that scholarship than she’d been of any of the other things I’d done, or all the kids—and fugitives from justice—I’d found.

I guess I could understand that. My musical gift was much easier to accept than my other one.

The one that, until recently, I’d thought I’d lost for good.

I could understand my mom keeping an album like this. In fact, she had one just like it.

But that’s because my mom loves me—even if we do have our differences.

The question was, why didRob have an album like this—one he’d obviously kept up with, even after we’d parted ways? What did it mean? Obviously that he’d kept on thinking of me, even after I was long gone out of his life….

But had he kept on thinking of me because he loved me? Or had he kept this album as a sort of trophy he could brag about—I dated Lightning Girl.

But wouldn’t my letters and e-mails to him—the ones I wrote so sporadically while I was overseas—make better material for bragging? And none of those were in the album.

There was only one way I was ever going to find out what it meant. And that was to ask its creator.

Holding the album to my chest—in the hope, I guess, that it would hide the violent hammering of my heart. Though why my pulse should be racing so hard was a question I didn’t dare ask myself—I left the spare room and came down the stairs to find Hannah and a woman I assumed to be her mother huddled together on the couch in the living room. Both of them were weeping, and speaking to each other in hushed voices.

Chick sat at the dining room table, eating what appeared—if the empty wrappers in front of him were any indication—to be his third cheeseburger. There was no sign of the owner of the house.

“Where’s Rob?” I asked Chick, since Hannah and her mother seemed otherwise occupied.

“He couldn’t take all the estrogen,” Chick replied with his mouth full. I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to be keeping his eye not on Hannah, but on her mother, who was an attractive blonde around his own age, though considerably slimmer. “He went out to his workshop in the barn.”

“Thanks,” I said, and started for the door…

…only to be stopped by Hannah, who cried, “Oh, there she is!” and leaped up to grab my wrist.

“This is her, Mom,” Hannah said, dragging me over to where her mother sat on the couch. “Jessica Mastriani. She’s the one who found me.”

Mrs. Snyder, Hannah’s mom, looked up at me tearfully. “I can’t thank you enough,” she gushed, “for bringing my daughter home.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” I said. I always did hate this part. “It’s very nice to meet you. I have to go now….”

“That’s not all she did, Mom,” Hannah began, and she started chattering about Randy and his misdeeds, and the part I’d played in getting his no-good butt hauled off to jail, and how she needed to go down to the station house to do her part to keep him there. Fortunately I managed to wrestle my wrist free and escape without her seeming to notice. A second later, I was out in the bright sunshine, heading for Rob’s workshop in the barn.

In the same way that his house had undergone a renovation since the last time I’d seen it, so had Rob’s barn. New wood panels lined the walls, so that in winter the place would stay snug, and in the summer, the central air Rob had obviously installed would cool it. The holes in the high-beamed ceiling, through which birds used to slip, were gone, as were the horse stalls—removed to make way for tool racks and a pneumatic lift. Partially refurbished bikes stood in neat rows, with the one Rob was currently working on—a 1975 Harley XLCH—on a table in the middle of the barn.

Rob was standing by the sink he’d installed at the far end of the building when I came in, and didn’t notice me right away. When I said, “Rob,” he turned around, started to say something, then noticed what I had in my arms.

Then he immediately clammed up. He leaned back against the metal sink basin, his arms folded across his chest. Dr. Phil would call this kind of body language hostile.

“I found it in Hannah’s room,” I said when I’d gotten close enough to him—about five feet away—that I could speak in a normal voice in the cavernous space and still be assured of being heard. “She…she told me about it before, but I didn’t believe her.”

Rob’s gaze was on the album. His expression was carefully neutral. “Why wouldn’t you believe her? Is it so weird I’d want to keep track of what you were doing? It’s not like I could ask you. You weren’t speaking to me, if you’ll recall.”

I looked down at the album, too. “Not all of this stuff is from the time when we weren’t speaking.”

Rob unfolded his arms and slid his fingers into the pockets of his jeans. Dr. Phil would call this a defensive gesture, too.

“All right,” he said at last with a shrug. “You got me. I tried to get you out of my head—from the day I found out you were so much younger than me, I tried to get you out of my head. But I couldn’t. That book’s the result. I know it’s creepy and weird.”

I finally looked up. “I don’t think it’s creepy,” I said. I was trying hard not to wonder if, now that I knew Hannah had been telling the truth about the scrapbook, the other things she’d said about Rob were true, too. How he kept going on to her about “how great and brave and smart and funny” I was. Did he really say those things? Did he still think they were true, now that he’d seen me again after so much time had passed?

I was also trying not to remember what had happened the last time we’d been in this barn alone together. Admittedly, it had just been some kissing…but Rob had always been a fantastic kisser. Not that I had so much experience to measure him by. Still, I couldn’t help remembering the way my knees had always buckled at the touch of his lips to mine.

“I don’t think it’s weird, either,” I added when he didn’t say anything. “Well. Maybe a little weird. I never thought you liked me that much.”

Because that, of course, was something else that had happened in this barn. I’d told him I loved him. And he had not acted too pleased about it.

Rob shrugged again. “What was I supposed to do?” he wanted to know. “You knew I was on probation. And you were underage. And the way your mom obviously felt about me—I couldn’t risk it. It seemed better just to stay away from you until you turned eighteen.”

“But you couldn’t wait,” I said. Not bitterly. I just said it like it was a fact. Because it was.

Except to Rob, apparently.

“What do you mean, I couldn’t wait?” he demanded, taking his hands from his pockets and stepping away from the sink. “What do you think—Jesus, Jess! I totally waited. I’mstill waiting.”

I blinked at him. “But…that girl—”