“Devon? Oh, I can’t believe that.” Lucy threw him a smile over one shoulder. “She was probably just nervous. A lot of people are, around new babies.”

“Yeah, well, I wish you could have seen her.” He pushed the mug away on an exasperated exhalation, then sat and bleakly gazed at his mother as she went back to rolling cookie dough into balls on the countertop.

Which was when it occurred to him that the back of her green sweatshirt was adorned with the rear view of a very fat black-and-white cat wearing a Santa hat; he assumed the front view of the cat would be on the corresponding side of the sweatshirt. Since breakfast, it seemed, his mother had metamorphosed into a Christmas elf.

Now that he thought about it, since this morning the whole house had broken out in Christmas. The sweatshirt, the tablecloth, Christmas songs drifting in from the CD player in the parlor, cookies baking in the oven, filling the air with the rich dark smell of cinnamon and cloves. Molasses Crinkles, he realized as he watched his mother’s hands deftly spoon gobs of thick brown dough, roll them into balls, dip them in sugar and then, the final touch, with a fingertip touch a single drop of water to the sugared top of each cookie, so they’d crack when they baked. What memories it all brought back. Those cookies had been his favorite, and he bet he hadn’t tasted them in almost ten years. She’d probably made them especially for him.

At some point in the future he’d probably have to think about that, maybe even decide whether it touched or annoyed him-or both. But at the moment he had something else on his mind. Someone else. Devon. Naturally.

What am I going to do, he thought gloomily, if she doesn’t have any feelings? About the little one, at least-he’d seen pretty convincing evidence of other kinds of feelings, down there in the barn this morning.

The little one. He thought then about his own feelings, and the need he still had, after all these weeks, to hold a part of himself safely aloof from feeling too much for a child he knew he had no real claim to. Saying her name, even in his mind filled him with fear. Even the word “baby” made him feel vulnerable. “Little one”-that was better. Nothing to do with his heart, only a small person for whom he was responsible. A helpless being he’d sworn to protect.

On that score, on a purely legal level, once the DNA tests proved he wasn’t the baby’s father, his custody claim wasn’t going to have much of a leg to stand on. So, he’d figured his only hope for keeping the little-Emily-out of her grandparents’ clutches was to get to Devon’s emotions-break her down, get her to remember what it had been like, growing up in that house. At the very least, get her to remember and acknowledge what it was that had made her little sister run away from home-and stay away, at the cost of her own life. But what if, he thought now, the memories are too painful for her to face? What if she’s buried the memories-and the feelings-too deep? What if I can’t get through?

Then…it will have to be Caitlyn.

“Son? You want to give me a hand out here for a minute?” His dad had opened the back door just wide enough to put his head through, letting in eddies of damp snow-scented air to swirl through the warm, spice-saturated kitchen.

“Yeah-sure.” As he pushed back his chair, Eric saw his mother throw another smile over her shoulder, this one aimed over his head, toward the back porch door.

Watching his parents’ silent communion, he felt a pang of something that wasn’t quite envy, but rather an acknowledgement sense of being on the outside of an exclusive club-one with a membership of two.

Once upon a time, he’d wondered if the kind of love his parents had was really as rare as it seemed. Now that he’d been out in the world for the past ten years, he knew beyond any doubt that it was. And that was a bleak and lonely thought.

Even with the storm windows up, the porch was cold as a meat locker. It smelled of mud, evergreens and freshly cut wood.

“I took off another four inches-that should be enough.” Mike gestured vaguely at the wet sawdust and pine boughs scattered on the floor, the tree leaning against the wall. “Your mother likes to use the extra branches to put around.”

Yeah, Dad, Eric thought but didn’t say aloud, I know. I used to live here, too.

He didn’t blame his father for treating him like a stranger; not really. He’d been just a kid the last time they’d spent any time together. The few brief and very awkward visits in the years since, some even more awkward phone calls hardly counted at all. Now, here he was a grown man, and it seemed neither of them had figured out how to work it yet.

“I thought we could-oh-okay…” His father hastened to grab the other side of the eight-foot tree Eric was already lifting and together they eased the freshly cut stump into the stand. “That looks pretty straight,” Mike said, standing back to get a better perspective.

“I’ll hold it, if you want to tighten the screws,” Eric said, and then silently cussed himself as he watched his father lower himself to his knees with a stiffness that hadn’t been there before. His dad getting old? Eric wasn’t prepared for that. Not by a long shot.

“You know, son,” Mike said, squinting up at him through the evergreen boughs, “I couldn’t help but hear what you were telling your mother just now-about Devon. The baby…”

Eric glanced at his father, then quickly away. His feelings just then were ambiguous, as they had been since long before he’d pulled his car up to his parents’ back door. While the child-the son-in him was bristling at the merest hint of parental interference, the adult-a brand-new parent himself-cautiously hoped for some much-needed advice. So as not to betray that fact, he eyeballed the tree, straightened it minutely and unnecessarily, and said, “Yeah? What about it?”

“You said…you didn’t think she had…any feelings…for the baby.” Mike’s head and shoulders had disappeared into the foliage, and his words came in muffled grunts. “But…I think…you’re wrong about that.”

What else is new? Eric-the-son wanted to say. Eric-the-new-father drew a careful breath and gruffly said, “Yeah? Why?”

“Think about it.” Mike sat back on his heels, gave the tree a measuring glance, then transferred the glance to Eric. “If she didn’t have any feelings toward that baby, why would it bother her just to hold her? Shouldn’t be any different than holding…say, a doll. Or a sack of groceries. Right?”

Eric didn’t say anything. He stared at the tree, then gave it a quarter-turn. His father studied it with tilted head, muttered, “A little bit to your right-that’s it, hold it right there,” and dove into the branches again.

“Now, Devon, it seems to me-” slightly out-of-breath, it came from the depths of the tree “-is a young woman who likes to be in control.” There was a pause before Mike emerged to gaze up at him again, this time balanced on the ball of one foot and the opposite knee. “That sounds like a cliché, I know, but in her case I think it’s important. There’s a good reason she’s a lawyer. Lawyers get to call the shots, see? Tell people what to do. Anyway, to a lawyer, emotions are commodities, something to be polished up, spin-doctored and sold to a jury.” He smiled crookedly and stuck out a hand. After the briefest of hesitations, Eric gripped it firmly and braced himself against the pull of his father’s weight. “Real emotions-particularly her own,” Mike said with a grin when he was on his feet again, “probably scare that woman to death.”

Eric made a disbelieving sound and shook his head, but it was only for show. To his surprise, his father seemed to know that. Instead of arguing with him, he touched his arm and moved closer in a companionable, man-to-man sort of way.

“Son, let me tell you how it is with women and babies. I don’t know what, but there’s something that happens. Put a woman close to a baby, and she goes all soft and runny inside. Even the most sensible no-nonsense woman’ll suddenly start cooing in babytalk. Take your mother-when she was younger, she’d fight a bare-knuckle brawl to prove how tough she was. She felt she had to, I guess, trying to run this place alone, all that responsibility, being the boss. I had a devil of a time just getting her to admit she needed me.

“Then your sister Rose Ellen was born…” He paused, laughing softly, and for some reason Eric found himself laughing the same way. “Ah, man.” Mike shook his head. “I remember once, Ellie was only a couple of weeks old. I walked into the bedroom, and there was your mother, leaning over the crib, crying. Nearly scared me to death- I thought for sure something was wrong with the baby. But your mom shook her head and kept looking at Ellie, who it turned out was sound asleep and perfectly fine, and all she could say was, ‘She’s so beautiful-’” He broke off with a cough, and Eric, all too familiar with how it was with guys and emotions, turned away with an embarrassed laugh of his own.

“The thing is,” his father said after a moment, stopping him just before he could escape back into the kitchen, “there aren’t many emotions in this world more powerful than those of a mother. You’ve heard of maternal instincts? If Devon was feeling even a little bit of that, it is no wonder she ran.”

After her demoralizing morning, Devon hid out in the bathroom for as long as she could find excuses to do so. She showered and shampooed, conditioned and deep-cleansed, tweezed and clipped, brushed and flossed, blow-dried and styled anything and everything she could think of to which those activities could possibly be applied. Worse than the boredom was the full awareness that that was what she was doing-hiding out. And the worst of it was, she couldn’t really understand why she was doing it. Devon O’Rourke wasn’t a coward. She was not in the habit of avoiding issues and ducking confrontations-especially when such confrontations might be her only means of obtaining needed information.