Okay, but we have to talk about this, she argued back desperately. I have to get him to talk to me about what happened to him. I just have to. And soon. This can't wait much longer. Tonight. We'll talk tonight.

But when they turned into the guest house parking lot, she realized that any confrontation with Tristan was going to have to wait a little while longer. The previously almost empty lot was suddenly full of vehicles, many of them vans and panel trucks bearing satellite dishes and multiple antennae on their rooftops. The world news media had caught up with them.

"Oh no," she murmured.

"Looks like the honeymoon's over." Tristan's smile barely stretched the hollows in his cheeks as he maneuvered the car into a vacant spot on the edge of the lot, well outside the huddled circle of media vehicles and equipment. "They were bound to find us sooner or later. The military's done a helluva job to hold 'em off this long." He turned off the motor and looked over at Jessie. "Ready to face the music?"

The skin under his eyes looked bruised. Seeing that, she felt something swell inside her and a shivering sensation crawl under the skin along her back, neck and chest. She knew what it was, she'd felt it before: maternal outrage. If she'd been a momma wolf her hackles would have been rising. Or, in her case, maybe a more apt comparison would be one of Granny Calhoun's hens fluffing up her feathers so as to look twice her actual size, ready to defend her nest against all comers.

"Tris, you're exhausted," she said as he opened his door, "maybe we can sneak in the back way."

He shook his head, already easing his bad knee over the sill. "I'm not gonna go skulking around like a coward."

Outside the car he paused to steady himself with a hand on the door frame, then leaned over to pick up his cane from the back seat. When he straightened again his skin looked gray, but Jessie saw him, with a visible effort, pull himself up to a military stance, and a muscle tighten in his jaw. "Gonna have to face them sometime. Might as well do it and get it over with."

Duty calls, she thought, rekindling an old resentment. And at the same time a familiar sense of pride. Taking his arm as they crossed the parking lot, she could feel tremors of exhaustion and weakness racking his body, and yet she knew he'd die before he'd ever admit it. And looking at his rock-hard features, nobody would ever guess he was holding himself together by sheer strength of will. But that's how he did it, she thought. That's how he's been surviving. Sheer willpower.

Not even willpower, though, could keep him from faltering when the mass of reporters spotted them and descended like a human tidal wave. She felt his body flinch as if from a physical blow. Glancing up at him, she saw that his face had turned a sickly bluish white-a familiar phenomenon from her experience as a nurse and one she knew was usually a prelude to somebody hitting the floor.

And with that thought, there it was again, that swelling, feather-fluffing, hackles-raising momma-bear fury, and without even thinking about it, she had taken an iron grip on Tristan's arm, and with her free arm thrown out like an icebreaker, was ploughing him through the river of pushing, shoving reporters, thrusting microphones and whirring, clicking cameras.

Having achieved the guest house steps, she turned to face the crowd, and as she did she was shoving Tristan behind her, shielding him from them with her own body. Somehow, he'd gathered the strength to lift his hand to ask for quiet. The din subsided, but before Tristan could begin to speak, Jessie heard her own voice-firm, forceful and calm-the one she used to reassure frightened parents in the NICU.

"I know how anxious y'all are to hear from my husband. I just want to ask you to please be patient and respect our privacy a little while longer. Lieutenant Bauer has had a long day. I know he'll be a lot better able to answer your questions after he's had some rest. Now, if you would…please…" Her voice faltered, and she felt Tris's hands on her shoulders-lending her his strength, she wondered, or drawing from hers?

She heard his deep, quiet voice, and a thrill rushed through her. "I just want to thank you all, and let you know I'll try to answer your questions in due time. I believe the base's public affairs officer is planning a press conference before I leave for the states, if you-"

"Lieutenant Bauer, just one question," someone shouted. "How does it feel to be back from the dead?"

Again she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. "It feels…great." She knew from his voice that he had to be grinning, and that it could only be one of those great big honest-to-God old-fashioned Tristan grins she loved so much. Her eyes filled with tears.

A reporter shouted, "Mrs. Bauer, would you mind if we asked you a few questions?"

She hadn't expected that. Not sure what she should do, she tilted her head back and glanced up at Tristan. He gave her a nod and his skewed half smile, but the tiredness in his eyes seemed bottomless. She put her hand over his where it rested on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. "Why don't you go on?" she murmured for his ears only. "I don't mind stayin' a minute."

He hesitated, then murmured back, "If you're sure…"

"I'll be fine. Go on-go." She turned back to the crowd of reporters with a determined smile. A moment later she felt him leave her, and there was a tingling coldness on her shoulders where his hands had been.

"Mrs. Bauer-when did you find out your husband was alive?"

"Mrs. Bauer, Mrs. Bauer-what's it been like to have your husband come back from the dead?"

"How is he feeling, Mrs. Bauer?"

"When do you plan to-"

"First of all," Jessie began in a loud voice, holding up her hands, "y'all have to understand, this has been happenin' awfully fast. I don't think it's really hit me yet." There was a ripple of sympathetic laughter. Somewhere behind her she heard the guest house door open and close. She paused, and the crowd grew hushed, listening as she went quietly on. "All I know is, my husband is alive, he's here with me, and very soon now he's gonna be back home where he belongs. It might have taken a while longer than I'd have liked for it to, but the good Lord has answered an awful lot of prayers."

In the genteel stillness of the guest house lobby, Tristan paused to listen to the rise and fall of Jessie's voice…the occasional rustle of reporters' laughter. Jess's voice. It was hers, yes…the one he remembered but different, somehow. Quietly confident, matter-of-fact. It came to him suddenly, what it reminded him of: the voices he heard every day at the hospital, voices of strength and comfort and encouragement. The cheerful, no-nonsense, reassuring voices of the nurses.

Instead of heading for the elevator, he turned as if drawn by a magnet to one of the multipaned windows that overlooked the front walk. From there, hidden from view by the curtains, he watched his wife face the crowd of reporters alone. And maybe it was seeing her from a distance like that, and hearing her voice that was so much the same and yet so different, but something in his perception suddenly shifted-like one of those optical illusions where one moment you're looking at a face right side up, and the next second it's upside down. She has changed. She's not the same Jessie I left behind.

He hadn't really thought she would be…had he? He'd prepared himself, or thought he had, for her to have gotten older…even to have found someone else. Then he'd found her looking just the way he'd pictured her in his mind, still slim, sunshine blond and beautiful, still a little bit awkward and eager to please him. Just the way he remembered her. Now he knew he'd been kidding himself. Of course she'd changed-in eight years, how could she not? But she hadn't gotten older; what she'd done was matured. And she hadn't found someone else. She'd found herself.

Watching the tall, self-assured woman-a stranger to him-out there on the guest house steps, he felt a stabbing sense of loss. His chest filled with the pressure of grief-for the young, accommodating girl he'd left behind and remembered so well…grief, too, for the impossible dream he'd clung to like a life preserver and that had kept him alive for so long.

Then, as he watched the beautiful, confident woman on the steps, her hair haloed by the television crews' spotlights, he felt something new come and take root in the empty place those losses had left inside him, and slowly begin to grow. Respect. Admiration. And the pressure in his chest was no longer grief. It was pride.


* * *

When Jessie slipped quietly into her room sometime later, she was hoping Tris might have gone to sleep. Instead she found him sitting in a straight-backed chair beside the table. A tissue spread on the tabletop near his elbow held a neat pile of orange and banana peels. The TV was tuned to a soccer game.

"Everybody gone?" he asked as he turned off the television set, stifling a yawn.

She dropped her pocketbook beside the dresser and nodded. "I think so. For now, anyway. I imagine they'll be back in the mornin'." Still flushed and, if she wanted to be entirely truthful, just a wee bit exhilarated, she took a deep breath and lifted her fingers to rake them through her hair. "Whoo-hope I don't have to do that again. That was somethin' else."

"I think you'd better get used to it," Tristan said dryly. "I wouldn't worry about it, though-you handled it beautifully." There was something in the way he looked at her…something soft and golden in his eyes…that made her pulse quicken.

She went toward him, wishing she could just walk right up to him and put her arms around him, and that he would put his arms around her and pull her into the vee of his legs and nestle his face against her breasts. Once, long ago, it would have been a natural, easy thing.