Blackness fell, sudden and complete. It took a second for Amber to get her mental bearings.

The power had gone out.

Fantastic.

Now she was alone in the dark with an unreasonably s.e.xy man who thought she was Mother Teresa.

Somebody's got to teach you how to misbehave.

She'd wanted to ask, How about you?

But of course she'd said nothing. She didn't know how to say stuff like that.

It was a trap, being good. You trapped yourself, and then even when you unlocked the door and walked out of the cage, you still felt trapped.

She sighed.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Why wouldn't I be okay?"

"Some people don't like the dark."

His voice didn't sound right. It sounded as if it was pushing back against the weight of something, but that didn't make any sense. Tony moved around the construction site like he owned all of Mount Pleasant and half the village of Camelot. He was never this ... strained.

"You wouldn't be one of those people, would you?"

She tried to give the question a teasing lilt, but it didn't quite fly, and then it didn't matter, because he said, "I might be."

Tony Mazzara, the Italian Stallion, was afraid of the dark.

She let it sink in for a moment, because it had such a long way to sink.

Part of her wanted to smile at the irony, but it was really bad news for him. The bas.e.m.e.nt wasn't just dim, it was pitch-black. An ocean of dark. There were no windows, and a heavy door at the top of the stairs blocked any light that might have filtered down. Poor Tony.

"Is there a flashlight down here, you think?" he asked.

"Not that I know of. How much of a problem is this for you, exactly? Like, you're not a big fan of the dark, or worse than that?"

"I'm not going to flip out and start smashing things."

"Okay. Good."

But he didn't sound good, now that she was listening. She could hear him breathing, fast and shallow, as if he might be flipping out. Plus, would he even have admitted being afraid of the dark if he had only a minor aversion to it? Probably not. He was a man. Her younger brother, Caleb, would never admit to being afraid of worms, even though he'd pa.s.sed out when he had to dissect one in high school.

She needed to help Tony get his mind off the situation, but she wasn't sure what to say. They were stuck in a bas.e.m.e.nt together in the dark, in a tornado, and he was possibly having a panic attack. What next, zombies?

She said the first nonsense that popped into her head. "You think this is what Y2K is going to be like?" January 1, 2000, was still months off, but she'd seen a "personal survival guide" at the bookstore last week. "Everybody huddled in the dark, fretting about the end of the world?"

"Nah. I think Y2K is a bunch of c.r.a.p."

"My mother is obsessed with it. She reads every article in the newspaper, and when it comes on the news, she's always like, Turn it up! This is important!' "

"Your mother sounds like a trip."

Her mother was controlling, difficult, and uptight. But really lovely, if you could get past all that. "She's unique."

"You live with her?"

"No, I have an apartment."

"Oh, right. You said that."

"But she lives nearby," Amber confessed. "My parents own the complex, so they have a big apartment above the office."

If he interpreted this to mean she was a loser who'd never properly left home, he was kind enough not to say so.

"My mom's having her New Year's party like she always does," he said. "All my family, plus the aunts and uncles and cousins. She figures if the lights go out and airplanes start crashing, at least there'll be champagne."

"Maybe we won't even survive that long. Maybe this is actually the apocalypse, getting a jump on us. By the time New Year's rolls around, the world will be empty, anyway."

"If this is the apocalypse, where are the hors.e.m.e.n? They're supposed to have fiery swords. Then it wouldn't be so f.u.c.king dark."

"You could ask to borrow a fiery sword to use for a flashlight," she suggested.

"Yeah. Excuse me, sir? I know you're probably going to lop my head off with that thing in a minute, but in the meantime, could I hold it, you think?' "

She smiled. "Maybe he wouldn't let you have the sword, but there'd probably be a flaming T-shirt or something he could spare."

"You're making out like the hors.e.m.e.n of the apocalypse are going to be nice guys. I'm not sure that's the way it works."

"Good point," she said. "You'll have to find an angel."

"Those won't be hard to track down. They'll be here for you."

"I doubt it. I never go to ma.s.s anymore."

"They're going to bring you a fancy chair to ride up to heaven in. A what-do-you-call-it, like in Vietnam movies? Where somebody pulls you through the streets?"

"A palanquin?"

Another huff of laughter. "I've never even heard of that. Whatever it's called, you're getting one."

He snapped his fingers. "A rickshaw. You're getting a rickshaw."

"I'm not sure I want a rickshaw."

"Doesn't matter. Rickshaws aren't optional. But look, if you haven't left in your rickshaw yet when the Devil shows up and starts listing all my sins, you might consider sticking around to defend me."

She smiled. He sounded better again. Relaxed. He was funny, which was a surprise.

She liked him.

Of course, she'd already liked him, but in a faraway, movie-star-idolizing sort of way. When she'd imagined talking to him in her head, he hadn't ever been funny.

Actually, did he even talk, in her head? Or did he just sort of ... attractively smolder while chopping wood, or smashing things with a sledgehammer, shirtless?

Her imagination-so rich in some ways, so impoverished in others.

"Do you deserve to be defended?" she asked. "I thought you were trouble."

"Who said I was trouble?"

The teasing had drained from his tone. Oops. "The same person who told me your name was Patrick."

"You were asking about me."

"It's possible."

"Well, if you did ask about me, and you found somebody who knew my family well enough to tell me and Patrick apart, they'd probably tell you I was all right. Not bad news like Patrick, but not as smart as Joe or as ambitious as Peter. They'd probably also tell you none of us boys has a lick of sense compared to Andrea and Cathy."

"That's a lot of nots. You're not the bad one, the smart one, the ambitious one, or one of the girls. Which one does that make you?"

"The one who's never going to amount to anything."

He was trying to sound light and breezy again, but it wasn't quite working. She heard the discomfort behind his words, and it surprised her.

Tony ran a big construction company, or at least part of it. Directed trucks. Told workers what to do. He walked around pointing at girders and directing electricians as though he had an encyclopedia of construction inside his head. Surely he'd already amounted to something?

"Why would anybody say that about you?"

A few seconds' pause. "Actually, I take it back. It's been awhile since anybody said that. I'm trying to be the responsible one these days."

"Trying?"

Three or four mornings out of five, his blue truck was waiting in the parking lot when she drove up, and he kept her late after work. He seemed about as responsible as they came.

"Yeah, well, it doesn't come real natural. My brother, Patrick? He and I ..." Tony paused, then exhaled explosively. "Let's just say he did something he couldn't undo, and I had a part in it. It changed the way I think about ... pretty much everything. And then my dad died a few years ago, and my mom took over the company, but she doesn't know jack s.h.i.t about building things. I've been helping her keep it afloat."

"You don't sound like trouble at all."

"I used to be."

An uncomfortable pause. They'd strayed too far from where they started. In an attempt to steer them back, she said, "That's a relief. If you were a saint, who would teach me how to misbehave?"

Silence.

She'd walked off a conversational cliff.

In the dark, silence had a completely different quality. She felt exposed, her heart beating over a loudspeaker, her words echoing in the s.p.a.ce between them.

She smelled concrete and pool chlorine and damp. She shifted away from the hard plastic of the chair digging into her upper back, and she heard it all coming. Everything he was about to say.

"Amber, look."

She crossed her arms.

"You're a nice girl."

That. Exactly that. Now he would tell her he hadn't meant what he'd said earlier.

"I didn't mean to give you the wrong impression. The thing is ..."

"I get it," she said. Anything to stop him before he could tell her she was too nice for him, or too young, or too something else that she didn't know the words for.

"I'm pushing thirty," he said. "And you're, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?"

"Twenty-four."

Metal sc.r.a.ped over concrete as he shifted in his chair. "You're a pretty girl."

He said it like an apology.

"Thank you."

Silence again. Pitch-black silence, into which no machines rumbled and no lights intruded, no shapes emerged to make the darkness feel familiar. She could hear the rain, a faraway white noise that only seemed to deepen the quiet of the bas.e.m.e.nt.

She could hear her watch, too, ticking off the seconds. She'd had no idea it was making so much noise down there on her wrist.

And beneath that, inaudible but present, she could hear the anger and frustration she'd been finding increasingly difficult to ignore over the past few years.

This was what came of trying so hard for so long to be good. Twenty-four years old, and her inexperience was written all over her face, so obvious that it meant a man like Tony didn't even find her attractive.

When she was little, she'd believed that G.o.d was watching her, and she'd wanted to please Him, just as she'd wanted to please her mother. In those first years after they moved to Ohio from Michigan, away from her aunts and uncles and her grandparents, her mother had become so bitter and unhappy she was almost unrecognizable.

Amber did what she could to make it better. She played with her younger brother, Caleb, and helped take care of baby Katie. She never made a peep at school, helped clean the house, brought home exemplary report cards.

After a while, Mom got used to Camelot, Ohio, and Amber got used to being good. For years and years, she was as good as she could possibly be, thinking it was going to get her somewhere. Win her a blue ribbon, or true love, or fulfillment.

It didn't.

Even before college, her faith in G.o.d and goodness had started to fray, and the summer break she spent in the slums outside Cape Town doing charity work with a group of Nazarene students left it in tatters.

G.o.d wasn't watching. There might be a G.o.d, or there might not-she hadn't made up her mind about that. But she'd seen enough dire poverty and need in South Africa to shake her out of her complacence.

Life could be short, and it could be brutal. She was lucky enough to have been born in a good place to good people in the midst of plenty. Yes, she needed to use the advantages she had to try to make the world better, but she also had to live.