"He'll go away," I reassured her. "This issue is between you and me. And I swear, I swear, I am going to leave your husband. I was actually planning to go back to school. On the East Coast. Far away from where he lives."

"Where we live," she said through clenched teeth. She nudged me into the bedroom with the gun at my temple. Once inside, she clamped a meaty hand over my mouth. Hot, clammy flesh, cold metal. "Not one sound, you fucking bitch."

I pushed my way through the drunk, chattering groups in the ballroom, searching for a quiet place to take Kyle's call. I crossed the lobby and ducked behind a coatroom.

"Tell me again. Slowly. Where is Nell?"

"I was calling to ask you that. So you put her in the car?"

I stared at the swirls in the carpet, eyes unfocusing and refocusing. My heart pounded in my chest. Move. I headed for the door.

"Jeremy, are you still there?"

"Yeah, I'm here. Yes. I put her in the car." My fingers felt numb, and my palm was suddenly slick with sweat. I grasped the phone more tightly and hailed the driver with the other hand. "She should be there. Maybe she's somewhere else in the hotel."

"I've looked everywhere in the hotel."

"Well, call the fucking police!" I said, climbing into the car. I barked the name of the hotel at the driver.

"I called them."

"Look around again. Where the fuck were you when she got there?"

"I was in the car, trying to get to the hotel! Why didn't you wait for me to get there before you sent her? Or call me to pick her up?"

"She was tired," I said. She was tired of playing the game, and I was tired of watching her. "Did you check the gym? The bar? The restaurant? The elevators?"

"Jeremy, I checked everywhere. Security is looking. She's not anywhere here. Maybe-"

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe she left."

I bit my lip. It was a possibility. One I didn't want to think about, but better than the other possibility...

"Check the room again."

"I checked. I knocked three times, but there was no answer."

"Just go in. Maybe she's sleeping."

"I left the key in my tuxedo jacket."

I cursed, noticing the black garment beside me on the seat.

"Knock again. Knock until she answers, or get security up there." I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.

I heard Kyle knock, and to my relief, I heard the door open and the clink of the chain catching.

"Put her on the phone, Kyle."

"Take the chain off," I heard Kyle say, and I heard Nell's soft refusal.

"Put her on the phone. Give her the phone! I want to talk to her."

Then I heard the sound of wood crashing and shots from a gun.

"Kyle! Kyle!" I yelled, but there was only terrible silence after that.

I cradled Nell in a private room at the hospital while she made her statement to the police. I tucked the blanket around her more tightly from time to time to distract myself from the terrible story she was telling them. No matter how close I held her, she still shivered in my arms. Underneath the hospital blanket, blood stained her ivory dress. Not her blood. Kyle's.

After everything we'd done, all the people I'd hired, all the police and private investigators, Leslie Gray had waltzed into the hotel room by knocking on the door. Nell let her in, thinking it was Kyle. It was too simple to believe.

"She had a gun. I wanted to run, but I was afraid she would shoot me. I was too scared to try to get away."

"No one expected you to get away," I said quietly. "That only works in the movies, not in real life."

"I tried to keep her talking, but she only got angrier. She said she was your wife and that I was a home wrecker...and a lot of other things."

I knew. I'd seen it all on her web sites, on the many letters she sent the last several weeks.

"She had her finger on the trigger." Her voice quavered, and she snuggled closer to me. She nudged her head under my chin. I stroked her hair and thought about how close I'd come to losing her. "She was going to kill me. She just had some things to say first."

"Thank goodness," I said. "It bought us some time. She always was very verbose in her ravings."

"When Kyle knocked, she freaked out. She didn't know what to do. She started acting really erratic...and when Kyle knocked the second time-"

That part I knew already. Kyle had broken in, and Leslie Gray had shot Kyle as he'd wrestled the gun from her, and then he had shot her. Fatally. Kyle was originally from Texas. He was good with a gun.

"It's okay. It's okay," I said as she cried. "Kyle's going to be okay."

Kyle's wound wasn't life-threatening, but he'd still taken a bullet to the chest. He'd come through surgery and was resting in recovery. Nell knew all this, but she still shook in my arms.

"I thought she killed him. I really thought she killed him."

"She didn't, but she might have killed you." I drew in a deep breath of her hair. Nell, fresh and flowery. Alive. It was redemption. A second chance to do things the right way. "I'm so sorry, Nell. This is all my fault. This is exactly what I was afraid of happening, what's kept me up at night. If she had killed you-" I stopped speaking. I didn't really have words for what I might have done if Leslie Gray had killed my Nell.

"It was my fault too," she said. "If I'd stayed with you... I should have stayed with you. I was being selfish. I was tired-"

"Hush." Why was she apologizing to me? Selfish? I was the selfish one.

I had been the selfish one all along. For my own purposes, I'd exposed her to this danger, but instead of blaming me, she was apologizing. She should have been throwing hateful accusations in my face.

"Rhiannon," I said.

"What?"

I looked down at her. "She should have hated her husband for what he did to her, what he put her through. But she forgave him. She still loved him."

She still loved him. Did she still love me? Had she ever loved me? I thought she had once, but how could she love me anymore?

She shouldn't love me anymore. I steeled myself to say the words I didn't want to say.

"You're like Rhiannon." I said. "But you shouldn't forgive me."

I watched her work that out in her mind. Small lines of tension appeared around her mouth, the mouth I wanted to kiss and soothe but wouldn't. She knew. My throat tightened to see the stubborn denial in her eyes. She kept her voice light and controlled. "Forgive you? It wasn't your fault."

"It was my fault. The only reason she wanted to harm you was because of me. I can't...I can't live like this anymore. I've never been able to live like this. That's why I don't let myself love anyone. That way it's easier not to get upset when the fans and press go after her. And it's easier to let her go...when I have to...for her own good."

She always tried not to cry but could never accomplish it. She blinked rapidly, and so did I. Don't look. Don't let the tears sway you. Don't let the pain of this moment keep you from doing what's right.

"You can't control who you love," she said. Her hands twisted in my shirt, and she looked up at me in supplication.

"I have a lot of control when I need to. You should know that by now."

"Jeremy-"

Steady voice. I had to be her dominant. I had to put the rest of it away and do this now. "Nell, I'm sorry. I just can't anymore. I can't chance this happening again. I can't live with this. Someone like me-my girlfriends will always be a target. And making you my wife? Jesus. I might as well paint a target on your head."

"Jeremy-"

"No. I want you to start applying to colleges. Let me know how I can help. You can start in the fall, wherever you decide to go. I want you to go wherever you want. I want you to be happy. I want you to be safe."

I took her hand. She made a little fist that made my heart ache, but I pried it open anyway and slipped the ring off. I pushed her tear-streaked face under my chin so she wouldn't say anything further.

"I'll tell my publicist in the morning," I said, blinking back my own grief. "She'll make it all make sense."

She'll make it all make sense.

Nothing ever made sense in my life except for the truths I manufactured. Only they were unchangeable, exact, easy to provide and manipulate as needed.

And of course, the public and the press made their own sense of things no matter what you did. The confrontation in the hotel room turned into some quiet insinuations that Nell and Kyle had been having an affair under my nose that led to our highly publicized "breakup." Funny how far off and yet how close to the truth the papers got at the same time. But Kyle healed quickly and got back to working for me. Nell stopped working for me for good.

I still paid her, though. I took care of everything. I bought her a beautiful little bungalow in Hollywood Hills and a fuel-efficient Mini Cooper for her to zip around town wherever she needed to go. A nice, practical car for my nice, practical, quiet little student, and a mountain of mythology books that I couldn't resist sending every week. I found myself inexplicably buying them for myself as well, as though reading them might give me the answers I continued to seek. The answer to why Nell was still so heavy on my mind. The answer to why I couldn't let her go. What was it about her that had caught me? Why her, the simple, quiet, unassuming girl that she was?

You can't control who you love.

I heard her words in my mind a hundred times a day. And I think she was partly right, and partly wrong. I could control who I loved. I had the control to keep myself away from her at least. But I loved her still. So in that way, yes, she was right.

But I had control. I had the control not to call her, not to e-mail, not to invite her out to lunch, not to drive over to her little bungalow at three in the morning when I thought I would die if I couldn't sink between her thighs.

And I had the control not to beg on my hands and knees for her to stay in L.A. when I learned, through Kyle, that she'd be returning to Harvard to complete a program I'd never even known she'd begun.

Chapter Nineteen.

Bravery *

I sat on my back porch and watched the sun go down. It was so beautiful, but it would have been even more beautiful if I weren't alone. It was late April, warm spring, but I still felt cold. I thought I would always feel cold from now on.

The doorbell rang. My heart used to leap every time the bell rang, because so often it had been a package of mythology books, an anonymous gift I knew was from Jeremy. But the books had stopped a few weeks ago. I supposed Jeremy had moved on. I tried not to look at the papers, for fear I'd see him with someone new. Of course, what did it matter? More than anyone, I knew it wasn't real.

I walked to the front door and looked through the peephole. A nervous habit now, one I wish I'd had before, so I could have saved Kyle a hell of a lot of pain.

Speak of the devil.

I opened the door and threw myself in his arms.

"Oh my God! What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to come see you before you took off for the East Coast, you little slut."

I hadn't seen Kyle in ages, since the night at the hotel, although we'd e-mailed and spoken a few times on the phone.

"Come in!" I couldn't believe he was here. Part of me, deep inside, hoped Jeremy had sent him here, but I knew he hadn't. Even in our phone conversations, Kyle carefully avoided talking about him, I assumed at Jeremy's command.

"You look great. Wow. Like you never even got shot."

"Ha-ha," he said as I got him a beer from the refrigerator. He looked at it suspiciously. "Since when do you drink beer, Nell?"

"I don't. I just keep it in the fridge because it...it reminds me of him. How he used to come home from work every day and go right to the fridge for a beer. I know, I know," I said at his derisive look. "I know I'm pathetic. God, sit down. Stay awhile. For real, you look great. And I've been meaning to thank you in person all this time. You know, for what you did at the hotel. I can't believe you took a bullet for me."

Kyle gave me that same old smirky smile, and it almost made me cry from the memories. "You know, Jeremy would have killed me anyway if I'd let you die. And it had nothing to do with that stupid crush stuff. Jeremy totally made that up."

"Oh, okay." I laughed. If that makes you feel better. "He made a lot of stuff up actually, didn't he?"

Kyle's smile faded a little. "The thing about Jeremy is that he does what he thinks he needs to do. Even if it hurts him. Even if it hurts people he really loves."

"Mmm," I said. "I guess."

"So you leave next Wednesday?" he asked, sitting back on the couch.

"Yeah, I'm starting summer session to squeeze a few credits in before the fall."

"You realize there's no hurry. He'd pay for your college even if you took ten years to get your degree."