Escape by Barbara Delinsky

irresponsible. I thought of Layla and the other innocent people suffering from drinking water that they thought was safe. Someone did have to help them, but that wouldn’t be me today. Maybe not tomorrow or Wednesday either.
    “Big frown,” Vicki observed.
    “Big worry.” But for later. Determinedly, I returned to the present, to Vicki and her precious little girl. “So you go to school?” I asked Charlotte.
    The little girl nodded.
    “Every day?”
    “Three mornings a week,” Vicki said. “It’s been an adjustment, but we wanted her to be with other children. Come fall, it’ll be five mornings a week. The timing’s good.”
    Something about her tone and a certain look in her eye made me catch my breath a second time. Another baby on the way?
    “Early December,” she confirmed with a look of terrified anticipation that was almost comical.
    “Oh, Vicki Bell, I am so happy for you.”
    “Are you really? You’re not just saying that?”
    I knew what she meant. “Absolutely not. I’m thrilled. You’re obviously a great mom. You could have
five
kids and not be fazed. Children fit in your life. Maybe they don’t fit in mine.”
    Charlotte had settled snugly into her mother, who said, “Is that what you’re running from?”
    “Maybe. I’m discouraged, but if what we’re doing now doesn’t work, we do have options. It’s the rest that … that just clogs me up.”
    “There have to be some good things.”
    “There are. I have a job, a husband, and a great place to live. And I’m healthy.”
    “But unhappy. So why are you in Bell Valley? It made you miserable ten years ago.”
    “
Jude
made me miserable,” I said, “but I loved Bell Valley even before that summer. The weekends I visited with you were vacations, even when we had studying to do. I relax here. I can think. That’s what I need to do now.”
    I thought of Jude. His brief letter had changed things. But maybe not. I figured I had maybe two weeks before he arrived.
    I needed to tell Vicki about that.
    But she was stuck on what I’d last said. “Think about where you want to go from here?”
    “First, think about why I went where I did after I left here. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I was on the rebound from Jude and took it too far. Coming back here is like starting over.”
    “How long will you stay?”
    I felt a stab of hysteria. “My car may have a say in that.”
    “No. It’s an electronics problem. Nestor says they’ll have it back by the end of the day. It’d be even sooner, if his boy wasn’t so enthralled. The kid’s sixteen and a total geek. It isn’t often he gets to play with a car like yours.”
    “If he messes it up, James will never forgive me,” I warned.
    “He won’t mess it up. Technology is his thing. He runs a repair shop out of the garage. Computers, cell phones, small appliances—we wouldn’t take them anywhere else.”
    “Runs a repair shop? At sixteen? What about school?”
    “He says he’s found his life’s work, and given how good he is, I believe him.”
    I considered it. “Well, that says something. He’s a high school dropout and has a job he loves. I have three degrees and a job I hate.”
    “Get another one,” Vicki said.
    “I’m trying, but it isn’t easy. I don’t want to go from bad to worse, and it’s not like I can look for a clerkship in Oregon, if I’m married to someone who’s dead set on New York.” I returned to her earlier question. “I don’t know how long I’ll stay here, and that is totally unsettling.” I’d always been a directed sort of woman. “Have I ever winged anything before?”
    “Your summer here. You came not knowing what you’d be doing.”
    “Right. And I had the wildest, most spontaneous and passionate summer of my life. So is that who I really am? Or was it an aberration? I have to find out.” I glanced at my watch, which, of course, wasn’t there. No clock on the nightstand, or on the dresser, either.
    “Our guests like to chill,”