Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

needed to be
protected too.

chapter 3
    Nicholas

    hen
Nicholas was four years old, his mother taught him about trusting
strangers. She sat him down and told him twenty times in a row not to
speak to someone on the street unless it was a friend of the family;
not to take the hand of just anyone to cross the street; never, under
any circumstances, to get into someone's car. Nicholas remembered
fidgeting on the chair and wishing he could be outside; he'd wanted
to check the tin of beer he'd left overnight on the porch to catch
slugs. But his mother would not let him leave, would not let him even
take a break for the bathroom—not until Nicholas could repeat,
verbatim, her lesson. And by that time, Nicholas had conjured images
of dark, stinking phantoms wearing ratty black capes, hiding in cars
and in the creases of the sidewalk and in the alleys between stores,
waiting to pounce on him. When his mother finally told him he could
go outside to play, he'd chosen to remain indoors. For weeks after
that, when the postman rang the doorbell, he had hidden beneath the
couch.

Although
he had got over his fear of strangers, he had never forgotten the
consequences, which made Nicholas the one person in a group to stand
off to the side. He could be charming if the situation called for it,
but he was more likely to feign interest in a frieze on the ceiling
than to be drawn into a conversation with people he didn't know. In
some individuals this was passed off as shyness; but in someone of
Nicholas's background and stature and classic features, it seemed
more like aloof conceit. Nicholas found he didn't mind the label. It
gave him time to size up a situation and to respond more
intelligently than those who spoke too quickly.
    None
of which explained why he impulsively asked Paige O'Toole to marry
him, or why he gave her the spare key to his apartment even before
hearing her answer.
    They
walked from Mercy to his apartment in total silence, and Nicholas was
starting to hate himself. Paige wasn't acting like Paige. He'd ruined
it, whatever it was that he had liked about her. Nicholas was so
nervous he couldn't fit the key into the door, and he didn't know
what he was nervous about. When she stepped into the apartment
he held his breath until he heard her say quietly, "My room was
never this neat." And then he relaxed and leaned against the
wall. He answered, "I could learn to live messy."
    Conversations
like that in the first hours after he proposed to Paige made Nicholas
realize that there was a great deal he still did not know about her.
He knew the big things, the sort of things that make up the talk at
dinner parties: the name of her high school; how she became
interested in drawing; the street she had lived on in Chicago.
But he did not know the little details, the things only a lover would
know—What had she named the mutt her father made her give back
to the animal shelter? Who taught her to throw a sliding curve ball?
Which constellations could she pick out in the night sky? Nicholas
wanted to know it all. He was filled with a greed that made him wish
he could erase the past, oh, six years of his life and relive them
with Paige, so he wouldn't feel he was starting in the middle.
    "This
is all I've got," Nicholas said to Paige, holding out a box of
stale graham crackers. He had sat her down on the black leather ouch
and turned on the halogen lights. She had not said whether or not she
would marry him, a detail that Nicholas had not overlooked, To all
intents and purposes, he should have wanted her to pass off his
proposal as a joke, since he still wasn't sure what had prompted him
to make such a rash statement. But he knew Paige hadn't taken it
lightly, and to tell the truth, he wanted to know her answer. God, he
was all knotted up inside over the prospect of her laughing in his
face, which told him more than he cared to admit.
    Suddenly
he wanted to get her talking. He figured if she would just stop
looking at him as though