CHAPTER 1

It was just the kind of day that never failed to depress her, even when she woke up feeling good. Today, the sense of impending disaster-the vague feeling of panic that had seized her when she first woke up worsened as the temperature skyrocketed and the hot, wet air closed around her like a straitjacket.

August in Canaan, New Jersey. Temperature, 93 degrees, humidity, 97

percent, and both climbing.

Canaan, New Jersey, where there were only two decent weeks a year-one in the spring and the other in the falland the rest of the time it was either too hot and muggy or too soul-numbing cold.

Canaan, where MaryAnne Carpenter had been born, and where she'd grown up, and where she'd gotten married, and where she'd had her children, and where, she thought wryly, it was beginning to look as if she was going to die.

If she wasn't dead already-which, this morning, seemed a definite possibility. And maybe not such a bad possibility, she reflected as she sipped at the coffee that had grown cold in the chipped mug. Except that if she was dead, then that meant she was now in Heaven and was due to spend eternity in a shabby two-bedroom house surrounded by a scraggly strip of brownish lawn, with a backyard just large enough to hold a rusting barbecue, some stained plastic lawn furniture, and a creaking swing set that neither of her kids had used for at least two years.

Obviously, if she was dead, this wasn't Heaven and she must have sinned a lot more than she realized.

The back door slammed open, and her daughter's voice cut through her brooding thoughts. "Isn't Dad here yet?"

MaryAnne stifled the tart response that rose in her throat, determined not to let her anger and mistrust toward the man she'd married contaminate Alison's relationship with her father. "He said noon, but you know your father," she said evenly. "If he's an hour late, we count him as on time, right?"

Alison unconsciously twisted a lock of her dark brown hair around her forefinger, a habit MaryAnne had first noticed almost the day after she and Alan had separated. Alison glanced at the clock, then flopped into the chair opposite her mother. "So he won't be here for another forty-five minutes." The girl sighed. "Just like I told Logan." She began picking at the curling edge of the Formica-topped kitchen table.

"Mom? Can I ask you something?"

The fact that Alison's eyes didn't meet hers warned MaryAnne that whatever the question was, she wasn't going to like it. But since Alison's thirteenth birthday last month she'd grown used to fielding questions she didn't quite feel comfortable about answering, so now she steeled herself and nodded. "You know you can always ask me anything you want, sweetheart," she said.

Alison took a deep breath. "Well, Logan and I are sort of wondering. Are you and Dad going to get back together again?"

Now, how on earth am I going to answer that one,) MaryAnne thought. How do I tell her that the last thing in the world I want to do is go back to living with.Alan Carpenter?

Except that maybe putting it together with Alan again wasn't quite the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

Maybe-just maybe-it was the only thing she could do, given the circumstances. She realized now that at some level it was what she'd been thinking about all morning, though she still had no answers-for Alison or herself. No answers, just a jumble of feelings that were totally confused.

Confused not only by emotions, but by economics as well.

And economics, she knew, were not a proper basis for a marriage.

Hadn't she read all the articles in all the women's magazines on the glories of love?

Hadn't she read all the stories about the poor couples who found happiness in each other and rose above their poverty?

The novels about women who married for money, only to find true love in the anus of the chauffeur, or the gardenef, or the pool man?

Everyone knew that love and money should properly have nothing to do with each other.

Then she'd looked around the house and begun to wonder. The paint on the outside was beginning to peel, and the wallpaper in the living room had finally deteriorated to the point that Logan's messy fingerprints could no longer be cleaned off.

"Didn't I tell you you should have painted in the first place?" Alan had asked when she'd called him to plead for enough money to replace the paper. "If you'd been practical at the start, you could just repaint. I just don't have the money for new paper."

But you had the money to take Little Miss Blondie to Bermuda, didn't you? MaryAnne had thought bitterly as she slammed the phone down.

She'd spent the rest of the day in a black rage, but by the next morning she'd calmed down enough to realize that Alan hadn't had enough money to take Eileen Chandler@r anyone else, for that matter-to Bermuda. Eileen must have paid for the trip herself.

Which had only made her mood dark again, and she'd spent the rest of that day engulfed all over again in the pain of losing her husband to a woman who was younger and prettier than she was, and had plenty of money of her own as well.

The worst part of it was her anger at herself for not having seen the separation coming. How stupidly loyal and trusting she'd been! How naive to believe every word Alan told her about working late so many nights to prove himself ready for a big promotion.

A promotion that would allow them to move into a bigger house in a better neighborhood, to take their first real vacation in years, and even to put away some money so when the kids went to college, they wouldn't have to plunge themselves into debt.

Blind. She'd been utterly, hopelessly blind-until the night six months ago when Alan had come home late, and without a word of apology or regret, had packed his suitcase and announced he was moving in with another woman.

"It's not something I can explain," he'd told her as she sat on the edge of the bed, staring wordlessly at him while tears streamed down her face. "It's just something that happened. She came in to talk to one of the architects, and something happened between us. Something I couldn't control." Finally he'd sat down next to her, gently putting his arms around her and talking quietly, his soft voice and warm brown eyes consoling her at the same time that his words cut into her soul. By the time he left, she was almost convinced that the whole thing was somehow her own fault.

The next morning she'd had to explain to Alison and Logan that their father had gone to live "somewhere else" for a while. She'd evaded all their questions, explaining only that things like this sometimes happened between grown-ups, and that they mustn't worry about it.

Everything would work out for the best.

By the end of the week she'd figured out just how stupid she'd been.

There was no way Alan was going to be promoted without going back to school. True, he was a very good draftsman-the best the company had-but for him to go any further in the firm, he was going to have to get a degree in architecture. Why had that never occurred to her in the months he'd been sleeping with Eileen Chandler?

Because she hadn't wanted it to occur to her, of course.

Because she hadn't wanted to believe that this man, whom she had believed in so completely for the fifteen years of their marriage, could be capable of so cruel a betrayal.

From the moment she'd met him, the warmth of his smile and clearness of his eyes had convinced her that he would never lie to her.

Now, he had.

Still, as the months had gone by, she'd somehow refused truly to believe it, kept somehow believing it was a bad dream from which she would awaken, and somehow kept putting off filing for a divorce. The bad dream became reality the evening she finally glimpsed the other woman, very blond, very petite, very elegantly dressed, and very securely wrapped in Alan's strong right arm.

They were coming out of a restaurant. A very expensive restaurant which was far beyond Alan Carpenter's modest means.

So, MaryAnne thought, could anyone begrudge her the glee she felt when Susan Weinstock had called last month to say, "Guess what? Little Miss Blondie threw Alan out!"

Susan gushed on: "Would you believe it's another man? Apparently, the lovely Miss Chandler decided Alan wasn't quite what she wanted. So she traded him in for a richer model. Some guy with two middle names, a roman numeral at the end, and a trust fund! Isn't that great?"

And it was-for one completely, blissfully satisfying moment of sweet revenge. Which quickly soured into confusion when Alan called to tell her that "things haven't worked out with Eileen, and I've moved out."

"Really?" she had replied, carefully revealing nothing of what she already knew, hoping her neutral tone concealed the collision of emotions inside her-the need to forgive and forget and have him back again warring with the longing to punish him for all the hurt he'd caused. "What happened?" she'd asked.

Alan barely hesitated. "It-Well, it was you, honey," he said, with the perfect amount of appealingly boyish repentance in his voice. "I-Well, I just couldn't get you out of my mind, and in the end, I found out it's you I love, not Eileen."

Another lie. MaryAnne felt her optimism shrivel as she silently hung up the phone.

But Alan was relentless, calling daily, pleading with her to give him another chance, begging her to forgive him, swearing that the affair had been a terrible mistake and that nothing like it would ever happen again. It wasn't until he'd admitted that Eileen had thrown him out that MaryAnne finally agreed to see him again.

Since then, her confusion had only grown. She no longer trusted him. She was bitterly angry about what he'd done.

But she was just as attracted to him as she'd ever been, and just as susceptible to the charm that had made her fall in love with him in the first place.

And, of course, there was the question of economics.

But as desperate as she was to have her family whole again, she wasn't ready to take him back.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

But finally she'd agreed to this first family barbecue, a week before Labor Day, and her daughter's question still hung in the hot, muggy air.

"Are you and Dad going to get back together again?"

As MaryAnne searched for the right words to answer Alison's question, the doorbell rang, and a moment later Logan charged in through the back door.

"It's Daddy!" the ten-year-old shouted. "He's early!"

MaryAnne's eyes went to the clock, and a faint smile curled the corners of her mouth. Only half an hour late, which, for Alan, was a record of punctuality.

Maybe, after all, he really had changed, really was sorry for what had happened.

Or maybe he just figured it would be a lot cheaper to move back into the house.

MaryAnne stood up to greet her husband, still not sure whether she was glad to see him or not.

More than two thousand miles from the stifling atmosphere of Canaan, New Jersey, Ted Wilkenson stepped out onto the front porch of his house near Sugarloaf, Idaho, and breathed deeply of the crisp mountain air. The day was perfect, the heat of the summer already beginning to fade, the deep blue sky forming an unblemished bowl over the valley in the Sawtooth Mountains in which Sugarloaf nestled like a forgotten village from a century earlier. His personal Shangri-la.

As he did every day, Ted paused to savor his good fortune in having discovered the valley nearly fourteen years ago. It was still no more than an unknown speck in the mountains north of Sun Valley then, and the refugees from Los Angeles had not yet realized that just beyond what they thought of as paradise was the valley of Eden. The problem now was to keep it that way. For the last five years, since the first developers had begun arriving to cut ski trails in the mountains above Sugarloaf, and build their brick and stucco time-shared condominiums, Ted and a few of his friends had begun buying up as much land as they could, and passing zoning ordinances to protect the original beauty of the place.

Ted's own ranch had grown from its original three hundred acres to more than a thousand. Tomorrow he would close on a deal to add another two hundred acres of land to his holdings. Two hundred acres straddling Sugarloaf Creek, which joined the beginnings of the Salmon River, ten miles farther down, where Sugarloaf Valley opened into the immense open space of the Sawtooth Valley. That should set Chuck Deaver-"Devious"

Deaver, the locals called him-back a pace or two, Ted thought as he started across the wide yard that separated the rambling two-story log house from the weathered barn that was the only original structure remaining on the property. Beyond stymieing the developer, whose plans to use the site as the heart of a much larger project had finally goaded Ted into making the purchase, the acquisition would please Audrey and Joey as well. Both his wife and son had been pleading for the purchase for nearly a year, Audrey to protect the land from the continuing march of condos up the valley, and Joey because he couldn't wait to have his own private fishing stream. As of tomorrow, a good portion of the stream would be safe from Deaver's bulldozers, and Ted, with Bill Sikes's help, could begin moving fences to include the new land into the protected wilderness that was the ranch.

For wilderness was what El Monte was, since neither Ted nor Audrey had any interest in developing more land than was necessary to raise fodder for the three horses that were the sole occupants of the barn. The whole point of the ranch was to protect the valley in its natural state, and both Ted and Audrey were aware of the irony that their current low-tech lifestyle was a direct result of Ted's former hightech experience in the overdeveloped morass of Silicon Valley. Now they were using the profits from the imniensely successful software company Ted had founded in California to protect their private wilderness in Idaho.

Ted and Audrey had discovered Sugarloaf together, only a month after they'd discovered each other. Audrey had spent the summer working as a waitress at the Sun Valley Lodge, and Ted had come up for a weekend respite from the pressures of running SoftWorks, which had already grown into a major software company, employing three hundred programmers, though Ted was still only twenty-five. He had met Audrey the first night he was there, and wound up staying the rest of the summer, running SoftWorks by phone, and discovering in the process that he wasn't nearly as indispensable to his company as he'd imagined.

On the last Sunday morning of the summer, she'd joined him for breakfast on the terrace between the lodge and the ice rink, and before lunch they'd driven over Galena Summit and stared in awe at the Sawtooth Valley, revealed before them like a hidden treasure. Surrounded by towering mountains that protected it from the world beyond, the valley's floor was a vast sea of grass and wildflowers, dotted with clumps of aspens and cottonwoods, the streams that would converge to become the Salmon River seeping out of the marshes at the head of the valley, to meander slowly down toward Stanley, the town that lay at its foot. For a long time they gazed silently at the flanks of the mountains, heavily forested on their lower slopes but barren above the timberline, soaring up to the jagged peaks that had given the Sawtooth range its name.

"This is it," Ted had finall murmured. "This is paradise.

Now all we have to do is find the perfect spot.

They'd driven down into the valley, explored the weathered old buildings of Stanley, then started back, turning up each road that wound into the foothills until finally they stumbled into the Sugarloaf Valley, a miniature version of the vast reaches of the Sawtooth, blocked at its eastern end by the rugged face of Sugarloaf peak.

The village, near the mouth of the valley, appeared as perfect as a set for a Western movie, with raised wooden sidewalks connecting the false-fronted buildings that flanked the unpaved road. Between the town and the face of Sugarloaf, the valley rose with increasing steepness, the wilderness broken only by a few cultivated fields, occasional long, twisting driveways leading to nearly invisible farmhouses which were the only signs of human habitation.

At the end of the road, they'd come upon a sign offering three hundred acres, together with a house, a barn, and outbuildings.

"Here it is," Ted had said.

"Here is what?" Audrey had asked.

"Here is where we're going to live after we get married," Ted replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be proposing to a woman he'd known only a month, and deciding that they would live on a crumbling farm hundreds of miles from anywhere.

"Looks all right to me," Audrey heard herself reply. "Do You think we ought to look at the house, or should we just buy it?"

"Let's just buy it," Ted had said. Half an hour later he had done just that.

The farm duly purchased, they headed back to Sun Valley, but by the time they got there, they'd decided there was no reason not to finish the job they'd already started, so they continued on through the resort town and drove down to Hailey, picked up a license at the courthouse, and got married before dinner.

"You're sure there isn't anyone you want at the wedding?" Ted asked at the last minute.

There was only MaryAnne, her childhood friend and still her best friend, but MaryAnne was two thousand miles away. "No," Audrey had said. Then, with the sudden thought: "You sure you don't want to at least call your parents?"

Ted's laugh had filled the car. "No chance. My mother ran out on me about a week after my father dumped her. I haven't seen either of them since. And I'm not about to spoil the best weekend of my life by trying to find them."

As they stood before the magistrate, their hands clasped while they repeated their vows, it occurred to Audrey that after only a month in a resort town, she really didn't know much about Ted Wilkenson at all. But somehow it didn't matter. Since the loss of her own parents to a junkie who had mugged them on the steps of their apartment house on New York's Upper West Side, she had felt just as alone in the world as Ted must have during the years after his mother abandoned him. But in the four short weeks since they had met, they'd come to feel as if they knew each other perfectly.

And that feeling had never changed, as far as Ted was concerned.

Joey was born less than a year after they were married, and Ted had essentially retired from SoftWorks, going back only often enough to explain his ideas for new programs and to get the programmers to begin producing them.

The old farmhouse was torn down, and the log lodge built in its place.

The ranch slowly grew, and the Wilkensons slipped easily into the fabric of the town.

Both of them knew that through some strange fate, they had found in one another the perfect partner.

And so Ted, not quite forty yet, was now living in his idea of paradise, with a wife who was his best friend, and raising his son far from the problems of the city.

His son.

The only fly in the ointment, Ted thought ruefully. Instantly regretting the thought, he reminded himself that Joey seemed to be getting better.

Discipline was all the boy had needed, really, and he had administered it. Not that Joey had ever been a truly bad kid-he'd just let himself fall into moods of silence and forgetfulness. Sometimes he wouldn't speak for hours at a time, or would disappear from the house for an entire day.

Ted had finally put his foot down, a couple of years ago.

"He's not a baby anymore," he told Audrey before taking his belt to Joey's backside the first time. "We've tried getting him to grow up your way, and it hasn't worked. Now we'll try it my way."

That first time Ted used the belt, Joey had sulked for two hours, until Ted explained to him that if he continued sulking, more punishment would follow. It had straightened the boy right up, and soon afterward Joey stopped giving in to his strange moods.

Yesterday, however, Joey had disappeared after breakfast, leaving his chores undone and telling no one where he was going. When the boy finally appeared as the sun was setting, Ted hauled him out to the barn, explaining to him that what was about to happen was for his own good. He had taken off his belt as Joey cowered. But the boy hadn't resisted his punishment, Ted now recalled with satisfaction, and he hadn't gone crying to his mother. Instead he'd told her that he and his father had been feeding the horses. Well, that was that.

The boy hadn't complained, and he hadn't sulked.

He was finally growing up.

A feeling of well-being surged through Ted as he stepped into the barn to begin mucking out the stalls.

He led Sheika, the black Arabian mare that was his favorite, to the cross ties, tethered her, then began the process of mucking out the horse's stall. He'd barely gotten the soiled straw shoveled into the wheelbarrow when Sheika whinnied nervously and pawed at the ground.

"It's okay, Sheika," Ted called out, but instead of settling down, the horse pawed at the floor of the wash stall once again, then tugged her head against the restraining tethers.

"Hey, settle down, old girl," Ted soothed, leaving the stall and moving toward the horse.

Sheika ignored him, her eyes fixed on the open door of the barn, her ears laid back against her head as she snorted nervously.

"What is it girl? What's wrong?" Ted glanced toward the door, but the glare of brilliant sunlight outside blinded him and he could see nothing. "Joey? Sikes? Is someone out there?" But he knew his son had gone fishing, and he'd seen Bill Sikes, his caretaker, drive off toward town. What the hell was going on?

Suddenly he felt vaguely uneasy. For a while now, strange things had been happening on the ranch. The horses had been spooking, and at times even he had experienced the unsettling sensation of being watched by unseen eyes.

Just a couple of nights ago, telling Audrey that he felt like getting some fresh air, Ted had gone outside to have a look around. The horses were restless in their stalls that night, but they'd calmed right down when he talked to them, and he'd found nothing amiss in the barn.

Yet even as he'd returned to the house, he'd still had the distinct feeling that somewhere, hidden in the darkness, eyes were watching him.

Despite the warmth of the evening, he'd shivered, and found himself hurrying back to the brightness of the house.

Now, in the full light of day, he had that same uneasy feeling. Again he called out: "Who is it? Is anyone out there?"

There was still no answer. Ted at last turned back to Sheika, reaching out to take one of the tethers in his right hand while he stroked the horse with his left. For a split second the big mare seemed to calm, but a sound from the door startled her and she jerked her head, yanking the tether from Ted's hand. Instinctively, Ted turned to see who had come into the barn, but all he saw was a quick flash of movement before the horse whinnied loudly once again, then reared up, her front hooves striking out against the presence in the barn.

Sheika's right hoof struck Ted Wilkenson in the back of the head, felling him instantly. He was still conscious, but before he could roll away, the horse plunged back down, neighing loudly as the form in the doorway drew closer.

Her great left hoof, shod only the day before with fresh iron, smashed into Ted's right temple, the bone shattering under the immense weight of the animal.

The horse reared again, finally jerking free of the tethers, then lunged out of the wash stall, her hooves thundering on the thick planks of the barn's floor as she galloped toward the doors.

A moment later she was gone, racing across a field toward the woods beyond.

Inside the barn, the two remaining horses panicked, whinnying loudly, rearing up, their hooves striking the sides of their stalls as they reacted to the sudden danger. But then the presence was gone as quickly as it had come, and the horses calmed once more, only pawing nervously as they caught a strange coppery scent in the air.

And Ted Wilkenson lay dead on the floor, his head resting in a pool of his own blood.

MaryAnne Carpenter gazed out the kitchen window, her hand suspended over the soapy water in the sink. The scene outside looked for all the world like any normal American family enjoying the end of a late summer day.

Alison was clearing the last of the supper dishes off the outdoor table, and the embers in the barbecue were dying away, only a faint wisp of smoke betraying that there was anything but ash left beneath the grill.

Logan and Alan stood at opposite ends of the small lawn, hurling a softball back and forth as if they'd been doing it every evening all summer. And indeed, for the kids, it was almost as if their father had never been gone.

They'd fallen into their old patterns, vying with each other for their father's attention. After a while even MaryAnne had begun to let down her guard, wondering if, after all, Alan might really have had a change of heart.

Except that suspicion, once learned, is difficult to put aside. Despite Alan's constant reassurances that a return to his family was what he really wanted, how could she be sure that if Eileen Chandler raised her finger, Alan would not happily trot back to her condominium, with its wellequipped gym-which, judging by his trim figure, he had obviously been using-and its swimming pool, which she had steadfastly refused to let Alison and Logan enjoy?

Despite her misgivings, MaryAnne had to acknowledge that she'd enjoyed the day, the easy comfort of having Alan back to tend to the barbecue and produce the perfectly cooked steaks that always managed to elude her, no matter how carefully she timed them. She'd even found herself falling into his discussion of the improvements they'd make to the house as soon as he moved back in.

"And you'll get your promotion, so we can pay for it all?" she'd been unable to resist asking.

He hadn't risen to the bait, and he'd had the good grace to blush with embarrassment at the question, and that he deserved the jab.

And now he was playing catch with Logan, as if the destruction of his marriage had never happened. The blissful look on her son's face tore at MaryAnne's heart.

"Mom?" Alison said anxiously as she came through the back door, a stack of plates precariously balanced in one hand, four glasses clutched with the fingers of the other.

"Are you going to let Dad come home now?"

The question jarred MaryAnne out of her reverie. She reached into the greasy water and fished out the skillet in which she'd fried the potatoes they'd had with Alan's steaks. "I-I'm not sure," she said, unwilling to shatter her daughter's hopes. "There's a lot to be discussed before that can happen."

Alison carefully set the glasses down on the counter.

"But wouldn't it be easier to talk about things if he were here?" she asked, her eyes once more avoiding her mother's, just as they had a few hours before, when she , had broached the same subject. "I mean, Logan and I really miss him, and@'

"And I don't really want to talk about it right now, all right?"

MaryAnne broke in, with more sharpness than she'd intended. "What's happening between your father and me is very complicated. I-I just can't discuss it with you right now."

"Then who should you discuss it with?" Alison demanded, her words taking on a petulant tone. "If you can't talk about it with me, who can you talk about it with?"

Audrey, MaryAnne thought. I could discuss it with Audrey except she's thousands of miles away, and wouldn't understand anyhow! I marry a man I knew for two whole years, and he ends up cheating on me, and she marries a man she's known for less than a month, and everything turns out perfect. It's not fair! Then she caught herself, realizing that she herself wasn't being fair. If any one would understand what she was going through, it would be Audrey, her best friend since they had been children right here in Canaan.

"Aunt Audrey," she said out loud, with a smile for her daughter. "In fact, I think I'll call her tomorrow, and see what she has to say."

Alison's eyes lit up. "Really? You promise?"

MaryAnne cocked her head at her daughter. "Now why does that please you so much, young lady?"

"Because Aunt Audrey's crazy about Dad, so she'll be on our side."

"Side?" MaryAnne repeated, raising her brows in an ex aggerated arch.

"Since when are you and Logan taking sides?"

"I didn't mean it like that," Alison said, backped@g quickly. "I just meant that Logan and I really want you and Dad back together, that's all."

Before the discussion could go any further, Alan strode through the back door, trailed by their son, who was begging for just five more minutes of catch.

"Don't you think I better help your mother with the dishes?" Alan countered, picking up a towel and starting to dry the pans that were draining in the rack.

"But-" Logan began.

"No 'buts,' " Alan said, cutting him off, snapping the towel at the boy, who leapt out of range. "Now scoo@ and let your mother and me have some time to ourselves, okay?"

Logan's mouth opened as if to reply, but his older sister grabbed him by the arm and almost dragged him toward the living room. "Just shut up, Logan," Alison said. "For once in your stupid life, try not to say something dumb!"

"Alison, don't talk that way to your brother," MaryAnne automatically called to her daughter, but the kitchen door had already swung closed behind her children. And then, before she quite knew what had happened, Alan had slipped his arms around her and begun nuzzling at her neck.

Even as words of protest rose in her throat, MaryAnne felt the familiar warmth of his touch begin to flow through her.

"Now was today so bad?" Alan crooned into her ear.

"Come on, honey, admit it-you loved having me here as much as I loved being here. And what happened with Eileen is over. It's over and forgotten. There's no one for me but you, and there never will be again.

All I have to do is pack up my clothes, and we can be together again."

MaryAnne wanted to tell him to be quiet, to leave her alone, to give her a chance to think things out. But his words crept into her mind, and his arms held her close, and she thought if she could just forget the last year, just put it out of her mind, things might be the same as they had been before.

He turned her around and pressed his lips to hers, and as the kiss deepened, she realized just how much she had missed him.

"Let me stay," Alan whispered. "At least let me stay for tonight."

MaryAnne felt her resolve slipping away, but before she gave in completely, she promised herself that tomorrow, in the clear light of the morning, she would follow through on her promise to Alison.

She would call Audrey Wilkenson.

Audrey would help her figure out what to do.