"I'm sorry we had to do it that way, Dave," Eve told him in the kitchen a while later; Shae had come up to the apartment just long enough to fill Eve in on what was happening, then disappeared. The boys were in sight in the living room, and they were talking in low tones. "But Cheryl and I have experienced enough freakouts that we didn't want to run the risk in front of the boys."

"Cheryl?" he frowned.

"My sister-in-law, and my other best friend," Eve smiled. "She's trans, too. That's quite a story, but one we don't need to get into right now. I thought you'd take it all right, but we never know for sure."

"No problem on my account, Eve," he replied. "In fact, it just proves you're one of the coolest ladies on the face of the planet." He grinned for a moment and went on. "I was thinking about it this morning. Shae showing up brought up some memories of Denis, and I was wondering how things turned out for him. The answer is better than I could have ever dreamed."

"It's better than I could have dreamed, too," she smiled. "Certainly better than anyone could have imagined when Shae stopped Denis from killing himself and taking a few others with him if he could have managed it. But that's a story for later, too. Let's just say it was a long and difficult road, but worth every minute."

"I think so," he smiled, realizing that the whole story had to be considerably more painful than Eve and Shae had let on. He let out a sigh and said, "I just hope things work out halfway as well for me, after this."

"Dave, I know you're down about Julie and everything. You have every right to be. Julie needs to be mourned and remembered. But the time will come for you to pick up the pieces, and when the time comes, you won't be alone."

"There's going to be plenty of pieces," he sighed. "I haven't even bothered to think it all out yet. I could very well be out of a job. Even if I'm not, the only reason Julie and I could afford our place in Battery Park Village was we had two incomes. Even if I could still afford it, I'm not sure I could live there again, anyway."

"Something will settle out," Eve told him. "Even if you don't have a job, you can find another one, and you and the boys won't be living in a homeless shelter. You have options. Give it time, Dave. Shae and I will help where we can, others will too. Shae put out her big hand to Denis at a very troublesome time, when she had no reason to do it. It changed his life, and really, hers, too. This isn't the same thing, but there are hands reaching for you, and not just ours."

"I realize that, Eve," he said, trying to keep himself pulled together.

"Among those hands are your mother's and Emily's," she smiled. "You want an incredible person, that's Emily. She could be president if she put her mind to it, or as rich as Bill Gates, but she's perfectly happy just being the manager of the Bradford Spee-D-Mart. We ought to be making up our minds whether to have them come, or what. They're worried about you and the boys, Dave. They at least want to show their support, and I don't see how it could do any harm."

"We might as well," he nodded. "But it leaves the question of Stan and Deborah."

"We don't have to call them right away," she reported. "Your father-in-law called while you were out, and we talked for a while. Your mother-in-law is fairly hysterical and is under sedation. He and I agreed it'd be best if the boys weren't exposed to that. He sounds fairly reasonable, Dave."

"It doesn't surprise me," Dave nodded. "I know him well enough to know that he's hurting as bad as she is, as I am, but he keeps things like this bottled up until he can turn to a bottle to work it out. He'll wait until Deborah calms down before it happens."

"I think I'd better plan on spending some time with both of them," she nodded. "But it doesn't have to be today. What I'm thinking is we can call Bradford, and work that part of it out. I'd hoped to have Shae here, but what she's doing is important, too."

It took a while on the phone to work out the details; as Shae had said, both his mother and Emily were ready to hop in the car and drive all night. It took both Eve and him to convince them to at least hold off until early morning, so they wouldn't pull in way late. "I'm not going to bet on how early," he said as soon as he hung up the phone after letting the boys talk with Grandma for a minute. "But if I had to put money on it, I'd bet well before dawn."

"If they aren't already so anxious that they start out anyway and get a motel somewhere," Eve nodded. "Boys," she went on, "When your daddy and Aunt Shae went out, they got you some crayons and coloring books. Would you like to have a couple now?"

Smiles broke across both their faces; it didn't take a lot of answering. Dave knew Shae had bought more than coloring books. There was a big bag of toys, but she told him they'd dole them out slowly, as needed. "We want to keep them busy and not let them have much time to brood," she'd told him while shopping. "That goes for you, too."

In a few minutes, they were sitting in the kitchen, while the boys were busy with the crayons and coloring books on the floor. "Eve, I've been thinking about it," he said. "Maybe you could keep an eye on the boys, while I go into the other room and make a couple of calls."

"Anything important?" she asked. She was really asking if it was something potentially emotional and stressful, and he knew it.

"I just keep thinking I ought to at least make contact with someone from work," he said. "I'm pretty sure the office is trashed, but I ought to at least let someone know I'm still alive."

"Good idea," she said. "But you don't need to head off into the other room, if you don't want to."

"Better that way," he said, nodding his head at the boys.

"Keep it cool," she smiled. "I'll keep an ear out."

At any other time, he might have been irritated at being watched over so closely, but right now it felt good. How lucky he'd been to have the distant past come out of the woodwork to him in the form of these two incredible high school classmates! And, he thought, the more he found out about them, the more incredible they seemed. He stole a glance at Eve -- Denis Riley? It couldn't be! But apparently, it was. Clearly a lot had happened that he had never seen.

He went into the living room, found where he'd left his cell phone the night before, and sat down in a chair where he was away from the kitchen some, but still in Eve's view. He speed dialed the office -- and got "not in service", no big surprise. He hadn't had a chance to look, but the office had faced the World Trade Center, and from what he knew it had to have been hit pretty hard. The next idea was to call his supervisor Michelle Martin at home, but got a busy signal. Only a machine answered the chief editor's home phone. He debated whether he should step out of line and call Rob, the company president. Well, things are probably all screwed up anyway, he thought, and Dunlap and Fyre wasn't such a big company that people were very formal with each other. With that thought, he hit the speed-dial for Rob's cell phone. It rang a couple times, and he heard, "Rob Dunlap."

"Rob, it's Dave," he said. "Just checking in. I take it we're not working today."

"God, it's good to hear your voice. Just a second." he replied. "It's Dave!" he heard Rob say to someone in the background. "Dave," he continued. "We've been trying your phone all day. We were starting to get real worried about you, too."

"I've been away from it until just now," he apologized.

"Are you all right Dave? Your family?"

"I'm all right, so are the boys," he said. He took a deep breath and continued, "Julie's probably dead. I was talking to her on the phone when she rode the tower down."

"God, Dave, I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm glad you're all right. Hang on again." He could hear Rob tell someone in the background, "He and the boys are OK, Julie's probably dead." He could hear sad sounds in the background for a moment before Rob came back on and said, "Michelle and Royce and Linda and I are here in my apartment; they're just as sorry as I am to hear about Julie. Where are you?"

"With an old high school friend on Staten Island. She and another old friend tracked the boys and me down. They brought us here. Is everybody else all right?"

"We still don't know," Rob said. "Now that you've called in, we're only hanging on Melissa Schaedler. Ronna Goldberg's husband is missing; it doesn't look good. We had several injuries in the office, mostly flying glass when the tower went down, nobody too seriously, fortunately. The office was totally trashed the last I saw when we got out of there, and there's talk the building is so unsafe that they may have to drop it before we can rescue anything."

"If you see Ronna, tell her I'm just sorry as hell, and I know how she feels. So, are we out of business, or what?"

"No, we're not out of business," Rob told him. "You can rest your mind on that. Virtually everything electronic was backed up across the river, and it happened so early in the day that few files had been changed yet. We're just getting started on how to get things going again. Nothing's solid yet, and it's going to be a few days."

"God, that's good to hear," he replied, feeling a wave of relief wash over him. "At least I've got something left out of yesterday besides the boys and some good friends I'd forgotten about."

"Things aren't quite as bad as they looked this time yesterday," Rob replied. "Bad, yes, but better. Are you and the boys doing all right?"

"As well as can be expected," Dave admitted. "One of my friends is a clinical psychologist, and she watches us like a hawk. If one of us starts brooding, she's on us in an instant."

"That's good to hear. Look, Dave, you take it easy, get yourself pulled together. Get in touch in a couple days, maybe by then we'll have some idea of how we're going to do this. Can you give me the regular number where you're at?"

"Sure, just a second," he replied, then called to Eve to give it to him; he passed it along.

"Good deal," Rob told him. "Dave, you hang in there and take care of yourself and your kids. We're all going to pull through this."

They spent the afternoon with the boys, talking with them, playing with them. They also watched a few minutes of the disaster coverage on TV; Eve tried to make the point that it was serious, that it was real -- and Dave noticed she didn't let them watch it for long. By late in the afternoon, they were starting to come to grips with everything, when the phone rang. Eve answered and it proved to be Shae. "They're wrapped," she reported a couple minutes later. "Apparently they really threw it together. She still has to get into street clothes and do a couple things, so she'll be back in an hour or so to get dinner for you. She suggested that if I left now, I could get home in time to see my kids and John for a while. I've got a couple clients I really need to face-to-face with in the morning, but I can probably be back here shortly after noon. The question is, do I dare leave the three of you alone for an hour?"

"Yes, Mommy," Dave grinned. "We should be OK."

In only a few minutes, Eve had her overnight bag packed and had headed out the door, leaving him truly alone with the boys for the first time since the morning of the day before. Granted, he'd been alone in the crowd with them much of that day, but things had taken a turn for the better the minute Eve and Shae had found them the night before. Now, this afternoon, it began to look just a little bit like there might be a future out there.

After talking it over with the boys, they decided to watch a little more TV, but Dave flipped it to CTN -- there was a limit to the disaster coverage he could handle. The show turned out to be Avalon again, a different episode than the one he'd seen in the morning. It was still amazing to watch Shae, see how good she was with the kids, like she'd been with his. He'd already picked up on a couple things she did -- she asked for the kids' thoughtful opinions, and let them participate in decisions. It was certainly not the Shae he remembered from high school, either.

Curious, he got up and went over to her bookcase. It was not a collection of elegant books on obvious display, but instead, books that got read. Toward one end of the shelf, he noticed a copy of the Bulldog, the Bradford school yearbook from their senior year. His was packed away in a storage locker, and he hadn't looked at it for years, but now he took hers from the shelf. He went immediately to the class pictures -- God, he looked young then; Shae had matured, too, and was a much better looking woman than the gawky kid she'd been. Denis, though . . . it was still unbelievable. There wasn't much resemblance; Denis clearly looked dull and distant in the picture, like Dave remembered him from school. He certainly could not pick Eve out of the picture. After a moment, he remembered Shae commenting that Eve had had facial surgery, so that probably had helped, but still, it was clear they were different people.

Dave didn't know much about transsexuals; he was aware they existed, and he knew that for some people it was more of a gender issue than a sex issue. Apparently it was for Denis. Still, it had to have been pretty bad if suicide had only barely been averted, which is what Eve had more or less indicated. Something to talk about sometime, and maybe with Shae, rather than Eve. He glanced at the page again and saw vaguely remembered faces looking back at him, most of whom he hadn't thought about in years. Jennifer Lynn Swift, for example, Jennlynn, everyone called her. Sharp as hell, but a very churchy girl, very churchy family; her father was the pastor of the Disciples of the Savior Church, the most conservative fundamentalist church in Bradford. Probably a minister's wife somewhere, he thought. Scott Tyler, about as good a friend as he'd had in school -- and not a word about him since, oh, about freshman year in college. He remembered Scott a little better, and it might be the reason that when Julie suggested 'Tyler' as their oldest son's name, he had been willing to go along with the idea. What was he doing? No idea. Most of the kids from home, hick small-town kids, were kids he'd tried to put behind him when he came to the city to become urban, a yuppie.

Emily apparently knew a lot of those kids, what had happened with them. She'd be here tomorrow; maybe he could catch up a little. It was more than a little embarrassing; although he'd all but forgotten her, she apparently hadn't forgotten him.

He hadn't been back to Bradford much since the summer after he got out of high school, a few times for brief visits, and then mostly to just see his mother, and especially the last few years she'd usually come to New York. Although they talked on the phone occasionally, it had been a year or more since he'd seen her, probably three since he'd been in Bradford, and that had been just a quick visit.

And Shae, of course. She was close to impossible to forget, but she'd changed a lot. He didn't remember her as a bookish girl, but a look at this bookcase proved that had changed, as well. It didn't take much looking at the books on the shelf to see that they were read, some of them several times; the wear was obvious. Wondering what she read, he glanced at the titles: some general fiction, no particular romances or gothics or chick lit, nothing particularly artsy or literary, just good stories. Some science fiction -- David Weber's "Honor Harrington" series showed lots of wear -- a little fantasy, Mercedes Lackey, that sort of thing. He would never have thought of her reading those in school; in fact, he could remember her telling him she didn't. Several books on education, childhood development, child psychology, not a surprise since she apparently took her job pretty seriously. Mythology, fairy tales, traditional stories, too. Several books about transsexuals, not a real surprise considering Eve. Not much in the way of sports, a surprise for a girl who had been as committed a jock as she was.

In fact, a much more intellectual bookcase than he would have thought, knowing her as he had from years ago. Well, he'd changed, and she'd changed, too. Over thirteen years will do that to you. Back in the old days, he hadn't nosed around girls a lot, since he'd known he wanted to come to New York and figured the baggage could make it difficult. He remembered Shae saying one time that she didn't mess around with guys much because she didn't want to wind up a Bradford mom who ran a fork lift out at General Hardware Retailers. How strange that they should both wind up here.

He was still staring at the bookcase, trying to fathom its owner, when he heard the children singing at the end of Avalon. Probably half an hour since Eve had left, he thought, Shae ought to be here soon. Maybe I ought to get started on dinner; I ought to contribute something, after all.

A glance in the refrigerator showed a couple small packages of chicken breasts thawing; apparently that was what she had in mind for dinner. It sounded good to him, and he didn't mind cooking, rather liked it, in fact. He and Julie had shared out the task, only fair with her working as many hours as she did. In spite of everything, a feeling of loss swept over him. He'd never see her again. It was hard to accept, but he was starting to accept it, and it hurt. But at least the routine of peeling potatoes, doing the cooking, kept him going, and the counter was just high enough to be a little cumbersome, so he couldn't let his thoughts stray far. If it hadn't been for yesterday morning, he'd probably have been doing pretty much the same thing in their apartment over in Battery Park, and it would be Julie he'd be waiting for to come home to dinner, rather than Shae. The big woman may have been a good friend, but she wasn't Julie.

Shae took longer than he thought; dinner was coming along nicely when he heard her front door open and her steps come into the kitchen, Tyler and Cameron tagging along behind. "Dave, good grief," she smiled. "I can't tell you the last time I came home and found someone making dinner for me."

"No big deal," he said. "So how'd it go at the studio?"

"Not bad, considering we only had about a third of the normal staff there," she said. "Things are kind of a mess. We threw together a little script about one of the kid's parents having to go to the hospital, how concerned the kid was, how Shae helped him deal with it. Then we worked up a straight-from-the-shoulder segment at the end, basically telling the kids that bad things sometimes happen, and we have to accept them and do the best we can to work past them. We shot a couple other versions like it to use as trailers on already existing segments." She let out a sigh. "I don't know how much good it will do, but maybe it will comfort some kid somewhere."

"Yeah, things can seem pretty simple when you're five," he said. "The boys remind me of that all the time."

"You're lucky," she said. "They're a couple real neat kids. Maybe someday I'll have some of my own, although I often wonder."

"I have to admit, I'm surprised you're still single," he nodded.

"It's not simple," she said. "Another penalty for being so tall, I guess. I tend to attract guys I'd really rather not attract. Let's . . . uh, not talk about it now. Tyler and Cameron, go wash your hands, and then you can help your daddy and me set the table."

"OK, Aunt Shae," one of them piped up as they headed for the bathroom, where they knew there was a stepstool under the sink.

"Something they shouldn't hear?" he said as they scampered from the room.

"Probably," Shae sighed. "And it'll take too long to tell. Maybe after they go to bed, or something."

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