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yet. And so, with a sinking heart, she went into the kitchen to prepare a tray and start the coffee maker.
    As she was about to carry the tray into the other room, a sound at the doorway made her jump and turn around. David was of course there, lounging against the doorpost and watching her unnervingly. She was unsurprised. Even if he hadn’t been the only mobile person in the house, she would have felt his entrance even as she heard his footsteps. After a wide-eyed stare at his unfathomable expression, she turned and with trembling hands rearranged the cups on the tray, without speaking. The air was charged with things left unsaid and questions she knew he wanted to ask her, and that wary hostility.
    He made a move and she just waited for him to say something, any of the things that were hovering on his lips, but all he said was, “I came to see if I could help carry anything in for you. You don’t look strong enough to carry a flea, let alone that heavy tray.” He came away from the doorpost and walked her way. His stride was graceful.
    She backed away from the tray immediately as if it had become contaminated, using the opportunity to put distance between him and her. Why did he make her feel so edgy, so tense and stretched tight? Why was she so sensitive to this man, of all people? “I’m stronger than I look,” she muttered, and he cocked a sardonic eyebrow at her.
    “You’d have to be; you don’t look strong enough to hold your head up straight. Grace is right. You’re too thin.” He picked up the tray and then went on into the other room. She was left cocking her head in silent sarcasm to his back, and she found herself suddenly, surprisingly grinning at his unprecedented personal remarks.
    Back in the living room she poured, kneeling in front of the coffee table and handing a cup first to Mrs. Cessler and then to David. She backed away from him immediately and felt a surge of irritation from him at this. So he’d noticed it before. She took her own cup and retreated back to her chair, sipping at it as an excuse to keep from having to say anything. The whole visit had rapidly become a fiasco for her. Nervous, uncomfortable, with Mrs. Cessler’s pain rubbing at her raw nerves, Dana felt close to the edge of something. She felt as if the tightness in her head was about to explode or break. She felt ready to lose all control, ready to fall into a pit and never climb out again. She felt—with a queer sense of shock in her heart, she felt that it was not her own crisis she felt approaching, but that of the strange man sitting across the room. It was David who was stretched so tightly something was bound to snap. It was David who was exercising such a rigid control over himself that the tightness and the desperation were reaching out and grabbing her by force. She was unable to shake it off; she was as caught as him.
    Dana had fallen silent as her thoughts rattled through this revelation, and the other two were talking on, apparently not noticing anything wrong with her other than the fact that she had withdrawn momentarily from the conversation. With a sluggish click back to the surface, she focused only partially on what was being said, still with half of her mind on the undercurrents in the room and her own surmises.
    “…and weren’t you doing something else about six years ago?” Mrs. Cessler was asking David. Dana heard the last of the question, but she didn’t catch the context of it or the first part and so she wasn’t sure what was being discussed. She glanced briefly at David and found him looking down at his hands as he lounged easily in his chair. “I thought your grandmother told me something about you working as an editor for a newspaper, right?”
    She didn’t know what came over her. She had only been paying attention with half her mind; she wasn’t even planning to speak; she’d every intention of just sitting back and staying silent until she could somehow contrive to slip away