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What makes you so sure?” They were walking slowly back to her office, and more than ever she wanted to stay. “This is crazy. You know that, don’t you, Charlie?I mean, I have work to do, campaigns to coordinate, I have no right to—”
    “You can keep talking if you want to, Sam, but it won’t make any difference.” He looked at his watch. “Two hours from now I’m putting you on that plane.”
    Samantha suddenly stopped walking and turned to look at him belligerently, and he couldn’t resist smiling at her. She looked like a very beautiful and totally impossible child. “What if I won’t get on it? What if I just won’t go?”
    “Then I’ll drug you and take you out there myself.”
    “Mellie wouldn’t like that.”
    “She’d love it. She’s been begging me to get out of her hair all week.” He stopped, eyeing Samantha.
    Slowly she smiled. “I’m not going to talk you out of it, am I?”
    “Nope. Nor Harvey. It really doesn’t matter where you go, Sam, but you’ve got to get the hell out of here, for your own sake. Don’t you want to? Don’t you want to get away from all the questions, from the memories, from the chance of running into … them?” The word had a painful ring to it, and she shrugged.
    “What difference does it make? When I turn on the news in California, they’ll still be there. The two of them. Looking …” Her eyes filled with tears just thinking of those two faces that she was magnetically drawn to every night. She always watched them, and then hated herself for it, wanting to turn the knob to another channel but unable to move her hand. “I don’t know, dammit, they just look like they belong together, don’t they?” Suddenly her face pulled into a mask of sadness and the tears beganto roll down her face. “We never looked like that, did we? I mean—”
    But Charlie said nothing, he only pulled her into his arms. “It’s okay, Sam. It’s okay.” And then as she cried softly into his shoulder, oblivious of the glances of secretaries hurrying past her, he swept a long strand of the blond hair off her forehead and smiled down at her again. “This is why you need a vacation. I think it’s called emotional exhaustion, or hadn’t you noticed?”
    She grunted disapproval and then chuckled softly through her tears. “Is that what they call it? Yeah …” She pulled away from him, sighed, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Maybe I do need a vacation.” And then, valiantly swinging her hair back over her shoulders, she attempted to glare at her friend. “But not for the reasons you think. You bastards have just worn me out.”
    “You’re damn right we have. And we have every intention of doing so again when you return. So enjoy yourself while you’re out there. Horse freak.” A hand on both their shoulders suddenly made them both turn.
    “Haven’t you left yet, Samantha?” It was Harvey, pipe clenched in his teeth and a bright light in his eyes. “I thought you had a plane to catch.”
    “She does.” Charlie grinned at her.
    “Then put her on it, for chrissake. Get her out of here. We have work to do.” He smiled gruffly, waved the pipe, and disappeared down another hallway as Charlie looked at her again and saw the sheepish smile.
    “You don’t really have to put me on the plane, you know.”
    “Don’t I?” She shook her head in answer, but shewasn’t paying attention to the art director, she was looking at her office as though for the last time. Charlie caught her expression and he grabbed her coat and bags. “Come on, before you get maudlin on me. Let’s catch that plane.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    He crossed the threshold and waited, and with two hesitant steps she followed him. With a deep breath and one last glance behind her she softly closed the door.

T he plane ride across the country was uneventful. The country drifted below her like bits and pieces of a patchwork quilt. The rough brown nubby textures of winter fields drifted into