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viewing their surroundings from the security of Paige’s car during the drive from the airport, one would have thought they were in a foreign country, and a hostile one at that.
    Only five of them had come, Mara’s parents and three of her brothers. Paige told herself that financial constraints kept the others at home. She hoped Mara believed it.
    They pulled up to the funeral home in the same silence with which they’d made most of the drive. After guiding them inside, Paige left them alone to say their good-byes. Back on the front steps, she tried to remember the last time Mara had mentioned her family, but she couldn’t. It was painfully sad. True, Paige didn’t see her own parents often, but she regularly saw her grandmother, who lived in West Winter, a mere forty minutes away. Nonny was spritely and independent. She had been mother and father rolled into one when Paige had been young and was more than enough family for Paige now. Paige adored her.
    “She looks pretty,” came the tight voice of Mara’s father. A tall, stocky man, he stood with his hands in the pockets of tired suit pants, and iron-hard eyes on the street. “Whoever set her out did a fine job.”
    “She always looked pretty,” Paige said in defense of Mara. “Pale, sometimes. Hassled, sometimes. But pretty.” Unable to leave it at that, she spoke with a certain urgency. “She was happy, Mr. O’Neill. She had a full life here.”
    “That why she killed herself?”
    “We don’t know she did. It may as well have been an accident as suicide.”
    He grunted. “Same difference.” He stared straight ahead. “Not that it matters. She was lost to us long time ago. This never would’ve happened if she’d done what we said. She’d be alive if she’d stayed back home.”
    “But then she wouldn’t have been a doctor,” Paige said, because much as she realized that the man was in pain, she couldn’t let his declaration stand. “She was a wonderful pediatrician. She loved children, and they loved her. She fought for them. She fought for their parents. They’ll all be here tomorrow. You’ll see.”
    He looked at her for the first time. “Were you the one told her to go to medical school?”
    “Oh, no. She wanted that long before I did.”
    “But you got her up here.”
    “She got herself up here. All I did was tell her about the opportunity.”
    He grunted and stared at the street again. After a minute he said, “You look like her, y’know. Maybe that was why she liked you. Same dark hair, same size, you could be sisters. Are you married?”
    “No.”
    “Have you ever been?”
    “No.”
    “Have you ever had children?”
    “No.”
    “Then you’re missing as much in life as she was. She tried with that fellow Daniel, but he couldn’t take his wife being gone all the time, don’t know what man could, and then when she didn’t get pregnant, well, what good’s woman like that?”
    Paige was beginning to get a drift of what had driven Mara from Eugene. “Mara wasn’t to blame for Daniel’s problems. He had a drug habit well before she met him. She thought she could help, but it just didn’t work. Same with getting pregnant. Maybe if they’d had more time—”
    “Time wouldn’t have mattered. It was the abortion that did it.”
    “Abortion?” Paige knew nothing about an abortion.
    “She didn’t tell you? I can understand why. It isn’t every girl who gets pregnant when she’s sixteen and then runs off to get rid of the child before her parents have a say in the matter. What she did was murder. Her punishment was not being able to get pregnant again.” He made a sputtering sound. “Sad thing is, having babies would have been her salvation. If she’d stayed back home and got married and had kids, she’d have been alive today and we wouldn’t have had to spend half our savings flying to her funeral.”
    At that moment Paige wished they hadn’t come. She wished she had never spoken with Thomas O’Neill. Mostly she