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Starlette had never verbalized any of this per se, but it had seeped out between her little digs at other doctors’ wives (none present to defend themselves) and in her limited observations on her own lot in life.
    Danny had married Starlette seven years ago, a year before he’d planned to retire from the air force. First marriage for both of them. He’d waited a long time to make that mistake, he told her, but the waiting hadn’t made him any wiser. After nineteen years in the service, he’d flown to Nashville to buy a house in anticipation of working as a songwriter in his retirement, something he’d always done during downtime in the air force. To protect his savings, he’d lined up a job with a local flying service. The owner was a big admirer of Danny’s war record, and one job perk was flying country music stars around the state. Starlette had been working for a real estate agency, and she’d showed Danny a couple of houses in Franklin. His songwriting aspirations hadn’t impressed her; in fact she’d questioned his ability to buy in that neighborhood. But his upcoming gig flying country music stars had the glamour she’d come to the city to find. Danny still had a year left at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to round out his twenty, but he was soon commuting to Nashville on every leave, to shop his songs and to spend time with Starlette. When she turned up pregnant, they decided to marry, and six months later, their daughter, Jenny, was born—beautiful and healthy.
    Danny was only two weeks from retirement when the World Trade Center was attacked. After that, he’d refused to consider quitting, despite Starlette’s protestations. She didn’t have to wait long for his return. He deployed to Afghanistan but was shot down three months later, in an incident he was lucky to survive. He took this as a hint from fate and returned to Nashville with his discharge papers in hand. Soon he was dividing his time between flying singers, selling songs, sleeping with his new wife, and raising his daughter. The only problem in paradise was that he quickly tired of being a flying chauffeur. Jet-set hillbillies were getting on his nerves. Some were truly wonderful people, but others were real jerks. With the fans they were warm and sincere, but as soon as they hit the chopper, they were bitching about the hassles of dealing with the public. After six months without selling a song, Danny was ready to bail out. He hadn’t returned to Mississippi except for funerals and one high school reunion he’d enjoyed, but ever since he hit forty-five, he’d had an inexplicable itch to head back South. The next time a singing cowboy millionaire said the wrong thing, Danny told him off, and that was that. It took some talking, but he finally convinced Starlette to give his hometown a try, promising that if it didn’t work out, they could move back to Tennessee.
    Laurel set aside Michael McDavitt’s file and forced herself to stop thinking about his father. Her strategy had been to focus on the conference
after
Starlette, and all she had done was rewind to the beginning of her relationship with Danny. God, was she messed up.
    She pulled out her file on Carl Mayer, her most serious ADD case, and tried to focus on the words and numbers on the page.
Mean, median, stanine
…no matter how hard she stared, the data wouldn’t coalesce into anything coherent. And why should it? In less than five minutes, she would be face-to-face with a woman she had willfully betrayed for almost a year. A woman who had never liked her, probably out of anxiety about being judged a bad parent. There was no way to avoid making those kinds of judgments, but Laurel always tried to keep them out of her eyes. The problem was, she didn’t respect Starlette McDavitt. Most of the mothers Laurel worked with bordered on sainthood when it came to dealing with their children; Starlette was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Laurel didn’t think she could have