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”

“How could he do a thing like that?” And then as she thought about it, she realized that there was more that he must have said, which might have given added credibility to the lies he told. It was the one thing she had never told Joe, and she wondered now if he knew. She sat very still as she looked up at him, and all she could see was the love in his eyes. “Did he tell you about my father too?” She hated talking about it, and never had before. But there was nothing she couldn't say to Joe. She knew she was safe with him.

“Clarke told me about that before I asked you to marry me in Cape Cod. He thought I should know,” Joe said gently as he took her hand in his own, and pulled her close to him. “I'm sorry, Kate. That must have been awful for you.”

“It was,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “I remember that day so perfectly…. I remember everything about it…. The funny thing is I don't remember much about him. I should, but I just don't. I was eight when he died, but he pulled away from everyone two years before that.” She looked sad as she spoke of it. It had been the greatest trauma in her life, other than losing Joe. “It must have been so awful for my mother too, but she never talks about him. Sometimes I wish she would. There's so little I know about him, except that Clarke says he was a nice man.”

“I'm sure he was.” He could see in her eyes how painful it still was for her. It was the root and core of all her fears, fears of loss and grief and abandonment. Unwittingly, her father had caused her so much pain. But she was happy and at peace with Joe. She had found a safe harbor at last.

“I'm glad you know,” she said quietly. It was the only secret she had ever kept from him."

"And that night, when they went to bed, they talked about Andy's betrayal of them both again. It was horrifying to Kate, worse yet to think that Joe had believed what he'd said, and in using Joe's guilts and frailties so brilliantly, Andy had succeeded in driving him away. They both agreed that it had been despicable of him, but an ingenious plan. Kate hadn't thought him capable of anything so devious, and it told her a great deal about him. She wanted to take some time to think about it, but she knew she would confront him about it one day. In the end, even after having used every ruse he could, he had lost her anyway. In spite of that, in the end, she had found her way back to Joe, and she was grateful for the kindness of the fates every day.

During the spring, Joe started spending more time in California. He needed a bigger base for his airline out there. By summer, he was spending half the month in L.A., and he wanted her with him. She took both children and the sitter, and they lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She enjoyed it a lot at first, she went shopping, played with the kids, and hung out at the pool watching movie stars come and go. Joe was constantly at the office, and came back to the hotel after midnight most nights and left again at six the next day. He was trying to spread his operation into the Pacific, and he wanted to establish new routes where they had never been before. It was an enormous undertaking, establishing numerous bases overseas, and planning all the logistics for an airline emerging as one of the most important in the world.

By September he was spending a lot of time in Hong Kong and Japan. They both agreed it was too far for her to go, and she hated leaving the kids for weeks on end. And it didn't make sense for her to sit in a hotel and wait for him in L.A. So she spent her time waiting for him in New York. He called her every night, no matter where he was, and filled her in on what he was doing. And from what she could see, he was doing a million things at once. Running New York, reaching out in the Orient, designing planes, running an airline, and doing test flights himself whenever he could. Understandably, he was crazed, and even when he called Kate, he sounded tense. In spite of competent people in all the various arms of his organization, he acted like he was a one-man band. And he complained constantly that he didn't have enough time to fly his planes. Or see his wife.

When he came back in early October, he hadn't been home in four weeks, and Kate pointed out that she never saw him anymore.

“What am I supposed to do, Kate? I can't be in fourteen places at once.” He had been in Tokyo for two weeks, making deals and setting up routes, Hong Kong for a week, battling with the British, and L.A. for five days. And one of his best test pilots had crashed just before he left, for no apparent reason, in a plane Joe had previously cleared himself. He had gone to Reno for the night, to inspect the wreckage and see his widow, and by the time he got back to New York, he was half dead.

“Why can't you try to run things from here?” Kate said sensibly. But it was more complicated than that.