My nightmares were full of children. Specifically, six little girls-two dark-haired, four fair, their knees sticking out beneath the plaid uniform jumper of St. Ambrose’s School, their hands twisting in their laps. I watched them all grow up in an instant, you see; at the very moment a jury foreman acquitted my client, the elementary school principal who had molested them.

It was my biggest triumph as a Philadelphia defense attorney; the verdict that put me on the map and had my phone ringing off the hook with calls from other well-bred community icons hoping to dance through the loopholes of the law to keep their own skeletons in their closets. The night after the verdict came back, Stephen took me out to Victor’s Café; for a meal so expensive we could have bought a used car instead. He introduced me to the maître d’ as “Jeannie Cochran.” He told me that the two senior partners in his own firm, the most prestigious in the city, had invited me in to have a talk.

“Stephen,” I said, amazed, “when I interviewed there five years ago, you told me you couldn’t have a relationship with a woman that worked at your firm.”

He shrugged. “Five years ago, Ellie,” he said, “things were different.”

He was right. Five years ago, I had still been building my career. Five years ago, I believed that the main beneficiary of an acquittal was my client, rather than myself. Five years ago, I could only dream of an opportunity like the one Stephen was offering in his firm.

I smiled at him. “So what time’s the meeting?”

Later, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. An attendant was there, waiting patiently beside a tray of complimentary makeup and hair spray and perfume. I went into a stall and started to cry-for those six little girls, for the evidence I had successfully suppressed, for the attorney I wanted to be years ago when I first graduated from law school-one so full of principle that I would never have taken this case, much less worked so hard to win it.

I came out and ran the water to wash my hands. I hiked up the silk sleeves of my suit jacket and began to scrub, working lather between my fingers, into my nails. At a tap on my shoulder I turned to see the bathroom attendant handing me a linen towel. Her eyes were hard and dark as chestnuts. “Honey,” she said, “some stains ain’t never gonna come clean.”

There was one more child in my nightmares, but I’d never seen its face. This was the baby I hadn’t had, and at the rate things were going, never would. People made fun of biological clocks, but they were inside women like me-although I’d never seen the ticking as a wake-up call, but rather as the prelude to a bomb. Hesitate, hesitate, and then-boom!-you’d blown all your chances.

Did I mention: Stephen and I had lived together for eight years.

The day after the principal of St. Ambrose’s was acquitted, he sent me two dozen red roses. Stephen walked into the kitchen as I was stuffing them into the trash.

“What did you do that for?”

I turned to him slowly. “Does it ever bother you? That once you’ve crossed the line, you can’t go back?”

“Holy Christ, you’re talking like Confucius again. Just say what you mean, Ellie.”

“I am. I just wanted to know if it gets you. Right here.” I pointed to my heart, still hurting. “Do you ever look at the people sitting across the courtroom, the ones whose lives were ruined by a person you know is guilty as hell?”

Stephen picked up his coffee mug. “Someone’s got to defend them. That’s how our legal system works. If you’re such a bleeding heart, go work for the DA.” He pulled a rose out of the trash can, snapped off its stem, and tucked it behind my ear. “You’ve got to get your mind off this. What do you say you and I head out to Rehoboth Beach and bodysurf?” Leaning closer, he added, “Naked.”

“Sex isn’t a Band-Aid, Stephen.”

He took a step back. “Pardon me if I’ve forgotten. It’s been so long.”

“I don’t want to have this discussion now.”

“There isn’t one to have, El. I’ve already got a twenty-year-old daughter.”

“But I don’t.” The words hung in the air, as delicate and arresting as a soap bubble the instant before it bursts. “Look, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to have the vasectomy reversed. But there are other ways-”

“There aren’t. I’m not going to watch you poring over some sperm donor catalog at night. And I don’t want a social worker going through everything from my tax records to my underwear drawer trying to decide if I’m worthy enough to raise some Chinese kid who was left on a mountaintop to die of exposure-”

“Stephen, just stop already! You’re out of control!”

To my surprise, he quieted immediately. He sat down, tight-lipped and furious. “That was unnecessary,” he said finally. “I mean, Ellie, that really hurt.”

“What?”

“What you just said. God-you called me a fucking troll!”

I met his gaze. “I said you were out of control.”

Stephen blinked, then started to laugh. “Out of control-oh, God! I didn’t hear you.”

When was the last time you did? I thought, but managed to curb the words before I spoke them.

The law offices of Pfister, Crown and DuPres were located in downtown Philadelphia, sprawled across three floors of a modern glass-and-steel skyscraper. I spent hours dressing for my appointment with the partners, discarding four suits before I found the one that I believed made me look most confident. I used extra antiperspirant. I drank a cup of decaf, afraid that the real stuff would make my hands tremble. I mentally plotted the route to the building in my mind, and left nearly an hour for travel time, although it was only fifteen miles away.

At exactly eleven o’clock I slid behind the wheel of my Honda. “Senior partner,” I murmured into the rearview mirror. “And anything less than $300,000 a year is unacceptable.” Sliding my sunglasses on, I headed for the highway.

Stephen had left a tape in my car, a mix of what he liked to call his “kick-ass” music, which he listened to when he was en route to litigations. With a small smile, I pushed it in to play, letting the drums and the backbeat thrum through the car. I turned it up loud, so loud that when I changed lanes precipitously, I could barely hear the angry horn of the pickup I’d cut off.

“Oops,” I murmured, flexing my hands on the steering wheel. Almost immediately, it jumped beneath my touch. I gripped it harder, but that only seemed to make the car buck like a mustang. A clear stream of fear pooled from my throat to my stomach, the quick panic that comes when you realize something has gone terribly wrong, something that it is simply too late to fix. In my rearview mirror I saw the truck looming closer, honking furiously, as my car gave a great shudder and stopped dead in the middle of sixty-mile-per-hour traffic.

I closed my eyes, bracing for a crash that never came.

I was still trembling thirty minutes later as I stood beside Bob, the namesake of Bob’s Auto Service, while he tried to explain what had happened to my car. “Basically, it melted,” he said, wiping his hands on his coveralls. “The oil pan cracked, the engine seized, and the internal parts glommed together.”

“Glommed together,” I repeated slowly. “So how do you separate them?”

“You don’t. You buy a new engine. You’re talking five or six thousand.”

“Five or six-” The mechanic started to walk away from me. “Hey! What am I supposed to do until then?”

Bob glanced at my suit, my briefcase, my heels. “Get a pair of Reeboks.”

A telephone began to ring. “Shouldn’t you get that?” the mechanic asked, and I realized the sound was coming from the depths of my own briefcase. I groaned at the recollection of my appointment at the law office. I was already fifteen minutes late.

“Where the hell are you?” Stephen barked when I answered the phone.

“My car died. On the middle of the highway. In front of an oncoming truck.”

“For Christ’s sake, Ellie, that’s why there are taxis!”

I was shocked silent. No “My God, are you all right?” No “Do you need me to come help you?” I watched Bob shake his head over the twisted intestines of what used to be my engine and felt a strange peace settle over me. “I’m not going to be able to make it today,” I said.

Stephen let out a deep sigh. “Well, I suppose I could convince John and Stanley to reschedule. Let me call you right back.”

The line went dead in my hand. Absentmindedly I clicked it off, and then stepped up to my car again. “The good news,” Bob said, “is that after you replace the engine, you pretty much have a brand-new car.”

“I liked my old car.”

He shrugged. “Then pretend it’s your old car. With a brand-new heart.”

I suddenly saw the truck that had been behind me on the highway, swerving and beeping; the other cars that had parted around mine, a stone in a river. I smelled the hot, rippling asphalt that sank beneath my heels as I tiptoed, shaky, across the highway. I was not one to believe in fate, but this had been too close a call, too sure a sign; as if I literally needed to be stopped short before I realized that I’d been running in the wrong direction. After my car had broken down I had called the state police and several service stations, but I had never thought to call Stephen. Somehow, I had known that if I needed to be rescued, I was going to have to do it myself.

The telephone began to ring again. “Good news,” Stephen said before I’d even given a greeting. “The Big Guys are willing to see you today at six o’clock.”

That was the moment I knew I would be leaving.

Stephen helped me load my things into the back of my car. “I completely understand,” he said, although he didn’t. “You want to take some time off before choosing your next big case.”

I wanted to take some time off before choosing whether I ever wanted to take another case, period, but that was beyond Stephen’s realm of belief. You didn’t go to law school and make Law Review and work in the trenches to land the trial of a lifetime, only to question your own career choice. But on another level, Stephen couldn’t accept that I might be moving away for good. I knew this because I felt the same way. In our eight years together we had not married, but we hadn’t separated, either.

“You’ll call me when you get there?” Stephen asked, but before I could answer, he kissed me. Our lips separated like a seam being ripped, and then I got into the car and drove away.

I suppose other women in my position-by this I mean heartbroken, at odds, and recently given a large sum of money-might have chosen a different destination. Grand Cayman, Paris, even a soul-searching hike through the Rockies. For me, there was never any question that if I wanted to lick my wounds, I would wind up in Paradise, Pennsylvania. As a child, I’d spent a week there every summer. My great-uncle had a farm there and progressively sold off lots and parcels of land until he died, at which point his son Frank moved into the big house, planted grass where the field corn had been, and opened a woodworking shop. Frank was my father’s age, and had been married to Leda long before I was ever born.

I couldn’t begin to tell you what I did during those summers in Paradise, but what stayed with me all those years was the calm that pervaded their home, and the smooth efficiency with which things were accomplished. At first, I’d thought it was because Leda and Frank had never had children of their own. Later, I came to understand it was something in Leda herself, something tied to the fact that she had grown up Amish.

You could not summer in Paradise and not come in contact with the Old Order Amish, who were such an intrinsic part of the Lancaster area. The Plain people, as they called themselves, clipped along in their buggies in the thick of automobile traffic; they stood in line at the grocery store in their old-fashioned clothing; they smiled shyly from behind their farm stands where we went to buy fresh vegetables. That was, in fact, how I learned about Leda’s past. We were waiting to buy armfuls of sweet corn when Leda struck up a conversation-in Pennsylvania Dutch!-with the woman who was making the sale. I was eleven, and hearing Leda-as American as me-slip into the Germanic dialect was enough to astound me. But then Leda handed me a ten-dollar bill. “Give this to the lady, Ellie,” she said, even though she was standing right there and could have done it herself.

On the drive home, Leda explained that she had been Plain until she married Frank-who wasn’t Plain. By the rules of her religion, she was put under the bann-restricted from certain social contact with people who were still Amish. She could talk to Amish friends and family, but couldn’t eat at the same table with them. She could sit beside them on the bus, but not offer them a ride in her car. She could buy from them, but needed a third party-me-to transact the sale.

Her parents, her sisters and brothers-they lived less than ten miles away.

“Are you allowed to go see them?” I’d asked.

“Yes, but I hardly ever do,” Leda told me. “You’ll understand one day, Ellie. I’m not keeping my distance because it’s uncomfortable for me. I’m keeping my distance because it’s uncomfortable for them.”

Leda was waiting when the train pulled into the Strasburg railroad station. As I stepped off, carrying my two bags, she held out her arms. “Ellie, Ellie,” she sang. She smelled of oranges and Windex; her wide shoulder was the perfect place to rest my head. I was thirty-nine years old, but in Leda’s embrace, I was eleven again.

She led me toward the small parking lot. “You going to tell me what’s the matter now?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I just wanted to visit you.”

Leda snorted. “The only time you come to visit is when you’re about to have a nervous breakdown. Did something happen with Stephen?” When I didn’t answer, she narrowed her eyes. “Or maybe nothing happened with Stephen-and that’s the problem?”

I sighed. “It’s not Stephen. I finished a very trying case, and . . . well, I needed to relax.”

“But you won the case. I saw it on the news.”

“Yeah, well, winning isn’t everything.”

To my surprise, she didn’t say anything in response. I fell asleep as soon as Leda pulled onto the highway, and woke with a start when she pulled into her driveway. “I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to conk out like that.”

Leda smiled and patted my hand. “You spend as much time as you need to relaxing here.”

“Oh, it won’t be for long.” I took my bags from the backseat and hurried up the porch steps behind Leda.

“Well, we’re glad to have you, for two nights or two dozen.” She cocked her head. “Phone’s ringing,” she said, pushing open the door and rushing in to pick up the receiver. “Hello?”

I set down my suitcases and stretched to work out the kinks in my back. Leda’s kitchen was neat as a pin, just like always, and looked exactly the way I had remembered: the stitched sampler on the wall, the cookie jar in the shape of a pig, the black and white squares of linoleum. Closing my eyes, it was easy to pretend I’d never left here, to believe that the most difficult choice I’d have to make that day was whether to curl up in an Adirondack chair out back or on the creaky swing on the screened porch. Across the kitchen, Leda was clearly surprised to hear the voice of whoever it was that had called. “Sarah, Sarah, sssh,” she soothed. “Was ist letz?” I could only make out small snippets of unfamiliar words: an Kind . . . er hat an Kind gfuna . . . es Kind va dodt. Sinking down on a counter stool, I waited for Leda to finish the call.

When she hung up, her hand remained on the receiver for a long moment. Then she turned to me, pale and shaken. “Ellie, I am so sorry, but I have to go somewhere.”

“Do you need me-”

“You stay here,” Leda insisted. “You’re here to rest.”

I watched her pull away in her car. Whatever the problem was, Leda would fix it. She always did. Putting my feet up on a second stool, I smiled. I’d been in Paradise for fifteen minutes, and I felt better already.