Once in Every Life

skirt. She started to take a step toward him, then stopped. Uncertainty tugged at one corner of her mouth.

> His own daughter was afraid of him. Jack felt a rush of self-hatred so strong, it made him want to smash his fist into something. But years of practice kept him perfectly still. Not a hint of emotion crossed his face or crept into his narrowed eyes. "What is it, Savannah?"

She chewed nervously on her lower lip. "Mama said to come quick. Her time's come."

"Now? But she's not due until? Shit!" He pushed past Savannah and ran into the cold, dark night. Rain pummeled his face and blurred his vision as he ran toward the house.

Christ, while he'd been putting a gun to his head, his wife had been preparing to give birth to his child.

What the hell kind of man was he?

"God forgive me," he murmured.

But, of course, he had no hope of that.

Chapter One

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. 1993

Tess Gregory paced nervously from one end of her small office to the other, her hands twined in a cold, bloodless ball. The silence that she'd long ago learned to accept seemed suddenly oppressive, suffocating. For the fifth time in as many minutes, she glanced down at the Mickey Mouse watch on her wrist.

Twelve o'clock. She let out her breath in an anxious sigh. The results should have been back by now. Certainly if her latest experiment had been successful?

No. She refused to think negatively even for a moment.

She knew better than most the value of positive thinking. Wearing a rut in the utilitarian gray carpet and worrying herself sick wouldn't do a bit of good. The lab would get back to her in their own sweet time, and until then, she simply had to relax. To believe.

Tess squeezed her eyes shut. It was an old childhood trick to calm her ragged nerves, one she'd often used as the doctors poked and prodded and asked questions she could no longer hear. She blacked out the physical world and focused on the one special noise that was captured forever in her memory: laughter. As always, it came to her

5

6

quickly, lifting her spirits and easing the gnawing anxiety from her stomach.

She pried her fingers apart and shoved her hands into her lab coat's deep pockets. Taking a deep breath to calm her racing nerves, she tilted her chin and sailed past the cushioned beige walls of her cubicle.

In the employee dining room, lunch hour was in full swing. Dozens of white-coated people were clustered around the long, rectangular table. Heaps of Styrofoam food and drink containers littered the wood-grain veneer tabletop. The mingled aromas of microwaved leftovers, old coffee, and hospital disinfectants hung heavily in the air.

They were all talking animatedly to one another, mouths and hands moving at the speed of light. It was like an old Charlie Chaplin movie: the only thing missing from the vibrant scene was sound.

Tess moved restlessly past the bank of vending machines and went to the room's only window. Hugging herself against the slight chill that seeped through the thin glass, she stared outside.

It was an ordinary spring day: wet and gray. The kind of day that encouraged Seattleites to seek travel packages on Maui. Ash-hued, moisture-thick clouds hung above the city, obscuring the rooftops and casting the streets in shadow. Rain pattered cement sidewalks and plunked in overfull, leaf-clogged gutters. Puddles shone on the pavement like haphazardly thrown silver coins.

A good day for miracles.

The thought came before she could control it. She knew she shouldn't even think it?thinking was the first step to hoping, and hoping was the first step to disappointment. But no matter how often or how loudly she told herself not to hope, she'd never been able to follow her own advice.

Maybe today was her mantra, her lifeline. It was the

7

same hope she had every morning as she stood at the corner of Third and Virginia, waiting for the bus that would whisk her here, to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The hope never died, even after countless failures. In fact, with each defeat, it grew stronger.

She rested her forehead against the pane, suppressing a quick shudder as the icy window chilled her skin. The answer was right under her nose; she could feel it. All she had to do was find the right key. If these tests didn't give her the answers she needed, she'd try again. And again and again and again.

That's what Tess loved about life and science?anything and everything was possible if a person truly believed.