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God! No!” Courtney jumped to her feet. “Tell me it isn’t true.”
    Trent pulled her back down beside him. Breath gushed from his lungs in short bursts. His mind struggled to get a grip on what he’d just been told. Her death changed—everything. For the better, he had to admit.
    “Her car was blown up by a bomb at about eight o’clock this evening,” the uniformed officer informed them in a voice barely loud enough to be heard over Courtney’s sobs.
    “What? That’s terrible—a tragedy.” Trent shaded the truth. He’d be a hell of a lot richer with Hayley out of the way. “Car bombs happen in the Middle East, not Newport Beach.” He tried to keep his mind off the money, adding, “Besides, who would want to kill Hayley?”
     
    “D EAR L ORD, WHAT IS the world coming to?” Meg Amboy asked the nurse who’d brought her breakfast just after dawn. Along with it came her medication and the morning paper. “Did you see there was a car bombing right here in Newport Beach last night?”
    “Umm-hmmm,” the middle-aged woman with a chest like the prow of a battleship responded. “It was out by the airport. That’s Costa Mesa.”
    Meg noticed the nurse had dismissed the incident as if it had happened on another planet. Typical attitude around Twelve Acres. The staff had been trained to be elitist. Newport had money and cachet while Costa Mesa, which bordered on Newport, was decidedly middle classwith an area that could only be termed a barrio . Meg knew most of the help in the kitchen and the housekeepers lived in Costa Mesa or just beyond in Santa Ana.
    Meg prided herself on not being a snob. True, she spent her money on the best assisted-living facility she could afford because she knew she didn’t have much longer to live. But she remembered with fondness growing up poor and earning her own way. Making a fortune with no one’s help.
    The battleship nurse, whose name Meg always failed to remember even though Meg had been at Twelve Acres for two years, left. Meg went back to the paper, content to read it until it was time to go downstairs for a second cup of coffee with Conrad Hollister. After they’d finished, she would walk beside his wheelchair to their morning game of bridge.
    “Conrad,” she whispered and lowered the paper. She stared out at the craggy shoreline framed by her huge window. The rampartlike bluffs had been weathered by wind and the unrelenting surf. Now scrims of early morning mist clung to the shore. Short trees bowed by the elements stooped like hunchback sentinels along the tops of the bluffs where mansions were perched.
    The view was breathtaking but she often experienced a haunting, solitary feeling when she gazed at the sweep of the deep blue sea. It made her lonely, which was an emotion she’d rarely experienced when she was younger, but she had more time to reflect now. Too much time.
    “What might have been?” she whispered to herself. What if she’d met Conrad Hollister ten, twenty, even thirty years ago?
    Meg refused to allow her thoughts to stray in this direction. At eighty-five, she had the same sharp mind thathad guided her as she amassed an empire in real estate. She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t have a heart that refused to recognize her brain was still young. Why dwell on what might have been when she had accomplished so much?
    Conrad was nothing more than an intellectual companion. They enjoyed many of the same things, like competitive bridge, but they weren’t lovers and probably never would have been. Still, once in a while thoughts crept into her mind and she speculated like an old fool.
    “It’s people who matter,” she quietly assured herself, then realized she’d been talking to herself more and more. There were plenty of folks at Twelve Acres to talk to—besides Conrad—but Meg missed her baby sister. Allison had been killed in a plane crash. Until she was gone, Meg hadn’t realized how much she counted on conversations with her sister.
    There