“Do you want me to help you pack your bags?” I say, knowing how pathetic I sound.

Sarah’s expression softens and she comes over to the couch and sits beside me.

“That’s what you’re worried about,” she says.

“You’re thinking you won’t see me anymore.” She pats my knee as if I were a child being comforted by his mother.

So, Rainey has been talking to her. I look around the den and realize how much Sarah has made it her own since her mother died. A year ago she persuaded me to buy an almost brand-new recliner for peanuts at a garage sale, and after my best friend Dan Bailey burned a hole in the coffee table before Christmas, she found another one at an antique shop and shamed me until, on New Year’s Eve, I broke down and bought it. Last winter a friend got her interested in ceramics, and now every flat surface in the room has some bizarre, gnome like figure crouching on it. Not great art, but I don’t know what’s good unless I can read a label or a name. I’m not a visual person, as Rainey charitably puts it. I pull off my jacket and lay it beside me.

“These groups can suck you in,” I warn, “and before you know it you’ve become psychologically dependent on them.”

Great, I think. I’ll have to pay somebody to kidnap her and then deprogram her.

“It’s a church,” she laughs, “not a concentration camp where they brainwash you. Rainey wouldn’t be involved in anything like that.”

“I should tell you that Chet Bracken’s dying of cancer I say, abruptly changing the subject.

“That’s why he’s asked me to help him. It’s a secret though.”

Sarah’s face softens, as I knew it would.