If only she and Jimmy had never left the small Middle Western town they'd been born and raised in! If only they hadn't come to San Francisco! If only she hadn't gotten a job as a stenographer with the bond company of Price-Meehan, and then asked Personnel if they could use a seventeen-year-old boy as a messenger. If only – no, there was nothing to be gained in going over all that again. She'd been over it a hundred times already. The past was past, and she had to go on from here.

There was no way she could go back and change the fact that their mother and father had been killed in an automobile accident. Neither could she change the fact that she and her brother had used the insurance money that was left after the double funeral to escape from their grief and loneliness, and incidentally, the boredom of small-town life, by heading west to the glamour and excitement of California. No, she couldn't change that any more than she could change the fact that Jimmy had taken up with a young gang of thieves who had used him to gain access to one hundred thousand dollars worth of securities.

It was for Jimmy she was doing this. The company that had been robbed had generously offered to keep the boy out of the case if he would return the fifteen thousand which had been his share of the loot. Only Jimmy hadn't had the fifteen thousand to return. He'd lost it in a crooked dice game with his confederates.

Terrified of going to jail, Jimmy had begged Marcy to help him, and as she had all his life, his big sister had promised. She couldn't bear to see Jimmy suffer. She had been six when Jimmy was born, and had adored him from the moment Mother brought him home from the hospital. Entrusted with a great deal of responsibility for his care, she had petted and pampered and spoiled him. She had built her whole life around him, in spite of the protests and warnings from their parents and others. Well, it looked now as though they had been right and she'd been wrong.