I waited for Sam to call me. But he didn't. Neither did Bernie.

I thought Bill might come over to let me know what was going on. He didn't.

And so ended another day of noncommunication.

The next day, when I got up, I had a message of sorts from Eric. He had texted me - texted me! - and not even personally, but through Pam. She relayed a stiff message, informing me that he'd talk to me later in the week. I had cherished a hope that perhaps Pam herself would show up to bawl me out or to enlighten me about how Eric was faring . . . but no.

As I sat on the front porch with a glass of iced tea, I examined myself to see if my heart was broken. I was so emotionally exhausted, I couldn't tell. As I saw it, maybe melodramatically, Eric and I were struggling with the chains of the love that had bound us together, and it didn't seem we could either break free of those chains or resume them.

I had a dozen questions and conjectures, and I dreaded the answers to all of them. Finally, I got out the weed whacker, my least favorite yard tool.

My gran used to say, "You pays your money, and you takes your choice." I didn't know where the saying had originated, but now I understood what it meant.

"Of course," I said out loud, because the radio was playing and I couldn't hear myself think over it, "if you make a decision, you have to abide by the consequences." I hadn't even made a conscious decision to use the cluviel dor to save Sam; I'd acted instinctively when I saw him die.

Finally, I'd reached my saturation limit on this retroactive second-guessing. I threw down the weed whacker and screamed out loud. Screw all this brooding.

I was sick of thinking about it.

So I was delighted, after I'd put away all the yard tools and showered, to hear a car crunching up my gravel driveway. I recognized Tara's minivan. As she drove past the kitchen window, I peered out to see if the twins were strapped into their car seats, but the windows were tinted too dark. (Seeing Tara in a minivan was still a shock, but during Tara's pregnancy she and JB had vowed to be model parents, and part of that picture was a minivan.) Tara's shoulders were rigid as she walked to the door, but at least she was coming to the back door as friends should. She didn't fool with knocking. She opened the back door onto the laundry room/porch and yelled, "Sookie! You better be here! Are you decent?"

"I'm here," I said, turning to face her as she came into the kitchen. Tara was wearing some stretchy brown pants and a loose white blouse, her dark hair in a braid down her back. Her makeup was minimal. She was lovely as always, yet I couldn't help but notice she'd let her eyebrows stray all over. Motherhood could sure wreak havoc on a woman's grooming. Of course, having two at one time would make "me time" extra hard to come by. "Where are the babies?" I asked.

"JB's mom's got 'em," she said. "She was drooling at the chance to keep 'em for a few hours."

"So . . . ?"

"How come you're not going to work? How come you're not answering your e-mail or picking up your mail at the end of the driveway?" She tossed a bundle of envelopes of all sizes and a magazine or two onto the kitchen table. She glared at me as she continued, "You know how nervous that makes people? People like me?"

I was a little embarrassed at the chunk of truth in her accusation that I'd been selfish in staying out of touch while I'd been trying to understand myself and figure out my life and my future. "Excuse me," I said sharply. "I did call in sick to work, and I'm surprised you want to risk taking my germs back to the babies!"

"You look fine to me," she said, without a speck of sympathy. "What happened to you and Sam?"

"He's all right, isn't he?" My anger faltered and disappeared.

"He's had Kennedy working in his place for days. He talks to her by phone. He doesn't come over to the bar." She was still glaring at me, but her stance was softening. I could tell from her thoughts that she was genuinely concerned. "Kennedy's real happy to do extra bartending, since she and Danny are saving up to rent a house together. But that business can't run itself, Sookie, and Sam hasn't missed four days at the bar, if he was in Bon Temps, since he bought the place."

That last part was mostly a muted blahblahblah. Sam was all right.

I sat in one of the kitchen chairs a little too hastily.

"Okay, tell me what happened," Tara said, and sat opposite me. "I wasn't sure I wanted to know. But I guess now you better tell me."

I did want to talk to someone about what had happened at Alcide Herveaux's country place. But I couldn't tell Tara the whole story: the captive rogue Weres, Jannalynn's betrayal of her pack and her leader, the horrible things she'd done. I couldn't imagine how Sam was feeling. Not only had he learned the true nature of his girlfriend - though evidence suggested that he'd always suspected Jannalynn was playing a deeper game - but he had to absorb her death, which had been truly gruesome. Jannalynn had been trying to kill Alcide, her packleader, but she'd given Sam a mortal wound instead. Then Mustapha Khan had executed her.

I opened my mouth to try to begin the story, and found I didn't know where to start. I looked at my friends-since-childhood buddy helplessly. She waited, with a look that said she intended to sit right there in my kitchen until I answered her. Finally, I said, "The gist of it is that Jannalynn is now completely and permanently out of the picture, and I saved Sam's life. Eric feels that I should have done something for him, instead. Something significant, that I was aware of." I left off the punch line.

"So Jannalynn hasn't gone to Alaska to visit her cousin." Tara was compressing her lips to keep from looking as freaked as she felt. But there was a hint of triumph, too. She was thinking she had known something was fishy about that story.

"Not unless Alaska has gotten a lot hotter."

Tara giggled; but then, she hadn't been there. "She did something that bad? I read in the paper that someone had confessed over the telephone to the officer in charge of Kym Rowe's murder and then vanished. Would that be Jannalynn, by any chance?"

I nodded. Tara didn't seem shocked. Tara knew all about people who did bad things. Two of them had been her parents.

"So you haven't talked to Sam since then," she said.

"Not since the next morning." I hoped Tara would say she'd seen him, talked to him, but instead she moved on to a topic she considered more interesting.

"What about the Viking? Why is he pissed? His life didn't need saving. He's already dead."

I held my hands palms up and open, trying to think how to phrase it. Well, I might as well be honest, if not graphic. "It's like . . . I had a magic wish. I could have used it for Eric's benefit, to get him out of a bad situation. And it would have changed his future. But instead, I used it to save Sam." And then I'd waited for the repercussions. Because using strong magic always had consequences.

Tara, who had had bad experiences with vampires, smiled broadly. Though Eric had saved her life once upon a time, she included him in her generic dislike of the undead. "Did a genie grant you three wishes or something?" she said, trying to keep the pleasure out of her voice.

Actually, though she was joking, that was almost the truth. Substitute "fairy" for "genie" and "one wish" for "three wishes," and you'd have the story in a nutshell. Or in a cluviel dor.

"Kind of like that," I said. "Eric does have a lot on his plate right now. Stuff that will completely transform his life." Though what I said was absolutely true, it came out sounding like a weak excuse. Tara tried not to sneer.

"Has anyone from his posse called you? What about Pam?" Tara was thinking I had reason to worry if the area vampires had decided I was nothing to them. And she was right to be concerned. "Just because you break up with the big guy doesn't mean they hate you, right?" She was thinking they probably did.

"I don't think we've exactly broken up," I said. "But he's pissed off. Pam passed along a message from him. A text message."

"Better than a Post-it note. Who have you heard from?" Tara asked impatiently. "All this weird shit has happened, and no one's calling you to talk about it? Sam's not over here scrubbing your floors and kissing your feet? This house should be full of flowers, candy, and male strippers."

"Ah," I said intelligently. "Well, the yard's strangely full of flowers. And tomatoes."

"I spit on the supes who've let you down," Tara said, fortunately not suiting action to words. "Listen, Sook, stick with your human buds and leave the others by the side of the road." She meant it all the way down to her bones.

"Too late for that," I said. I smiled, but it didn't feel as though it fit my face right.

"Then come shopping. I need some new bras, since I'm Elsie the Cow these days. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up."

Tara, breastfeeding twins, was notably more bosomy. Maybe more than a bit curvier, too. But I was hardly one to point fingers, and I welcomed the change of focus in our conversation. "How are the kids doing?" I said, smiling more genuinely. "I'm gonna have to babysit them some night so you and JB can go to the movies. How long has it been since you went out together?"

"Since six weeks before I was due," she said. "Mama du Rone has kept them twice during the day so I could go to the store, but she doesn't want to keep 'em at night when Papa du Rone is home. If I can pump enough milk to get ahead of the little monsters, JB would take me to the Outback. We could eat steak." There was an avid look to her mouth. Tara had been craving red meat ever since she'd started nursing. "Besides, since Hooligans closed, JB doesn't have to work at night anymore."

JB had been employed at Hooligans as well as at a health club, where he was a trainer. At Hooligans, he'd been doing the (nearly) full monty on ladies' night to raise extra money for the twins' birth. I hadn't spared a moment to think about the fate of the building and business since the owner, my cousin Claude, had vanished from the human world. That was definitely something to worry about when I ran out of other, more important stuff.

"Just let me know next time you're in a steak mood," I assured Tara, pleased at the prospect of doing her a good turn. "Where were you thinking of shopping today?" Suddenly, I was anxious to get out of the house.

"Let's go to Shreveport. I like the maternity and baby shop there, and I want to drop by that consignment shop on Youree, too."

"Sure. Let me put on some makeup." In fifteen minutes I was dressed in clean white shorts and a sky blue T-shirt, my hair in a neat ponytail and my skin thoroughly moisturized. I felt more like myself than I had in several days.

Tara and I talked all the way over to Shreveport. Mostly about the babies, of course, because what's more important than babies? But included in the conversation were Tara's mother-in-law (a great woman); Tara's shop (not faring too well this summer); Tara's assistant, McKenna (whom Tara was trying to fix up with a friend of JB's); and other items of interest in the Taraverse.

On this very hot summer day in July, it felt comfortingly normal to be having this gossip session while we took a gal-pal road trip.

Though Tara owned and operated an upscale boutique, it didn't carry specialty clothes like maternity and new-mom wear. She said, "I want me some breastfeeding bras and a breastfeeding nightgown from Moms 'N More, and at the consignment place I want to pick up a couple of pairs of shorts, since I can't get my fat baby ass into my pre-baby shorts. You need anything, Sookie?"

"I do have to get a dress for Jason and Michele's wedding," I said.

"Are you in it? They set a date yet?"

"I'm the only attendant as of now. They narrowed it to a couple of dates, but they're waiting to pick one after they hear from Michele's sister. She's in the army, and she may or may not be able to get leave on those dates." I laughed. "I'm sure Michele will ask her, too, but I'm a sure thing."

"What color you need to wear?"

"Any color I like. She says she doesn't look good in white, and besides, she went that route for her first wedding. Jason's wearing a tan suit, and Michele's wearing chocolate brown. It's a cocktail dress, and she says it looks great on her."

Tara looked skeptical. "Chocolate brown?" she said. (Tara did not think that was suitable for a wedding.) "You should look today," she continued more cheerfully. "Of course, you're welcome to look at my shop, but if you see something today at the consignment shop, that would be perfect. You're only going to wear it once, right?"

Tara carried pretty clothes, but they were expensive, and her selection was limited by the size of the shop. Her suggestion was really practical.

We stopped at Moms 'N More first. The maternity and new-mom shop held little interest for me. I'd been dating vampires for so long that pregnancy was not something I thought about, at least not very often. While Tara talked lactation with the saleswomen, I looked at the diaper bags and the adorable baby items. New mothers were certainly beasts of burden. Hard to believe that once upon a time, babies had been raised without diaper bags, breast pumps, special trash cans for disposable diapers, plastic keys, walkers, premade baby food, plastic pads for changing, special detergent to wash baby clothes . . . and on and on and on. I touched a tiny green-and-white-striped sleeper with a lamb on the chest. Something deep inside me shivered with longing.

I was glad when Tara completed her purchase and we left the store.