A pallid young woman toting a cartload of complicated looking apparatus stops just outside Vic’s open doorway. She is wearing a surgical mask, as I ...am, though — from the countless tubes running from-and-to various parts of her body, to-and-from the humming contraptions on her trolley — I know that her mask is intended to keep out all the perilous things mine is meant to keep in. The sound of her sliver thin voice — muted further by the mask but, I presume, more by condition and emotion — tugs. "I kept my silence, though my face must have been quite a picture telling the entire story."How could you?" Carly finally asked with wonder."You expect me to open my mouth and insert my foot?" I asked."It's OK Ian. OK, it's a bit shocking, but I won't tell anyone," Carly said far more mildly than I expected."Thanks sis," I said sincerely. "Helen's lovely and it's hard to explain, but ... she meets a deep seated need in me, a tie to roots I thought were forgotten." You'd better not get caught,". Stacy joined them in the pool, and she and her father practiced diving from the board.The afternoon passed pleasantly. It was almost as if nothing had happened to change Stacy's life so drastically. Her father said they'd enter their jumping horses in competition at a meet the following weekend. Stacy was happy to hear it, and they talked excitedly about past meets they'd won and those they'd lost.Stacy's mother went in early and prepared an excellent dinner. While with her father, and again. He remained calm, hands folded behind him. "I wish I were, your Lordship," he said simply.He offered nothing more. He had no need to prove himself to Roquan. He knew that the Overlord's statement was more from disbelief than the notion that Vanlo had erred on something as serious as this.It was obvious that Roquan was struggling for the right words, and he grew all the more frustrated the more those words eluded him. "Hellfire, Vanlo!" he finally exclaimed. "What motive would he possibly have.