"Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was . . . you look just like him."
And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes. Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed to be having fun.
Thus it began.
At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take. She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance, Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a dissertation about Minoan Crete.
That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in D.C. about helping trace hot money.
In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close, but she didn't.
He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled the world—London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met, at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convocation of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make of all the Slavic exuberance.
Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her. She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.
Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click. Why? she wondered.
Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she could do.