Ten kinds of hell were raised when Miko told her family she was pregnant. I hope you're not planning to marry him, her mother said, it'll ruin your career. Dump him. Keep the baby. He wanted her to join him and work on the dark side of Hawaii with his coven of followers, was some kind of liberal Buddhist monk who preached free love, green issues and unanaesthesized midnight water births at sea. Sent to cover the feature story and knee-deep in Pacific beach-mud, she'd held a tiny bloody emerging crown as he chanted litanies over mother and child about the unity of all things and cosmic harmony. He was a rough lover, charismatic, inscrutable, the perfect beau for a writer, or so she thought. As soon as she had the abortion she wondered what she'd seen in him, ever. She returned to the boyfriend she'd betrayed, who put his name under "Father" on the medical forms and never looked back. The novel that came out of it was a bestseller, but only after her editor deleted the fictional happy ending.