Marino went back to his car, wondering what it was like to be Kirstin Beck. She was trapped in a life she didn’t want and dependent on him, a total stranger, to escape. It had become much more than a story for his next book. It was personal; he cared about her. Tony Marino, a man who avoided commitment and responsibility, was mired in a mess few would want. He was falling in love with a married woman, whether he wanted to admit it or not, who was trying to escape from a Communist country to find a daughter lost to adoption, who she had never before seen, and to care for a grandmother no one else could help. The situation was complicated by her husband, a Stasi informant or, worse yet, a Stasi agent. Yet Marino drove forward, convinced he could somehow put all the pieces together. The man w
