A knock told Daniel that his ride had arrived.  He opened the door and was surprised to see Alex standing on the other side.

“Alex.  I wasn’t expecting you to be the one to give me a ride,” he said.

“Well, I want to be sure you don’t stay on those feet too long,” she explained.  That was really only part of the reason, but Alex wasn’t about to tell the minister that she wanted to spend more time with him.

Daniel chuckled.  “Ah, and you wanted to see to it personally, eh?”

“Well, you know what they say about if you want something done right.”

With another laugh, Daniel followed Alex to her truck.  He was secretly delighted that she was the one who was going to act as his chauffeur to Michelle’s house.  There was something about the redhead that attracted him.  Even before he met her, he was intrigued by the woman Rollie had described in his letters.  She had sounded like an amazing person, and that opinion had not been changed by actually meeting her.  In fact, he was even more impressed by how well she seemed to be holding her life together, which couldn’t be easy being both a single parent and a business owner in an economically depressed area.  Her strength and determination reminded him a lot of Kate.

Thinking of Kate reminded Daniel of the strange dream he’d had last night.  He could only remember bits and pieces of it, but one of those bits was of Kate saying goodbye.  He awoke from the dream feeling both sad and as if something inside him had been set free.  But the thing that made him really wish he could remember the whole dream is that he had the vague impression that Alex had been in it.

Daniel’s thoughts were brought back to the present by Alex’s voice.

“So, how are you feeling this morning?” she asked.

“Sore.  My muscles are definitely not happy with me.”

“How about your feet?”

“They don’t sting as much, but they’re itching like crazy.  I have to exercise a supreme act of will not to scratch them.”

“Well, I think you’re up to the challenge,” Alex told him with a smirk on her lips.

They chatted the rest of the way to their destination.  Michelle’s parents were delighted to see the minister and warmly invited him and Alex inside.

“Actually, I have some errands to run,” the redhead said.  “I’ll come back in an hour to pick you up, if that’s okay, Eric.”

“Sure.  I’ll see you then,” he responded.

“Michelle!” Lara, her mother, called as they came into the house.  “There’s someone here to see you.”

The little girl came out of her bedroom.  The moment she saw Daniel, her eyes lit up, and she ran into his arms.

“Hey there.  How are you doing?” he asked.

“Okay.  I got to stay home from school today because of what happened yesterday.”

“Yes, I know.  So, do you like having the day off?”

“Well, I wish I could go and play with Linda.  She didn’t go to school either.  But Mama and Daddy said they want me to stay here today.  They thought I might get the sniffles because the water was so cold, but I didn’t.  Did you get the sniffles?”

“Nope, no sniffles, though I am pretty sore from all that swimming.”

“I can imagine you are,” Michelle’s father, Doug, said, “especially since you never swam before.”

“That still amazes me,” Lara remarked, shaking her head.  “However did you do it?”

“With a lot of help from God,” the minister replied fervently.  “I know I couldn’t have done it without Him.”

Michelle’s parents exchanged a look.  They led Daniel into the living room, everyone taking seats.  Michelle sat on the arm of the chair the minister had taken.  They spent several minutes chatting, getting to know each other a little better.  Daniel found out that Doug worked on the mainland, as did many of the islanders.  He had stayed home from work today because he wanted to be with his family after the near-tragic events of yesterday.

They’d been talking around twenty minutes when Lara asked Michelle to go play in her room for a little while so that they could talk about “adult things” with Daniel.

“Since yesterday, my wife and I have been doing a lot of thinking, about how suddenly life can change,” Doug said after his daughter had left.  “We almost lost our daughter, and to say that it scared us would be an understatement.  Lara and I both believe in God, and we’ve raised Michelle to believe that way too, but we’re not churchgoers, though we’re each from churchgoing families.  Church just wasn’t something that we made time for in our lives.  But we’ve been talking about it, and we have decided that we’d like to come to your services this Sunday.”

Delighted, Daniel smiled brightly.  “I would love to see you there.”  His smile faded.  “But, um, I hope that this isn’t only because I rescued your daughter.”  Though he would be happy to see them at the church, he didn’t want it to be only because he was the one who saved their daughter.

“Well, in a way it is,” Lara admitted, “but not in the way you mean.  Almost losing Michelle like that woke us up to some things, like the fact that we need to start paying more attention to the important things in life.  And one of the things we have been neglecting is the place God has in our lives.  We want to change that.”

“Well, I would be happy to have you join our congregation,” Daniel told them with a smile.

Lara called Michelle back into the room.

“Can I go outside with Reverend Cooper?” the little girl asked.  “I want to show him my secret hiding place.”

“Um, sure, sweetheart,” Lara said.  “Just make sure you stay warm.”

Michelle grabbed Daniel’s hand and towed him outside.  They went into the woods behind the house.  The girl led the minister to a spot where a big pine had fallen across a clump of boulders, creating a little cave-like hollow.

“This is my secret hiding place,” Michelle told him.  “Only Mama and Daddy and my very best friends know about it.”

“Well, I am very honored that you have shown it to me,” Daniel said in a serious tone of voice.

Michelle crawled into it.  “Come on inside.  It’s neat in here.”

Daniel eyed the tight quarters, not sure he could get his lengthy frame in there.  He got down on his hands and knees and managed to get partway in.

“You’re right.  It is neat in here,” he said, trying not to bump his head on the tree above him.

Michelle giggled.  “You’re all hunched over.  You’re too big to fit.”

Daniel grinned.  “Yep, I guess I am.  I think this secret hiding place is made only for kids.”

“You can get out, then.  I don’t want you to throw your back out like Daddy says he does sometimes.”

The minister gratefully crawled out of the hole.  Michelle got out as well and took hold of his hand again.

“Come on.  There’s a place where we can see the ocean really good,” she told him.  A few minutes later, they arrived at a spectacular overlook of the bay.

“Beautiful,” Daniel murmured.  “I think I could look at this forever.”

Michelle looked up at him.  “Reverend Cooper, Mama and Daddy told me that you almost drowned while you were saving me.  Is that true?”

The minister looked down at her.  “Yeah, it is.  I’d never swum before, and I was very tired because of swimming so far.  I almost didn’t make it back with you.”

Michelle appeared to ponder that for a moment.  “Are you . . . are you scared of the water now?  I don’t think I could ever go in a boat again.  I get really scared just thinking about it.”

Daniel knelt before the girl.  “It’s perfectly natural that you’d feel that way, Michelle.  It was a very scary thing you went through, and it’s going to take a little while to get over it.  But, pretty soon, you and Linda will be out there in a rowboat again, having more fun,” he smiled, “though I think that you’ll be staying away from that particular part of the shore from now on.”

“Yeah, no way am I going near there again!” Michelle agreed adamantly.  “What about you?  Are you scared to go out on the water now?”

“Well, that’s the funny part.  Before I rescued you and Linda, I couldn’t swim, and I was always terrified of being out on the water because of that.  But, now that I know I can swim, it doesn’t scare me to think about going on a boat, even though I did almost drown.”

“Then maybe when I’m not scared anymore, we could go out together.”

“I would love that, Michelle, but I’m not sure how long I’m going to be here.  I need to meet my . . . brother in New York to help him with something, then I will be going back to Africa.”

“Oh,” the little girl said, looking disappointed.  Then a frown crossed her face.  “I was kinda wondering something.  I heard that your brother is the other Reverend Cooper.”

“Uh huh.”

“His first name is Daniel, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you said yours was Eric.”

“That’s right.”

“But when we were on the beach and Doctor Watson and Officer Mitchum were talking to you, I thought I heard them call you Daniel.”

The minister froze, panicking for a moment.  When he was suffering from shock, he hadn’t even thought about the fact that Kevin and the doctor were calling him by his real name.  Apparently, they hadn’t been thinking about it either or at least not thinking about the fact that there was a fourth person present.  The question was, what was he going to do about it now?  The thought of lying right to the face of this child was abhorrent to him.

“Um, can you keep a secret, Michelle?” he asked.

“Uh huh.  I’m really good at keeping secrets.  When my daddy planned a surprise birthday party for my mama, I didn’t say one word to her about it.”

“Good.  Could you keep a secret for me?”

Michelle nodded her head.

“All right.  Doctor Watson and Officer Mitchum called me Daniel because that’s my real name.”

“You and your brother have the same first name?” Michelle asked, confused.

“No, Daniel’s first name isn’t really Daniel.  We’re having to pretend our names are different from what they are because of something that happened.  But we’re trying to fix it so that we don’t have to pretend anymore.  When we do, we can tell everybody the truth.”  He paused.  “So, can you keep that a secret from everyone?”

“Even my parents?”

“Yes, even them.”

“Okay.  I won’t tell anybody.  Promise.”

“Thank you, Michelle.  That means a lot to me since it is very, very important that nobody else knows yet.”

They returned to the house.  The reverend chatted with the family a while longer until Alex came to pick him up.  The sharp-eyed redhead did not miss the fact that he was limping slightly when they walked out to the truck.

“Okay, what did you do?” she asked sternly as they headed back to the parish.  “You didn’t stay off your feet did you.”

Feeling like a kid that had gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Daniel replied, “Michelle and I went for a little walk.  We didn’t go that far.”

Alex shook her head.  “I should have known you’d do something like that.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I did.”

“Why?”

“Michelle knows my name’s not Eric.”

Alex’s eyes snapped to his.  “What?”  There was surprise and anxiety in her voice.

“Kevin and Doctor Watson called me by my real name when I was going into shock.  None of us thought about the fact that Michelle was there and might be lucid enough to be paying attention.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That my ‘brother’ and I were having to pretend that we had different names because of something that happened.  I also told her that we were trying to fix it so that we wouldn’t have to pretend anymore.  I asked her to keep it a secret.”

“Do you think she will?  Children usually aren’t very good at keeping secrets.”

“I hope so.  I’m just glad that she brought it up in private instead of in front of her parents.”

They finished the journey in silence, each of them worried about what could happen if Michelle failed to keep the important secret she had been entrusted with.

“So, are you going to take it easy on those feet the rest of the day?” Alex asked as she dropped the minister off at the parish house.

Fighting not to smile, Daniel replied, “Yes, I promise to stay off of them as much as I can, Doctor Stone.”

“Good,” Alex said, not responding to his wisecrack.  “Um, are you going to be hearing from Rollie today?”

“It depends on how things go.  He’ll call if anything big happens.  He’s not sure how long this part of the plan is going to take.”

“Well, if he calls, please let me know.”

“I will, Alex.  Thanks for the chauffeur service.”

“Anytime, Daniel.”

The minister watched Alex leave, then went inside.  He headed into the bathroom and took some ibuprofen, then returned to the living room and sat down on the couch with a relieved sigh, happy to be off his feet.  He hadn’t let on how much they’d begun to sting and burn.

Daniel removed his shoes and put his legs up on the cushions, hoping that, by tomorrow, his feet would be well enough to start doing things around the place.  He hated being cooped up like this, especially during such lovely weather.

Laying on the couch, Daniel’s thoughts returned to Rollie.  What happened over the next few days would decide if the Aussie would get his life as Rollie Tyler back.  If everything went well, the organization would be brought down, and Rollie would be only one step away from being able to come out of hiding.  If things didn’t go well, if Irwin O’Brien figured out what was going on, Rollie and Angie would have to run, and Daniel would probably never see them again.

Closing his eyes, the minister sent up a fervent prayer that everything would work out all right, and that, if they didn’t, God would lead Rollie and Angie to safety.