Once he filed the class grades, Rudy Persaud drove to Kristine's house for a date. He was leaning on a walking stick, Ozlem recalls, the result of a foot injury. "He made it sound like he wanted a relationship," Kathy recalls Kristine later telling her about the day, which had included lovemaking. But Ozlem had picked up a different vibe. "He's adorable," she said, "but he's hiding something."

Rudy Persaud's family is one of the more than 200,000 Hindu families who have flocked to America from Guyana (overwhelmingly to Queens, especially Richmond Hill) since the sixties, during and after the unfriendly regime of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. They left a Caribbean country where they and their forebears had lived since coming there as indentured laborers from India between 1838 and 1917. Queens now has about twenty Hindu temples. Pandits like Rudy's father, having witnessed a full generation of Hindu youth raised on rap music, make pleas for traditional morality and spiritual regeneration.

In mid-June, Kristine told Valerie Santos she felt certain she was pregnant; Valerie brought her a pregnancy test from the health clinic she worked in. When it came out positive, despite the certainty she'd expressed to Valerie, "she was shocked," Kathy says. "It took a day for it to settle in -- she hadn't planned it. But then she said, 'I'm graduating in January, I have a great house, I'm already 28 -- I can do it.' "

Even though she only had sex with him once, Kristine told friends there was no question that Persaud was the baby's father. Still, she was afraid to tell him, Kathy says, but she did not put the task off. She beeped him, and when he called her back, she said she had something important to discuss; could she see him in person? When he said he was busy, she broke the news on the phone. According to the accounts of several of Kristine's friends, he heatedly denied paternity, claiming he'd had a vasectomy (a "partial vasectomy" was the term Kristine told Kathy and Nick he had used). Then, in a subsequent conversation (again, according to what Kristine told friends), he backed away from the vasectomy assertion. He stopped denying paternity. "He started crying -- literally crying," Kathy says Kristine told her. "He started begging her to have an abortion." He told her that he had gotten married. (Apparently, the Turkish "business trip" had been his honeymoon, and his new wife was a young Brahmin woman.) "He said, 'You're going to ruin my life! My parents are going to disown me!' " He said his wife and his parents were going to pay his tuition to dental school. " 'You can't do this to me!' 'This can't happen!' "

Kathy reports, "He talked to her a few more times. Each time, he begged her again to have an abortion -- the baby 'would ruin his life.' She was trying to work it through with him. I said, 'Would you stop already? It's his problem! You don't have to make it right for him.' But she wanted it to be right for him."

She had reasons for this. She wanted his name on the birth certificate so her child wouldn't be embarrassed enrolling for school with a document that did not list a father. The acknowledgment of paternity would also allow her to sue him for child support, something Kathy pressed her to consider. "But Kristine is definitely not about money. Never once did she say, 'Oh, he's gonna be a dentist one day!' " Kristine would only consider suing for child support "later," Kathy says, "if down the road she needed money to safeguard the baby."