I nodded.

“You might not believe it, but you’ve been doing that for me. I don’t know if I’m ready for a relationship either. What I do know is that I want you in my life, and that the thought of losing you – again – would break my heart.”

“Where does that leave us, then?”

“How about we just sit by the fire, you and me, and enjoy tonight. We can be friends tonight and tomorrow and for as long as you’d like. And you keep calling and we keep talking and having coffee when the kids are at art. And like everybody in the world, we’ll just take things one day at a time.”

I stared at her, marveling at her wisdom, and how simple she made it all seem.

“I love you, Emily.”

“I love you, too, Russ.” She gave my hand a squeeze. “It’s going to be fine,” she said earnestly. “Trust me.”

Later that night, I lay awake in bed. Emily and I had lingered for another hour by the fire, letting the meaning of everything that had been said sink in. When I dropped her off at home, I felt the urge to kiss her, but was afraid of upsetting our newfound balance.

Emily sensed my hesitation and simply leaned in for a hug. We held each other for a long time beneath her porch light, and the intimacy of that moment struck me as more real and more meaningful than anything else she could have done.

“Call me tomorrow, okay?” she whispered, releasing me, but not before raising a tender hand to my face.

“I will.”

And with that, she turned and went inside.

The last two weeks of November were some of the happiest in my recent memory. My anniversary passed without incident; neither Vivian nor I mentioned it when she FaceTimed with London, and it wasn’t until after the call had ended that I even remembered it at all. At work, I was proving to be hugely productive on behalf of my new clients. London returned from Atlanta on Sunday night, and though she’d had a good time, she slipped back into her routine without a fuss. I spoke to Emily every day, and worked out a deal with Claude to buy her painting, which I then mounted in the family room. I saw Marge, Liz, and my parents the following weekend, the day after Marge and Liz had met with the fertility specialist. While we were all seated in the family room together, they told my parents about their plans.

“It’s about time!” my mom cried, jumping up to hug them both.

“You’ll be good parents,” my dad added. He sounded as gruff as always before he embraced Marge and Liz in turn. With hugs from my dad as rare as solar eclipses, I know they were touched.

Through Taglieri, I learned that Vivian wanted London in Atlanta for the Thanksgiving weekend. Actually, she wanted London beginning on Wednesday evening, through Sunday. I wasn’t happy about that, but again, the every-other-weekend pattern just happened to nail every holiday. Vivian arrived on Wednesday to pick up London in the limo and whisk her off to the jet again. As I watched them pull away, I thought about how quiet the house would be without my daughter for the next four days.

The house was quiet that weekend. Because no one, not even me, was there at all.

Instead, that was the weekend when once more, my world began to collapse around me.

But this time, it was even worse.

How did it happen?

Like it always seems to happen: seemingly without warning.

But, of course, in retrospect there had been warnings all along.

It was Saturday morning, November twenty-eighth, two days after Thanksgiving. I’d spent the previous evening with Emily, dining out and visiting the Charlotte Comedy Zone. Once again, I was tempted to kiss her at the end of the evening, but settled instead for another long and glorious hug, one that confirmed my desire to keep her in my life for a long, long time. My feelings for her were already displacing thoughts of Vivian in a way that I hadn’t anticipated, and that I hoped would continue. I felt undeniably lighter and more positive about the future than I had in months, if not years.

The call came in on early Saturday morning. It wasn’t yet six a.m. when the house phone began to ring, and the sound itself was ominous. My cell phone was on airplane mode, and no one would call the house at that hour unless something terrible had happened. I knew even before I picked up the phone that it was my mother on the other end, and I knew that she was calling to tell me that my father was in the hospital. He’d had a heart attack. Or something worse. I knew she would be frantic, probably in tears.

But it wasn’t my mom on the other end of the line.

It was Liz, calling about my sister.

Marge, she told me, had been admitted to the hospital.

She’d been coughing up blood for an hour.

CHAPTER 23

No

When Marge was eleven, she and my mom were involved in a car accident.

Back then, my mom was still driving one of those huge, wood-paneled station wagons. Because they were from a different generation, my parents weren’t accustomed to wearing seatbelts, and as a family we rarely did.

Marge liked seatbelts even less than I did. Whereas I simply forgot to put mine on when I hopped in the car – I was still young, remember – Marge deliberately chose not to wear them, because it allowed her more freedom to punch or pinch me whenever the mood struck. Which, I might add, was way too often.

I wasn’t in the car that day, and though I’m not sure how accurate my recollections are, it seems the accident was no fault of my mom’s. She wasn’t speeding, the road wasn’t busy, and she was passing through an intersection while the light was green. Meanwhile, a teenager – probably fiddling with the radio or scarfing down McDonald’s French fries – blew through the red light and broadsided the rear of the station wagon.