Shaking her head, still feeling unsettled, Brynn folds her arms and leans back. It’s going to be a long ride home no matter how fast Fiona drives.

  Cassie notices the white rectangle on the windshield just as she’s opening the driver’s side door. Curious, she lifts the wiper blade to remove it and realizes it’s an envelope.

  Just like the other day.

  Only that one arrived in the mail, addressed to her.

  This one is blank.

  It’s probably just some kind of menu or maybe a promotion the inn is doing,she tries to reassure herself.

  Still, as she slips behind the wheel, she finds herself looking nervously around the parking lot, almost as if…

  Well, as if she expects to see somebody lurking nearby, watching her.

  Her hand shakes slightly as she opens the envelope flap.

  Calm down. You’re starting to get all freaky again, over nothing.

  She pulls out what looks like a card…

  No, it’s an invitation.

  On the front is a cartoonish guy holding a finger to his lips. A dialogue bubble extending from his head reads, “SHHH!”

  Inside is the line “IT’S A SURPRISE PARTY!” Below that, a series of preprinted headings have been filled out in what looks like old-fashioned typewriter type.

  FOR: Matilda Harrington’s Thirtieth Birthday

  WHEN: October 4

  WHERE: Matilda’s House

  GIVEN BY: A Friend

  Relieved, Cassie smiles. A surprise party. Fiona must be throwing it. Or Brynn.

  She wonders why they opted to leave the invitation on her car rather than hand it to her after Tildy left. They probably put it here earlier, not realizing Tildy would be the first to leave.

  Cassie tucks the invitation into the glove compartment and starts the engine.

  Too bad she won’t be able to make it. October 4 is the day of her wedding shower—to which Tildy was going to be invited.

  Well, she’d better not send her an invitation and risk throwing a wrench into the surprise party plans.

  Uh-oh. Cassie’s mother will be disappointed. She has long known that Tildy’s godfather, “Uncle Troy,” is also known as former Massachusetts governor Troy Allerson. His handsome face is everywhere lately, along with the requisite beautiful, two-decades-younger blonde wife, Lisa, and their beautiful blonde school-age triplets.

  The quintessential Boston Brahmin, Allerson, like Tildy’s father, is Harvard-educated, immensely wealthy, has New England roots dating back centuries, and is politically connected. In fact, he’s rumored to be a future presidential candidate—which is, of course, right up Regina Ashford’s networking alley.

  But the shower is supposed to be about the bride-to-be, not about the mother-of-the-bride-to-be rubbing shoulders with the politically connected Matilda Harrington.

  Cassie’s thoughts are so preoccupied with all she still has to do before her wedding that she’s almost at the Danbury exit before she realizes the invitation lacked a specific time for the party…and RSVP information.

  Probably an oversight.

  Whatever.

  She’ll have to remember to send Tildy something nice for her milestone birthday. What do you get the woman who has everything?

  A bottle of champagne? A bouquet of roses?

  Roses…

  That reminds her, she really has to set up a meeting with the florist.

  And get the shower guest list to Tammy.

  And speak to the caterer.

  And do a million other things, none of which she has time to do. None of which shewants to do.

  I’m sure I’ll feel more excited about it when some of the planning stress is behind me,she tells herself, trying to ignore the increasingly familiar hollow feeling inside.

  Lying should come easily now. Isaac has been doing it long enough. Not just with Kylah, but with Lindsey before she left, and, for that matter, with just about everyone else in his life.

  But it doesn’t come easily at all to unlock the door, paste on a smile, and casually call, “Babe? Is that you?”

  Smoochy the cat, alive and well and napping on the couch, opens one eye, then closes it again.

  “It’s me.” Kylah steps out of the bedroom, hanger in hand. Blonde, blue-eyed, slender, pretty. The kind of girl who never had a problem finding a boyfriend, even in Manhattan.

  If we broke up, she wouldn’t be alone for long,Isaac finds himself thinking.

  He says, casually, “I thought you weren’t coming back till tonight.”

  “I caught an earlier flight. I left you a couple of messages this morning to tell you.”

  “On my cell? Because I didn’t—”

  “No, not on your cell. You’re always home on Saturday mornings.”

  Emphasis on the wordalways, which buzzes his ears like a cloying mosquito. Has she really known him long enough to applyalways to anything about him?

  “I called here,” she goes on. “I wanted to let you know I was coming early, just in case you might be planning to surprise me at the airport.”

  “I was planning to,” he says as smoothly as the saxophone gliding along in the background. “In fact, I was just stopping home before heading over there.”

  “Stopping home to drop off your bag?” she asks, eyeing his duffel.

  “Right.”Here we go…

  “Where have you been? Because, obviously, you haven’t been here the last few days. Your toothbrush and shaving stuff aren’t in the bathroom. Smoochy’s water dish was empty, and so was his dry food. His milk bowl was sour, and there were no empty Purina cans in the garbage.” She pauses for effect, then bookends that detective work with, “Where have you been?”

  Kylah has every right to investigate and ask questions, he reminds himself, after coming home to an empty apartment. She has every right to stand there looking at him with that disillusioned look on her face.

  Lindsey wore that same expression, perpetually, when she began to suspect there was another woman.

  “I’m sorry, babe.” He drops the duffel and crosses the room to hug her.

  She’s stiff in his arms, but she lets him do it.

  Still, she persists, “Where were you?”

  He can’t tell her the truth. Kylah doesn’t know about Rachel. If he has his way, she never will. Look what happened when he told Lindsey.

  “One of our clients up in Boston had a system crash yesterday and I had to drop everything and go.” She knows as little about his business—computers—as he does about hers: pharmaceuticals.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

  “I couldn’t reach you,” he says simply.

  She shrugs, looking thoughtful. Looking as though she thinks it could actually be true…

  After all, she spends little time in her room during conferences, and she always turns off her cell phone when she’s giving seminars.

  Of course, hecould have left her a voice mail…

  But she doesn’t even bring that up.

  Maybe because she desperately wants to believe him, regardless of how credible she actually finds his story.

  “I’m going to go finish unpacking,” she says, slipping from his grasp and heading back toward the bedroom. “Why don’t you do the same thing, and then we’ll go over to Dojo and get some dinner?”

  Dojo. Her favorite. She’s a vegetarian.

  Not Isaac. He’ll take a steak—cold-bloody-rare, Rachel’s preference as well—over hummus, sprouts, and tofu any day.

  But Rachel isn’t here with him now.

  Kylah is, and she’s waiting for him to respond.

  “That sounds good.” He forces a smile.

  “Good.” She returns an equally strained version.

  “I’ll be right there.” He waits until she’s disappeared into the next room before quietly unzipping his duffel bag and feeling around inside.

  Locating the packet of photos, he quickly crosses to the desk in the far corner. They both use it, but she won’t look inside the file drawer anytime soon.

  The moment he has a chance, he’ll return the photos to their usual spot: safely tucked into his own locked drawer in his own apartment near Gramercy Park.

  She doesn’t know about that, either.

  The apartment. Sheknew about it, of course—past tense. She thinks he let it go when he moved in with her. She believes he gave all the furniture to a new entry-level guy at work, and she assumes that Isaac stopped paying rent on that supposedly vacated apartment the month he started paying half of hers.

  Kylah doesn’t know he has no intention of letting the apartment go—that he can’t possibly let it go.

  Kylah doesn’t know about a lot of things.

  And what she doesn’t know, Isaac reminds himself, ignoring the guilty twist in his gut, can’t possibly hurt her.

  Isaac ignores the mocking voice in his head.

  You know, sometimes, things turn out quite differently from what you had in mind.

  Sometimes, you wind up hurting people.

  People you hate.

  And, yes, even people you love.

  PART II

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR TILDY

  CHAPTER 7

  “Do we go trick-or-treating tonight, Mommy?” Caleb asks over breakfast, same as he has every morning this week, thanks to the wide world of kindergarten and his new Halloween-obsessed friend, Tyler Carmichael.

  “Not tonight, sweetie.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow.” Brynn sets a bowl of dry Cheerios in front of Jeremy, sitting in his plastic booster seat, and returns to the cupboard for a sippy cup.

  “Then when?” Caleb dips his spoon into his bowl, shoves some milky Frosted Flakes into his mouth, and continues around a still-crunchy mouthful, “The day after tomorrow? Or…Wednesday?”

  “Todayis Wednesday.”

  He mutters under his breath, “Monday, Thursday, Wednesday…” Then he announces, “You’re right, Mommy! Today is Wednesday. And tomorrow is Tuesday!”

  Her back to him as she pours milk into the sippy cup, Brynn smiles and opts not to correct him again. He’s so pleased with himself, learning the days of the week. He just hasn’t mastered the order yet.

  There’s a lot for a first-time elementary school student to absorb, and Caleb has had his eyes opened to all sorts of new concepts in the past month.

  He’s definitely developed a growing awareness of organized time, even beyond a daily classroom schedule that includes his favorite, “snack time,” and “quiet time,” the probable favorite of his teacher, Mrs. Shimp.

  And he talked so often about the classroom’s monthly wall calendar adorned with seasonal icons that Brynn created a duplicate here at home. To Caleb’s delight, it now hangs on the wall in the kitchen, decorated with stickers she bought at the crafts store.

  For“Oct-oh-boh,” as Caleb calls it, there are autumn leaves and pumpkins, Christopher Columbus and his three ships, candy corn, and costumed children carrying plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets.

  “We still haven’t even figured out what you’re going to be for Halloween yet,” Brynn reminds her son.

  He thinks about it. “Can I be Gary?”

  “Who’s Gary?”

  “He’s SpongeBob’s pet snail.”

  “Oh…Well, isn’t there somebody else you can be?”As in, somebody who comes in a package at Target with a vinyl jumpsuit and plastic mask?

  “No, I want to be Gary. Tyler is going to be SpongeBob’s friend Squidward.”

  “Well then, why don’t you be SpongeBob?”

  “Tyler says that’s boring.”

  “I think SpongeBob is anything but boring.”I also think we need to limit your time with Tyler, Brynn decides as she hands Jeremy the cup.

  “Well, I want to be Gary. You can make me a Gary costume, right, Mommy?”

  She sighs. “Sure, why not?”

  “Good. I’ll go get some tape. You need tape, right?” He pushes back his chair.

  Brynn pushes it back in promptly with a hip check. “Whoa, hang on there, Gar’, we’ve got plenty of time before Halloween. Eat your breakfast.”

  “How many days do I have?”

  “Till Halloween?” She does quick mental math as she sets the sippy cup on Jeremy’s plastic placemat. “About twenty five.” Which means only twenty-three days until her thirtieth birthday. Yikes.

  “Cool beans.”

  Cool beans?

  She suppresses a smile. That’s a new one, and yet another reminder that her firstborn is now living a whole life that doesn’t involve her.

  Lately, Caleb’s vocabulary has been sprinkled with unfamiliar phrases like “crisscross-applesauce,” “Line Leader,” and “morning message.” He takes as much pleasure in his parents’ exaggerated confusion whenever he drops one of those phrases into conversation as he does in patiently defining them.

  “How many days,” he asks now, munching Frosted Flakes, “till we get to go visit Grandpa and Grandma?”

  Now there’s a word she doesn’t like to hear.Grandma . She tries not to cringe when her boys use it, though. Her father insists that they refer to his wife that way, just as the other grandkids—Brynn’s brothers’ children—do.

  For some reason, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone but Brynn.

  Sue shouldn’t get to be Grandma.

  Brynn’s mother should beGrandma …even if she never got to see any of her grandchildren.Angel Grandma in heaven, Brynn calls her with the kids, to differentiate—and she makes sure that she talks to them about her mother a whole lot more than she does about Sue.

  Or about her mother-in-law, for that matter.

  Garth’s mother is a good person—not as warm as Brynn’s family, but she does love the boys. She’s seen them an average of once a year, though…and she’s old. Really old. Snow-white-hair, deep-wrinkles, and-a-walker old.

  “Mommy? How many days till we go?” Caleb prods.

  “To see Grandpa? That’s next weekend.”

  “Grandma, too?”

  “Grandma, too,” she says reluctantly, and tries to smile cheerfully.

  Caleb and Jeremy adore Sue. According to Caleb, she’s “laughy”—meaning, she tells the boys silly jokes that crack them up. She always has a purse full of Hershey’s Kisses and Bazooka Bubblegum. She takes them bowling whenever they visit, and she lets them beat her.