Andrea punched another number on her phone and picked up her pen again. She listened for a moment and then she began to smile as the tip of her pen formed a heart on the page.

A moment later, the phone, notebook, and pen were back in Andrea’s neatly organized purse and she was smiling from ear to ear. “Guess what happened?”

“You won the lottery.”

“No, but it’s every bit as good as that. Bill’s phone was unplugged! He didn’t realize it until he got up this morning, and he was an hour late for his first seminar. He stopped by the desk and chewed them out for not giving him his wakeup call, but they said they did and he didn’t answer. They sent a maid up to his room to check it out and she discovered that one of Bill’s pillows had slipped down behind the headboard and knocked his phone cord loose in the middle of the night!”

“So you worried for nothing,” Hannah said, giving her sister a big smile.

“I guess so! I mean, it’s the oldest excuse in the book. You know, I was home all night. There must have been something wrong with the phone, but that’s exactly what happened. At least that’s what Bill told me.”

As Hannah watched, Andrea’s smile faded and she began to chew on her lower lip, something she hadn’t done, to Hannah’s knowledge, since Miss Bruder caught her putting on eye shadow in the girl’s bathroom in fifth grade.

“What do you think, Hannah?” she asked, looking up at her older sister anxiously. “Am I a fool for believing a tired old excuse like that?”

Hannah didn’t even have to think about her answer, since there was only one reply. “Absolutely not,” she said.

“But

what if Bill’s lying to me?”

“What if he is? Do you want to divorce him?”

“No! I love Bill!”

“Then you have to choose to believe him. Maybe he’s lying and your trust will be misplaced, but that’s a whole lot better than not believing him when he’s telling you the truth.”

Andrea thought about that for a long moment. “That makes perfect sense. You’re a wise woman, Hannah.”

“Not really,” Hannah said with a smile. “If I were that wise, I’d be independently wealthy, happily married, and Congress would declare me a national treasure. And so far, I’m none of the above.”

After Andrea had left with the box of cookies for her afternoon meeting, Hannah sat back down at the work island and lingered over the last few sips of coffee in her mug. She could hear faint conversation and an occasional laugh from the coffee shop, but those sounds were perfectly benign. There were no yowls from her thespian tomcat, not even the slightest mew. As far as she could tell, Moishe was behaving perfectly.