She didn’t know what to say to that. She understood the logic behind what he was suggesting, but something about sending all that stuff to Max felt weird.

When the silence between them started to stretch out a tad too much, he said, “Or, you know there is another option.”

She snorted. “Let me take a wild guess. You, in the spirt of charity, are prepared to fly across the ocean and help me out with this.”

“Well, don’t sell yourself short; I would hardly call it charity.”

She laughed. It was actually tempting. Or it would be if he was here. And not her best friend’s fiancée’s best friend.

He laughed, too. Because of course he had been joking. “When are you going to your parents’ house? How do you get there? How is the fruitcake?”

“That’s a lot of questions. Let’s see.” She looked at her watch. “I’ll leave in about three hours. It’s not as long a journey as you might think. I take a bus to a station in Queens where I catch the Long Island Railroad, and my dad picks me up on the other end. And the fruitcake seems fine to me—I’ve been dousing it in extra booze—but my mom will be able to tell.”

“I have a feeling you might be able to fool her.”

“Your feeling is incorrect.”

“Truly. When she and I were speaking after the ballet, we were talking about how I don’t like Christmas. She wasn’t having it. She was listing all the things there are to love about Christmas, and one of them was fruitcake. I said, oh yes, I’d seen yours, that you’d been so hard at work on it for weeks.”

“You told my mother you’d seen my fruitcake?”

“What’s wrong with that? Is that an American idiom for something untoward?”

She laughed. “No. I’m just thinking about how my mom is going to get on my case about you knowing such intimate details about my life.”

“Intimate details about your fruitcake? Are you sure that isn’t American slang of some sort?”

She couldn’t help but laugh again. “You know what I mean. Vince left a year and a half ago, and she’s so angry at him. She wants me to move on. Well, she’d probably prefer if I actually got divorced first, but that’s taking long enough that I think she’s over it.”

“Why is that taking so long?”

“We’re fighting about Max.”

“Well, I have been called a homewrecker on more than one occasion.”