Nice.

But now I wanted the real stuff.

“Spill,” I said.

He hesitated. “All right, since you really want to know. I knew you’d get it out of me eventually. One of the main reasons Adrienne and I split up was because she didn’t want kids. And I did.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably. “It was always an issue between us. And I knew it always would be. We had two very different visions of the future, and neither of us was willing to compromise. Not that there is a compromise when it comes to the issue of children. I mean, you either have them or you don’t. And having a family was too important to me.”

I was quiet, finally.

“Look. Adrienne and I simply weren’t meant to be.”

I bit the inside of my lip. “Why?”

“Because you and I are meant to be.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, rolling his eyes, like I was one of his annoying ninth graders. “Because I said so.”

Chastened, ashamed, pouty, I said nothing. My silence was my apology.

Or so I hoped.

“Now apologize,” Donald said.

I shrugged.

“I mean it. Apologize.”

I shrugged again.

“Out loud.” He leaned against the sink and pulled me toward him; I stared into his chest and played with the buttons of his shirt.

“I’m sorry.”

“For?” He stuck his finger under my chin and lifted my head so I would have no place to hide.

“For . . . ?” I had no idea, really.

“For imagining the worst. For your Gloom and Doom. For not believing in me. In us.”

I looked into his eyes—clear, guileless, as trusting as a child’s—and felt enormous relief. Of course Donald loved me; of course he wasn’t going to go back to Adrienne. How crazy was I to have ever thought otherwise.

So I said out loud that I was sorry.

For real, this time.

He nodded. And in that split second, he moved on: forgiving me completely and forgetting the whole episode.

“Now, cut the shit,” he said, and turned toward one of the greasy counters. “We have artichokes to butterfly.”

15

When Adrienne arrived at eight-fifteen—fashionably late—she couldn’t have looked more respectable. Gone were the tight jeans, the low-cut midriff-baring T-shirt, the push-up bra, and in their place was a perfectly simple and very understated (though tightfitting) ensemble of slate gray trousers and sweater: Jil Sander?

Perfect timing.

Coming into the house and air-kissing her way past me to a full embrace with Donald, she was the picture of sophistication, elegance, and restraint. And sly manipulation (hadn’t Donald himself admitted just hours before that she was “always up to something”?).

Donald’s eyes pinned me. My reports of Adrienne’s sluttiness, it seemed, had been greatly exaggerated. And with that glance, the reassuring effects of the moment we’d had in the kitchen earlier in the afternoon all but disappeared. So much for faith and trust.

Crowded there with the two of them, uncomfortably, in the foyer, inhaling her perfectly delicate perfume (which I recognized: it was, of course, French—Annick Goutal’s Eau d’Hadrien—what else? ), I hated her guts.