“I could make the deliveries, too,” Barbara ventured.

I must look like I’m on my last legs, Shay thought. She nodded and went into her small office, closing the door behind her.

Her desk was piled with telephone messages, bills from food suppliers, catalogs offering fancy ice molds and serving dishes. She sighed as she sat down in her chair. She had her own business now, and she was keeping her head above water financially, which was something in the first year, so where was all the delight, all the fulfillment, all the pride of accomplishment?

Barbara and Louise were laughing in the kitchen, their voices ringing. They sounded happy.

Shay opened a ledger and tried to concentrate on debits and credits, but her mind kept straying back to those two women in the kitchen. She found herself envying them. Why was that?

She tapped the eraser end of her pencil against her chin. She guessed she was like them, in a way—life had certainly thrown her a few curve balls, like Eliott leaving her—and she’d landed on her feet, but she didn’t remember laughing the way Barbara and Louise were laughing now. She remembered fear and uncertainty and a constant struggle, and she remembered leaving Hank with a babysitter on cold winter mornings when she would have given anything to stay home and take care of him herself.

Shay sighed again, laying down her pencil. That was it, that was what she envied. For all the heartache they’d suffered in recent months, Louise and Barbara had had their time with their children. They’d been there for the first giggle, the first step, the first word.

Resolutely, Shay took up her pencil again and forced her eyes to the neat columns written in the ledger. There was no point in bemoaning such things now; she was a career woman, whether she liked it or not. And on that cold, windy November day, she didn’t like it very much.

At noon Alice breezed in with chicken sandwiches from the deli down the street, her cheeks pink from the cold weather. The two women chatted about inconsequential things as they ate, and then Alice went back to her yarn shop upstairs.

Shay marveled at the woman’s energy, at the same time wondering what had happened to her own. She finished balancing the books and then went into the kitchen to help Louise and Barbara box fragrant crab quiche for delivery. Once the boxes had been loaded into the back of her van, Shay confessed that she didn’t think she could make it through the rest of the day and her helpers promised to take up the slack.

She delivered the quiche to the home of a prominent surgeon and his wife and then drove around aimlessly, not wanting to work, not wanting to go back to her empty house. Finally, in desperation, she went to Reese Motors to say hello to Ivy.

The office was in an uproar. Marvin was about to make another commercial and Ivy was simultaneously going over an invoice with a salesman and sparring with Richard Barrett. It gave Shay a pang to see that she’d been so easily replaced.