ROSE DIDN'T COME around. And it wasn't just that she didn't want to share Carrie.

All-or-nothing Rose could never understand what her daughter saw in laid-back Howie. “Is there anything, anywhere, he's passionate about?” Rose demanded soon after Thanksgiving. “Anything he'd make a sacrifice for?”

But Howie wasn't into sacrifice—not if he could find a way around it. And he definitely wasn't into guilt. Unfortunately, Carrie couldn't shake hers. They'd be in bed eating Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, watching Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston, on Law and Order, and Carrie would hear a sweet, familiar voice in her head. “Aren't you being just a little selfish, love?” a phantom Rose would ask. “Just a little self-indulgent?” At other times the phantom would be more militant. “At the very least, you could be reading a good book!” it would say. Later that day, in her office at the shelter, the real Rose would say, oh so casually, “Don't you think Howie's a little … well… shallow?”

Oddly, Howie understood Rose. “Your mother is a high-wire act,” he said. “She thinks I'm boring. In her way, she's right—”

“No, she's not,” Carrie broke in, eager to reassure, but he didn't need it.

“Sure I am—up against someone like Rose Manning.” Then he grinned. “But the world needs boring people. Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone was as intense as you and your mother?”

“I am not like my mother! How can you say that?”

He rubbed the top of her head with his chin. “You don't know what you are, sweetheart. Not yet.”

“My track record says I'm not much.”

“Never discount genetics. You come from women who are major overachievers.”

Not that Howie cared if she overachieved or underachieved. He just wanted to be happy with her. And that was the problem.

“I don't know if I can be happy,” Carrie told Zoe in a desperate late-night phone call. “I wasn't trained for it. And besides, who says being happy is the way to go? Shouldn't we care more about what we do while we're here on earth and the footprints we leave behind?”

“Nah,” said her best friend.

But the doubts and fears grew worse.

“Relax, Carrie, honey” Howie said.

But she didn't know how to do that either. When they'd been dating for a year, Howie had asked her to marry him, and she'd said yes, because she couldn't say no. For several months she'd floated around Manhattan in a little bubble of what she recognized was happiness—it seemed you didn't need any training for it, after all, just the right guy. But then she'd started to feel the old familiar locked-in feeling. The feeling that she was going to fail at something else. And this time Howie, who was way too good for her, would fail along with her.