“Mother has decided she wants to buy a place in the country—I suggested it. I'm going to help her find a house and then we're going to decorate it together. I think she's hoping it'll bring us closer together. I can keep her occupied for six months, but work is the only life she has, and she's already been away from it for a while. After six more months she's going to be crazy to get in front of an audience again. That's when I'm going to give her the new musical you're going to write for her. I think The Lady would be a great title.”

He shook his head. “I can't do it that fast. I have a job and I write at night.”

She had a checkbook in her purse. She'd debated long and hard about asking him if she could lend him the money he'd need to get him through six months. But now, looking at him, she knew she couldn't do it. He'd been too poor for too long to accept a handout without resenting it—and resenting the giver. She wanted him indebted to her but she didn't want him to dislike her. Besides, he was already starting to come up with a way out on his own.

“Hershemer's will let me have the time off,” he thought out loud. “They'll hold my job for me. And there are a couple of people who owe me some money …” Rose could see him doing math in his head. “I'll make it work. I'll have to. I'm not going to blow this.”

Rose knew he wouldn't blow it. After all, he was the extraordinary man she'd been waiting for. His show was going to be a smash and he was going to be the toast of Broadway—surely God would let all of that happen—and he would realize that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And then he would realize that he couldn't live without her.

“Thank you, Rose,” he said.

Antoinette Landovich, eat your heart out! she thought. I'll never lose him now.

Six months later she almost did.

*   *   *

BOBBY WAS GOING to be under pressure; writing an entire musical in six months was almost impossible. Knowing that, Rose told him, “I don't expect to see you at Rockefeller Center anymore. And I know you're not going to have time to have coffee every morning.”

The look he gave her was one of pure relief. “You're an angel!” he said, and he hugged her. She told herself she wasn't disappointed.

She gave Bobby her phone number written on a piece of her stationery. “So you can get in touch with me,” she told him. “I realized that in all the time we've known each other, I've never done this.” She waited for him to return the favor.

Instead he stared unhappily at the piece of paper in his hand. She realized she'd gone too fast.