The first had been a summer crush—the other reason (besides the Knicks) that she’d headed Stateside. When they met, Tom was an American clerking for a British barrister and Rachel had just finished her undergraduate stint at Oxford. They’d tried the long-distance thing and that had gone well enough, so Rachel had applied to the graduate journalism program at Columbia and gotten in. The pressure of Tom’s looming boards and landing the proper job with the right firm had not been their undoing—the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder was validated when seeing each other every day on the same continent resulted in Rachel realizing that Thomas Nelson, soon-to-be-Esquire, was nothing but an old-fashioned bore.

Charles Kellerman had been a completely different experiment. Rachel should have known the relationship was doomed from the start. Older by a couple of decades, divorced for five years, and with two teens closer to Rachel in age than their father, Charlie was hardly a snooze. A heart surgeon who literally saved the life of every person who ended up on his table, Charlie knew only one route and that was (as Don Henley sings) in the fast lane. It was ski races down the Vermont slopes in the winter and regattas on the Sound when summer came. Charlie had swept Rachel off her feet and she’d had to strap herself in to try and keep up.

It didn’t help that her mother was so horrified that Rachel had taken up with a married man (“though I kept telling her he’d been divorced for five years”) that Allison wouldn’t discuss it. Though initially infatuated by a lifestyle she’d never known, it hadn’t taken Rachel very long after she moved in with Charlie (a week) to realize this wasn’t for her—he had already lived a full life that she wanted to experience with someone from the beginning.

“Meaning children?” asked Frankel.

“Building something together, at least.”

Hearing Rachel’s story brought to mind the fact that he and Julia hadn’t had kids. He’d often wondered if it were a purposeful or subconscious decision. Whatever the truth, he would never have built something substantial with Julia.

He had ended up telling Rachel as much and she raised her glass.

“Here’s to there still being time,” she toasted.

When they’d emerged from the restaurant at two in the morning, the rain had stopped and the wintry sky was clear enough to see a few stars and a full moon shining down on the city. As a result, there were plenty of cabs.

“I could walk you home,” offered Frankel.

“It’s forty blocks from here.”

“I’m up for it if you are.” He nodded at the holiday light display hanging off the lamps on Fifty-Seventh Street. “It’s a special time in the city, particularly when you have it to yourself.”