Suzanne nodded. She’d learned a long time ago that her mom disappeared inside her work when she was sculpting with no room for the trivialities of life. And Suzanne got it. Having spent days in the grip of an obsessive creative fever, she finally got it. But that didn’t mean it was without its casualties, that loved ones didn’t live on scraps of time and affection and counted down the days until the fever passed.

“I still can’t believe she’s dropped everything to come here.”

“She’s worried about you guys, too, Dad. She’s trying to get things back on track.”

“I think it’s too late. I think we’ve forgotten how to talk to each other.”

If Suzanne hadn’t been their daughter, if she’d been Winona, she’d have said, Don’t talk.

Get naked. Do that wild animal stuff she could never now unknow they did. But she was not going to counsel her sixty-year-old father to get boinking. Not in so many words anyway.

“So use this time,” Suzanne urged. Her mother reappeared near the arrow pointing to the restroom. “She’s not working on a project; you’re not pandering to clients. You both seem to want the same thing. Get to know each other again. Think of it as a second honeymoon.”

He nodded just as her mother took her seat and Tucker said, “What can I get you to drink?”

Simone smiled at him and asked, “What do you recommend?”

Tucker looked dazzled again, and Suzanne glanced at her father. He was watching the exchange with zero malice or jealousy—in fact, she could see the same admiration in his eyes for her mother that had always been there. A lot of men might have been insecure seeing their wife so openly fascinated by other men, but her father understood Simone St. Michelle better than anyone. He knew she was an artist down to her marrow and everything was grist for the mill and that she studied and flirted with everyone she came across—men and women—and it was about art and artistic expression, not sex.

It was all kinds of madness that the two of them would even contemplate breaking up.

“Tucker has a great cocktail menu, Mom.”

Tucker nodded. “I do a mean piña colada.”

“Oh, hmm.” Simone sat on her barstool. Her mother liked martinis and Chardonnay from the Loire Valley in France, and she didn’t really believe in switching things up. For a creative, she was quite rigid in many ways. “I think I’ll just stick with a martini.”

“Simone.”