almost as soon as the morning paper hit the doorstep.
“Yo, Mom,” Oliver said. He had a bandanna tied around his forehead and he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with his favorite cartoon character on the front. “Kid power!” he whooped, thrusting a plastic sword into the air.
Ashley rolled her beautiful Tyler-brown eyes. “What a dope,” she said. She was eight and had a lofty view of the world.
“Be careful, Oliver,” Amy fretted good-naturedly. “You’ll put out someone’s eye with that thing.” She put the waffles on plates and set them down on the table, then went to the refrigerator for the orange juice. “Look, you two, I might be home late tonight. If I can’t get away, Aunt Charlotte will pick you up at camp.”
Charlotte was Ty’s sister and one of Amy’s closest friends.
Ashley was watching Amy pensively as she poured herself a cup of coffee and joined the kids at the table.
“Were you talking to yourself last night, Mom?” the child asked in her usual straightforward way.
Amy was glad she was sitting down because her knees suddenly felt shaky. “I was probably just dreaming,” she said, but the memory of Tyler standing there in their bedroom was suddenly vivid in her mind. He’d seemed so solid and so real.
Ashley’s forehead crumpled in a frown, but she didn’t pursue the subject any further.
Fortunately.
After Amy had rinsed the breakfast dishes, put them into the dishwasher and driven the kids to the park, where camp was held, she found herself watching for Tyler—waiting for him to come back.
When she’d showered and put on her best suit, a sleek creation of pale blue linen, along with a matching patterned blouse, she sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the telephone for what must have been a full five minutes. Then she dialed her best friend’s number.
“Debbie?”
“Hi, Amy,” Debbie answered, sounding a little rushed. “If this is about lunch, I’m open. Twelve o’clock at Ivar’s?”
Amy bit her lower lip for a moment. “I can’t, not today…I have appointments all morning. Deb—”
Debbie’s voice was instantly tranquil, all sense and sound of hurry gone. “Hey, you sound kind of funny. Is something wrong?”
“It might be,” Amy confessed.
“Go on.”
“I dreamed about Tyler last night, and it was ultra-real, Debbie. I wasn’t lying in bed with my eyes closed—I was standing up, walking around—we had an in-depth conversation!”
Debbie’s voice was calm, but then, she was a professional in the mental health field. It would take more than Amy’s imaginary encounter with her dead husband to shock this woman. “Okay. What about?”
Amy was feeling sillier by the moment. “It’s so dumb.”
“Right. So tell me anyway.”
“He said I was going to meet—this friend of his—Harry somebody. Who names people Harry in this day and age? I’m supposed to fall in love with this guy, marry him and have two kids.”
“Before nightfall?” Debbie retorted, without missing a beat.
“Practically. Ty implied that I’ve been holding up some celestial plan by keeping to myself so much!”
Debbie sighed. “This is one that could be worked out in a fifteen-minute segment of the Donahue show, Ryan. You’re a healthy young woman, and you haven’t been with a man since Ty, and you’re lonely, physically and emotionally. If you want to talk this out with somebody, I could give you a name—”
Amy was already shaking her head. “No,” she interrupted, “that’s all right. I feel foolish enough discussing this with my dearest friend. I don’t think I’m up to stretching out on a couch and telling all to some strange doctor.”
“Still—”
“I’ll be all right, Deb,” Amy broke in again, this time a little impatiently. She didn’t know what she’d wanted her friend to say when she told her about Tyler’s “visit,” but she felt let down. She hung up quickly and then dashed off to her first meeting of the day.
Amy often marveled that she’d made such a success of her business, especially since she’d dropped out of school when Tyler passed the bar exam and devoted herself entirely to being a wife and mother. She’d been totally happy doing those things and hadn’t even blushed to admit to having no desire to work outside the home.
After Tyler’s death, however, the pain and rage had made her so restless that staying home was impossible. She’d alternated between fits of sobbing and periods of wooden silence, and after a few weeks she’d gone numb inside.
One night, very late, she’d seen a good-looking, fast-talking man on television, swearing by all that was holy that she, too, could build a career in real estate trading and make a fortune.
Amy had enough money to last a lifetime, between Tyler’s life insurance and savings and her maternal grandmother’s trust fund, but the idea of a challenge, of building something, appealed to her. In fact, on some level it resurrected her. Here was something to do, something to keep her from smothering Ashley and Oliver with motherly affection.
She’d called a toll-free number and ordered a set of tapes and signed up for a seminar, as well.
The tapes arrived and Amy absorbed them. The voice was pleasant and the topic complicated enough that she had to concentrate, which meant she had brief respites from thinking about Tyler. Under any other circumstances, Amy would not have had the brass to actually do the things suggested by the tapes and seminar, but all her normal inhibitions had been frozen inside her, like small animals trapped in a sudden Ice Age.
She’d started buying and selling and wheeling and dealing, and she’d been successful at it.
Still, she thought miserably as she drove toward her meeting, Tyler had been right, she wasn’t happy. Now that the numbness had worn off, all those old needs and hurts were back in full force and being a real estate magnate wasn’t fulfilling them.
Harry Griffith smiled grimly to himself as he took off his headphones and handed them to his copilot, Mark Ellis. “Here you are, mate,” he said. “Bring her in for me, will you?”
Mark nodded as he eagerly took over the controls, and Harry left the cockpit and proceeded into the main section of the private jet. Often it was filled with business people, hangers-on and assorted bimbos, but that day Harry and Mark were cutting through the sky alone.
He went on to the sumptuous bedroom, unknotting his silk tie with one hand as he closed the door with the other. He’d had a meeting in San Francisco, but now he could change into more casual clothes.
With a sigh Harry pulled open a few drawers and took out a lightweight cable-knit sweater and jeans, still thinking of his friend. He hadn’t been present for Ty’s services two years before. He’d been in the outback, at one of the mines, and by the time he’d returned to Sydney and learned about Tyler’s death, it
