“Thank you, thank you!” she whispered, and threw her arms around his neck. He had done exactly what she had hoped he would do in the beginning. But this was even better. It wasn’t just an objective review of her menu and wine list, it was also written from the heart and explained the philosophy behind it, and he had even let people know when she was planning to reopen. It was the best of all possible worlds. And then she suddenly worried about something as she hugged him and pulled away to look at him. “You didn’t get in trouble for this, when you told them about us, I mean?” Mike shook his head, smiling at her, ecstatic that she was so pleased with it. He had hoped she would be. He owed her that. His earlier review had been unnecessarily bitchy, but the menu had annoyed him, even if he did think she was the sexiest woman who had ever lived. He thought she had taken the easy way out. But she hadn’t. April always took the high road — in everything. She was that kind of woman. Instead of just easy food or hard food, she served people both kinds and wasn’t afraid to do it. He believed every word in his review.

“It’s all true,” he said simply. “Truth is the best defense for anything. April, people all over New York talk about your restaurant. It’s really something to be proud of, and when you open again, it will be even better. This will give you a little time to try new dishes, add some new things to the menu. Consider it maternity leave. Other women take three months off to have a baby, or even six. Enjoy it, play with your menu, watch your dream be reborn again. You have nothing to worry about. And I had nothing to apologize to my editor for, except my first stupid, ignorant, utterly pretentious review. I owed this one to you.” She sat cross-legged on his bed, beaming at him.

“This is the best gift you could have given me,” she said, deeply moved by his generosity and the eloquence of his review.

“No, that is,” he said, pointing at her belly, “and it’s the best one you could have given me, even though I was stupid about that too. When are we getting married, by the way?” he asked with interest.

“What about Memorial Day weekend? That gives my mother two weeks to do it when she gets back. Although knowing her, she could throw it together in five minutes. And it’s a week before my due date.” It was a little tight, but it made sense to her.

“What if the baby comes early?” he asked, looking worried. He really wanted to marry her before the baby came. He thought it was important to do that.

“We’ll bring it to the wedding,” April said simply, and he laughed at her. She was quite a woman. He had realized it when he met her, but then dropped the ball along the way. Fortunately, she hadn’t. April never dropped the ball. She grabbed it and ran with it, in everything she did. Even now after the fire. “How many people do you want at the wedding?” She had forgotten to ask him before, and her mother had emailed her to ask.

“Just me and you. I don’t want my parents, I haven’t seen them in ten years and they’re too drunk to care.” He had never heard from them again since his call. He was ready to let them go forever and his therapist agreed with him, they were a lost cause. He wanted to look forward, not backward, to the life he was going to share with April. “I’d like my friend Jim and his wife. He was a fan of this relationship and the baby even before I was.” They had been to the restaurant twice before the fire and April liked them both very much.

“Can we go on a honeymoon?” she asked, looking like a young girl, and he laughed at her.

“Yeah, at the hospital. You can’t go away now, silly. Why don’t we stay at a hotel for the weekend, and pretend we’re not in New York? Or pretend we are and enjoy it.”

“I’d really like to go to Italy with you,” she said, looking disappointed. They could go to all the restaurants they both knew and loved and talked about.

“Why don’t we go in August, before you reopen?”

“What’ll we do with the baby?” She was planning to nurse, and since she could have it with her at the restaurant for the first months, it wasn’t a problem.

“Take it with us. We can get him used to great food right from the beginning,” he teased her. “Sounds like a plan to me. Now all we have to do is get married, have the baby, and reopen the restaurant.” He made it sound like a snap of the fingers and one, two, three, and April laughed at him.

“I have a feeling none of it will be that easy,” she said, looking worried. “The wedding maybe, thanks to my mother. Getting the restaurant open again is a project, and I’m feeling nervous about getting this thing out of me,” she said, pointing to the basketball on her lap, and he nodded. It looked huge to both of them. She was a tall woman but narrow-framed, and it seemed impossible to believe that anything that enormous could emerge with ease. “Are you still planning to be there?” she asked, sounding anxious. He said he would, but she knew he was scared. If he was not there, she knew Ellen would be.

Mike nodded, looking pensive. “I think so. I want to be,” although it seemed scary to him too, and watching April in agony would be upsetting. She didn’t talk about it, but he knew that as the time grew closer, she was as worried as he was. The logistics of it looked damn near impossible to him, and to her too.

They talked about their trip to Italy as April cooked him dinner. She whipped up a primavera pasta from things he had in his refrigerator and a frisée salad with bacon and poached eggs. By the time they went to bed that night, they had agreed on Florence, Siena, Venice, Rome, Bologna, and Arezzo, where April knew a restaurant she insisted they couldn’t miss. They agreed to put off Paris for another trip, since everything was closed in August. And as they piled into bed, after she took another shower to get the smell of smoke off her, she put her arms around him and thanked him again for the great review. He was relieved that he had done it. He had wanted to for a long time, as a gift to her. And this seemed like the right time.

“Larry thinks I should look into opening a second restaurant now,” she said as he turned off the light and she yawned, and Mike looked at her with horror.

“One woman, one restaurant, and one baby are all I can handle right now,” he said honestly, and that was already a lot for him. He had come a long way in the past four months, farther than he ever thought he could. “Could we settle for that for the moment?” She nodded, smiling at him, grateful for all they had. And she wasn’t ready to open a second restaurant either. She had enough to do rebuilding the one she had.

“Do you think we’ll ever have more children?” she asked, as she lay in bed next to him. She couldn’t imagine how Ellen managed three, and she had been an only child, but she liked the relationship between her two half-sisters, and sometimes envied them that.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Let’s get this one out first.” It seemed like a big project to him. He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him. She was a woman who climbed mountains and was willing to conquer the world. Mike was a lot more easily daunted, but he was following her example and learning a lot from her. As he held her, he could feel the baby kick him, hard. It was difficult to believe that a month from now, they’d be parents. He was excited by the prospect, but if he thought about it too much, it still scared him to death. April was a lot calmer about it. And as he held her in his arms, thinking of all that lay ahead for them, he drifted off to sleep, and April looked at him and smiled. As it turned out, their crazy one-night stand had turned out to be a very good thing.

Chapter 19


After the initial shock of the fire at April’s restaurant, and being reassured that they weren’t needed at home, Jack and Valerie had a fantastic time in Paris. They both loved staying at the Ritz and had stayed there before. They enjoyed the same restaurants, although Valerie introduced him to some new ones, and April told them about others that were intimate and unknown. Paparazzi took their photographs occasionally as they went in and out of the hotel. Neither of them was major news in Europe, but they were both well-known. And they loved being with each other.

Jack was astonishingly generous with her, and bought her a gold bracelet, and a fur jacket she saw and fell in love with. He surprised her with it at the hotel, after saying he had to go out and get some air. Life with him was a constant series of thoughtful, loving gestures, and Valerie was discovering a side of herself she had never known existed. For once in her life, she wasn’t thinking about work, but only her man.

They played “what if” games that Jack invented sometimes at dinner. If the network asked her to choose between him and her job, just how much did she love him, and what would she do?

“That’s easy,” she teased him. “I’d keep my show, and meet you on the sly in cheap motels in New Jersey.” And what if he had to give up sportscasting for her, or his place in the Hall of Fame, would he do it?

“Sportscasting, yes. Hall of Fame, not so easy. I worked my ass off to be in it in the first place,” he said sensibly. And there were times when they both talked seriously about what they wanted to do about their jobs as they got older. They were in an industry that prized youth.

“Barbara Walters has always been my role model,” Valerie said to him. “She has stayed on top for her entire career, and never slipped for a minute. She had to compete with men, her peers, younger women, and she’s still the best and the biggest in the business, and what’s more I really like her.”

“Is that what you want? To stay in the business forever? It’s a hell of a fight to stay on top the way she has, and I’m not so sure it’s worth it,” Jack said, as they finished dinner in a cozy restaurant on the Left Bank that April had recommended. Their joint favorite was still the Voltaire, on the quais along the Seine, but that night they hadn’t been able to get a table. Everyone in Paris wanted to go there, and only the cream of “le tout Paris” got in.

“I used to think so,” Valerie said in answer to his question about staying in the business. “What else is there?” And then she corrected herself, “Or what else was there before you? April is all grown up and has her own life, now more so than ever, with a restaurant, a husband, and a baby. What am I supposed to do with the next thirty years, if I’m that lucky? Or even the next ten? I always thought work was the answer. But I thought that when I was thirty too. I guess I’m just a workhorse. But I have to admit, sometimes now I’m not so sure.” She was happy with him, happier than she ever had been, but she also couldn’t give up a career for him, nor would she want to. What if either of them decided to move on, or things didn’t work out for them? It could always happen. Sometimes things changed, even in the best of relationships, and this was just the beginning. She wasn’t willing to put her career on the line for him, and he knew it. She had worked too hard to get there to risk it for any man, and she didn’t think she should. But she was willing to accommodate him to the best of her ability, within the framework of how she worked and lived.

He asked her a surprise question then. It had crossed her mind once or twice, but she didn’t have the answer to that either. “Do you suppose we should think about getting married eventually?” They were both old enough to know what they wanted, and who. She had always thought she wanted to get married again, but now she wasn’t as sure. She loved him, without question, but did they need the papers to go with it? They weren’t going to have children. They both had interesting careers. They loved each other. But just how much did they need to prove? And to whom?

“I don’t know. What do you think?” she said, smiling shyly at him. It was a big subject, and there was still the factor, and always would be, that she was older than he. What if he fell in love with a younger woman one day? She didn’t want the heartbreak of divorce again, especially at her age. Losing him would have devastated her. “I’m of two minds about it. Basically, I believe in the institution and what it stands for. I always did. But at this point in our lives, sometimes I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Do we really need the paperwork to tell others what we feel? And it’s like any other contract, the day one of you wants to get out of it, there’s nothing you can do to keep them there. People who want to get out, do, and then it’s a giant mess.” He didn’t disagree.