After Harvard undergraduate, he had eventually moved on to Harvard Business School, and had been totally enamored with venture capital. He'd found a job the minute he graduated, and in the eight years since he had made fortunes for several of his clients.

“And what about you?” she had asked quietly, watching his eyes as they walked along the beach at sunset. “There's more to life than venture capital and Wall Street.” She wanted to get to know him better. She had just had the most exciting weekend of her life, and she hadn't even slept with him. She wanted to know more about Sam Parker before they disappeared back to their own lives after they left California.

“Is there more to life than Wall Street?” he laughed, slipping an arm around her. “No one's ever told me. What is there, Alex?” He had stopped walking and looked down at her. He was enormously taken with her, even then, but a little bit afraid to show it. Her long red hair had been flying in the breeze, her green eyes looked deep into his and made him feel a stirring he had never felt before. In some ways, it scared him.

“What about people? Relationships?” She knew he had never been married, but she didn't know more than that. She assumed, just looking at him, and watching his easy style, that he must have had hundreds of girlfriends.

“No time for those,” Sam teased, as he pulled her a little closer and they continued walking. “I'm too busy.”

“And too important?” she asked pointedly, fearing that he might be conceited. He certainly had every reason to be, but so far she hadn't seen it.

“Who said that? I'm not important, I'm just having a good time.”

“Everyone knows who you are,” she said matter-of-factly, “even here. Los Angeles, New York …Silicon Valley, for sure …Tokyo …where else? Paris? London? Rome? It's a pretty big picture.”

“And not exactly a correct one. I work hard, that's all. So do you. No big deal.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled down at her, but they both knew there was a lot more to it than he admitted.

“I don't fly to California in my clients' planes, Sam. My clients come to me by cab. If they're lucky. The rest of them come by subway.” She grinned and he laughed.

“Okay, so mine are luckier. Maybe I am too. Maybe I won't be lucky forever. Like my father.”

“Are you afraid of that happening to you too? Losing everything?” It was an intriguing side to him, and clearly a motivating factor.

“Maybe. But he was a fool … a nice fool …but a fool. I think it killed him when my mother died. He gave up. He lost his grip, he was like that when she was sick too. He loved her so much that he just couldn't handle it when she went. It killed him.” He had long since decided that he would never let that happen to him. He would never love anyone enough to let them pull him down with them.

“It must have been awful for you,” Alex said sympathetically, “you were so young.”

“You grow up fast when you're the only one you have,” he said soberly, and then he smiled sadly, “or maybe you never do. My friends say I'm still a kid. I think I like that. It keeps me from getting too serious. There's no point getting too serious in life. It's no fun when you start to do that.” But Alex was, she was serious about her work, and her life. She had lost her parents by then too, although less dramatically than Sam had. But in her case, it had sobered her, made her feel more responsible. She had to be more grown up, more alert about her career, more intense about her work. It was as though she felt obligated to live up to their expectations of her, even now that they were gone. Her father had been an attorney too, and he had been so happy when she'd gone to law school. And she wanted to be the best attorney she could now, for him, even though he wasn't there to see her do it.

They were both only children, they both had important careers, they both had a lot of friends, which for both of them replaced family in some ways, though Alex spent a lot of time with friends of her parents', and families of her friends from law school. Sam's friends were mostly bachelors, people he worked with, clients, or women he'd gone out with.

He had kissed Alex for the first time on their walk down the beach in Malibu, and he had slept most of the way back to New York, with his head on her shoulder. She had looked down at him pensively, thinking that he looked like a long, lanky boy as he lay there beside her, but she was also thinking how much she liked him. Too much probably. She wondered if she would ever hear from him again, if this was a beginning or an interlude for him. It was hard to tell with Sam, and he had admitted that there was a young off-Broadway actress he was currently going out with.

“How come you didn't take her to L.A.?” Alex had asked candidly, shy, but never afraid to ask important questions. It was too much a part of her makeup not to.

“She was busy,” he said honestly, “and I thought it would be more interesting to get to know you.” He hesitated and then turned to Alex with a smile that melted her heart in spite of her best efforts not to let it. “To tell you the truth, I didn't ask her. I knew she had rehearsals all weekend, and she hates baseball. And I really wanted to be with you.”

“Why?” Alex had no idea how beautiful she was when she asked him.

“You're the smartest girl I've ever met … I like talking to you. You're bright and you're exciting, and you're not exactly hard to look at.”

He had kissed her again when he dropped her off at her apartment, but there was no commitment in the kiss, no promise. It was quick and casual, and in a moment the cab was gone, and Alex felt strangely let down as she walked into her apartment with her suitcase. She had had a wonderful time, but she figured that he was in a hurry to get back to his off-Broadway girlfriend. It had been wonderful, but she knew it didn't mean anything. It was just another fun weekend in the life of Sam Parker. She didn't think there was much room in his life for Alex Andrews.

Until he sent her a dozen red roses at the office the next day, and called her that afternoon and asked her to dinner. Their romance began in earnest after that, and in spite of the heavy cases she had to prepare, she could hardly concentrate on her work during her four-month courtship with Sam.

He asked her to marry him on Valentine's Day, almost four months to the day of the first time he'd taken her out to dinner. She was twenty-six by then and Sam was thirty-three. They got married in June, in a small church in Southampton, with two dozen of their closest friends in attendance. Neither of them had families, but their friends provided the warmth and celebration to make it an extraordinary day. They had gone to Europe on their honeymoon, and stayed in hotels that Alex had only read of. They went to Paris and Monaco, and spent a romantic weekend in Saint-Tropez. Sam had a client who was dating a minor movie star there, so they had a fabulous time, and went to a party on a yacht and sailed to Italy and back by morning.

They went to San Remo, and then on to Tuscany, Venice, Florence, Rome, and then they had flown to stay with a client of his in Athens, and then to London for the last few days, where they went to Annabel's, and all of Sam's favorite restaurants and nightspots. They looked at antiques, and jewelry at Garrard's, and he bought her all kinds of fun clothes in Chelsea, though she said she had no idea where she'd wear them, surely not to the office. It was the perfect honeymoon, and they had never been happier than when they got back to New York, and she moved into his apartment. She'd been staying there anyway, but she had kept her own apartment until after the wedding.

She learned to cook for him, and he bought her expensive clothes, and a beautiful simple diamond necklace for her thirtieth birthday. He could have afforded to buy her a lot of things, but there was very little she wanted. She loved her life with him, their love and romance and friendship, their mutual respect, and passion for their work. He had asked her once about giving up her career, or at least putting it on hold to stay home and have kids, and she had looked at him as though he were crazy.

“What about not retiring, and having kids?” he had modified his previous offer. They had been married for six years by then, and he was thirty-nine years old, and once in a while he thought about having children. Most of the time, it would have cramped their style, but still, he thought it would be too bad if they never had them. But Alex had said she wasn't ready.

“I just can't imagine having anyone be that dependent on me, I mean all the time. I'd feel guilty working as hard as I do now, I'd never see the kids, and that's no way to bring up children.”

“Can you see yourself slowing down eventually, working less?” he asked. But he couldn't see her doing that, and neither could Alex.

“Honestly? No. I don't think you can be a part-time lawyer.” She'd seen other women try it, and they always drove themselves crazy. Eventually, they either came back to work full time, and felt guilty as hell toward their kids, or retired completely. And she didn't want to do that either.

“Are you saying you don't want children at all, ever?” It was the first time she had ever really thought about it, that seriously, and she wasn't ready to say that either. Their conclusion was “not now, maybe later.”

The subject came up again when she was thirty-five, and by then it seemed like everyone they knew had had children. They'd been married for nine years by then, and they were very comfortable with their life as it was. She was already at Bartlett and Paskin, she had made partner, and Sam was something of a legend. They flew to France every chance they got for holidays, and California at the drop of a hat for a weekend. Sam still had a lot of business in Tokyo, and quite a lot in the Arab states, and Alex found his life fascinating, but her career wasn't unimpressive either. And there just didn't seem to be room in either of their lives for a baby.

“I don't know, I feel so guilty about it sometimes …like it's unnatural of me … I don't know how to explain it to anyone, but it's just not for me, at least not now,” she concluded with him, and they put the subject away for another three years, until she was thirty-eight and he forty-five. An alarm had gone off on her biological clock, albeit briefly, and this time she brought the subject up to him, after another partner at the office had a baby, and this time she conceded it was just adorable, and her friend seemed to be handling both career and child well. It had made Alex think seriously, for the first time, about having children.

But this time, Sam could no longer imagine it. Their life was too set, too well regulated, and too easy without kids. After twelve years of marriage to her, he thought it was too late, and it would no longer enhance anything. He wanted her to himself now. He liked things just as they were, and she surprised herself at how easily she gave the idea up again. Obviously, it was just not meant to be. She had an enormous trial to handle right after that, and the subject of children in their lives went out of her head completely until four months later.

They were coming back from a trip to India, where she had never been before, and she was feeling seriously ill, and afraid she had caught some dread disease, when she went to her doctor. It was the first time she had felt really sick in years, and it scared her. But what he told her of her malady scared her even more. And that night, she looked at Sam and told him the news in bleak desperation. She was pregnant. She had really put it out of her head, this time permanently, after the last time the subject had come up, and so had he. And they looked at each other like two victims of the crash of ‘29 when she told him.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” she said miserably. It was the first time she'd ever been pregnant. And she now knew what she'd never been completely sure of before. She didn't want children.

“It's not cholera or malaria, or something like that?” A near fatal disease would have been more welcome news to either of them than a baby.

“He says I'm six weeks pregnant.” She had been late on the trip, but she'd thought it was from the extreme heat, or the malaria pills, or just the rigors of travel. And she had never looked as miserable in her life as she did now, staring unhappily at her husband. “I'm too old for this, Sam. I don't want to go through it. I just can't.” Her words surprised him too, but he was relieved to hear them. He didn't want the baby either.

“Do you want to do something about it?” he asked, startled by her adamant dislike of the situation. He had always suspected that she might want kids someday, and lately, he had begun to fear it.