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over this. Maybe it was about helping Herb move on. More likely Sonja had been looking for a home that would boost their social status. Either way, the house and the marriage had been history before the year’s end.
    Remy’s search for a home had almost been fulfilled during her time in New York, when she and her friends had set up housekeeping in a Greenwich Village apartment. During college Kiara and Dakota had become the sisters she’d always longed for. The arrangement had been so copacetic that, despite the fact that Remy knew the end was inevitable, she had been crestfallen when her friends finished their degrees and moved on.
    Although Remy had moved back to Herb’s Drexel Hill townhouse, which was walking distance from the newspaper offices, the arrangement had lasted less than a month. Remy had felt like she was imposing on strangers, and Herb’s third wife had done nothing to allay her discomfort. It was no surprise that Loretta did not object when Remy asked Herb to fund a small apartment for her until she got on solid financial footing.
    The apartment, Remy’s current home, was small and sleek, a lonely island in a fabulous location near the Museum District. Was it home? She shook her head as she let her eyes blur over the brick house that seemed to be wrapped in a halo of light. No, the apartment wasn’t home. More like a safe resting place.
    She wondered if Herb ever missed this house, this place chock-full of heart and memories. Having lasted more than ten years now, wife number three—and the townhouse—seemed to be working out for her father. Herb had his family, though it didn’t really include Remy. Having just come from dinner at Herb’s, she felt her outsider status acutely. Loretta and her teenaged daughter, Heather, had been conspicuously absent from the meal of gourmet take-out food.
    “They’re at the nail salon,” Herb had explained, “doing that mother-daughter thing.”
    Although Remy had shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter, it hurt to be ignored. Would it have killed Loretta and Heather to join them, sit at the dinner table and pretend for just one night that they cared? She knew Loretta didn’t like her. Did Loretta think of her as Herb’s grown daughter who occasionally came around to hit up her father for rent money?
    In the year that she’d been back in Philadelphia, things between Remy and her father had improved. She had learned how to express herself without making him angry, and Herb had figured out that, occasionally, he needed to shut up and listen to his daughter. They had taken baby steps, but Herb still had a long way to go, and Remy sensed that Loretta felt threatened by any hint of a relationship between father and daughter.
    Herb’s gift twinkled on the passenger seat, and Remy picked up the cellophane-wrapped treat that her father had given her—a glazed marzipan heart for Valentine’s Day. An early gift, he’d said. Itwas a nice gesture, a concoction pretty as an ornament or brooch, but she knew it would be a ball of sugar in her mouth, cloying and overly sweet.
    Okay, Herb was trying. She had to give him that. Still …
    She dropped the cellophane bag on the floor and leaned toward the friendly house framed by her car window. How she longed to wrap her arms around those porch columns, check the backyard for the tree swing, and peer between the balusters along the stairs for lingering traces of the love and joy that once blossomed there. Her heart ached for the lilac bushes that once hid her in hide-and-seek, the lawn where she’d made snowmen and snow angels, the room beyond that second-story window on the left that had once held her bed and books and stuffed animals. Stretched out on the bed, Mom by her side, she had traveled to story lands of friendly monsters and bulls, purple crayons and green eggs.
    How her heart ached to visit that world one last time.
    If only she could go home …
    Her eyes were fixed on her old bedroom window when she caught