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three or four days.
    “What do we owe him? A deal on this apartment? So what? You work, you could get us an apartment like this, Mom. You could do a whole lot of things for us without him.” But Jean was never as sure. She would have been frightened to leave him now, frightened not to work for Durning International, not to be at his right hand, not to have the apartment, the job, the security that she always knew was there … the car he replaced every two years so that she could go back and forth to Greenwich with ease. Originally, it had been a station wagon so that she could car pool his kids. The last two had been smaller though, pretty little Mercedes sedans he bought and replaced for her. And it wasn't as though she cared about the expensive gifts, there was more to it than that, much, much more. There was something about knowing that Arthur was there for her, if she needed him. It would have terrified her not to have that, and they had been together for so long now. No matter what Tana thought, she couldn't have given that up.
    “And what happens when he dies?” Tana had been blunt with her once. “You're all alone with no job, nothing. If he loves you, why doesn't he marry you, Mom?”
    “I suppose we're comfortable like this.”
    Tana's eyes were big and green and hard, as Andy's had been when he disagreed with her. “That's not good enough. He owes you more than that, Mom. It's so damn easy for him.”
    “It's easy for me, too, Tan.” She hadn't been able to argue with her that night. “I don't have to get used to anyone's quirks. I live the way I please. I make my own rules. And when I want, he takes me to Paris or London, or L.A. It's not such a bad life.” They both knew it wasn't entirely true, but there was no changing it now. They were set in their ways, both of them. And as she tidied the papers on her desk, she suddenly sensed him in the room. Somehow, she always knew when he was there, as though years ago, someone had planted a radar in her heart, designed to locate only him. He had walked silently into her office, not far from his own, and was looking at her, as she glanced up and saw him standing there.
    “Hello,” she smiled the smile that only they had been sharing for more than twelve years, and it felt like sunshine in his heart as he looked at her. “How was your day?”
    “Better now.” He hadn't seen her since noon, which was unusual for them. They seemed to touch base half a dozen times during the afternoons, met for coffee each morning, and often he took her to lunch with him. There had been gossip on and off over the years, particularly right after Marie Durning died, but eventually it had died down, and people just assumed they were friends, or if they were lovers, it was both discreet and dead-end, so no one bothered to talk about them anymore. He sat in his favorite comfortable chair across from her desk and lit his pipe. It was a smell she had come to love as part of him for more than a decade, and it pervaded all the rooms in which he lived, including her own bedroom with the East River view. “How about spending the day in Greenwich with me tomorrow, Jean? Why don't we both play hookie for a change?” It was rare for him to do that, but he'd been pushing very hard on a merger for the past seven weeks, and she thought the day off would do him good, and wished he would do things like that more frequently. But now she smiled at him regretfully.
    “I wish I could. Tomorrow's our big day.” He often forgot things like that. But she didn't really expect him to remember Tana's graduation day. He looked blankly at her and she smiled as she said the single word. “Tana.”
    “Oh, of course,” he waved the pipe and frowned as he laughed at her, “how stupid of me. It's a good thing you haven't depended on me the way I have on you, or you'd be in trouble most of the time.”
    “I doubt that.” She smiled lovingly at him, and something very comfortable passed between them