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rancid fumes from the lavatory.
    She’d already told Jill she would be taking the eight a.m. bus and promised to call when it was about fifteen minutes away from the terminal so whoever was going to pick her up could time the short drive. She probably should have phoned Jill back and informed her of the change in transportation plans, but she hadn’t. She’d been pissed off by Jill’s imperiousness. So she and Luc would show up unannounced at Jill’s front door, and Jill would deal with it. Jill was a whiz when it came to dealing with things.
    Melissa and Luc had packed overnight bags, figuring they’d spend Saturday night in Massachusetts and drive home Sunday. If Jill didn’t want to put them up at her house—and Melissa could respect that; Abbie was twelve years old, and Jill might not want her spending the night under the same roof as an aunt engaging in premarital sex—then they could stay at Doug’s house. It had a zillion rooms, and the twins were too young to care who stayed in which room with whom.
    Or, if necessary, she and Luc could stay at her parents’ house. They hadn’t turned her bedroom into a study or a sewing room or a second den. Melissa’s childhood bedroom remained intact, the décor unchanged from the day she’d left for Brown University thirteen years ago. French provincial furniture, pink Swiss-dot curtains, rose-hued carpeting, a canopy bed—the room was a shrine to girlie-girl taste. One of these days Melissa would drop by and reclaim her stuffed animals. For her future children, of course, not for herself.
    If worse came to worst, she and Luc would get a room at a motel for the night. A bed-and-breakfast would be more romantic, but the autumn leaf season was in full swing, and most of the B-and-B’s in New England had been booked a year ago. She consoled herself with the thought that a motel would be cheaper. She really had to save money if she was serious about buying an apartment.
    Traffic was heavy on the Cross-Bronx—as if that was anything new. Cars, cabs, vans and eighteen-wheelers inched along, brake lights flashing like electrified rubies. Luc fiddled with the radio dial, gliding from one burst of static to the next. Apparently the radio didn’t work any better than the CD player. Melissa could attempt a conversation with him, but he didn’t look interested in chatting, so she focused instead on the folder of print-outs in her lap, each page describing a condo or co-op for sale. Kathy, the broker she was working with, had faxed them to her yesterday.
    One bedroom or two?
    Assuming she did wind up having children  . . . and she really hoped she would in the not too distant future. She was already thirty-one years old and didn’t want to be one of those forty-something moms contending with colic and hot flashes at the same time. Plus, she wasn’t sure she should raise her offspring in the city. City-bred kids were so hard, so tough, so jaded, and you had to pay a fortune in tuition for a decent private school. So investing in an apartment big enough to include a nursery seemed pointless. Closets were far more practical.
    Still, it bothered Melissa that a one-bedroom apartment could cost as much as a two-bedroom. She compared two of the units Kathy had recommended, holding their sheets side by side on her knees. Both apartments were located in buildings in the same borderline neighborhood—not quite the Flatiron District, not quite Grammercy Park, not quite the northern edge of Greenwich Village. Closets were important, but did two huge closets equal one bedroom? And bottom line, did she want to spend close to seven figures for an apartment that wasn’t actually in a neighborhood?
    Setting those two pages aside, she lifted the next one from the pile and tried to read it as the paper trembled in her hand, picking up the car’s vibrations. Clinton—at least that was a real neighborhood, and nowadays Hell’s Kitchen, which overlapped with Clinton, was almost chic. Two