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with the twins. She started to laugh again.
    She accepted a generous settlement package from her employer, and transferred her two suitcases and a garment bag to a one-bedroom 1940s rental on Ocean Avenue with hideous linoleum and yellow clapboard siding. She helped Dixie with the bookstore in the height of tourist season.
    And then one day she noticed a publisher’s flier in the mail: Daniel Orsay presents Ribbons of Light , Sonnets for a Modern Age. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she had muttered out loud. “He is a poet after all.”
    On a whim, she had contacted the publisher to schedule a signing. And six weeks later, Daniel Orsay himself had stood backlit in the open door of Dixie’s Books and Nooks, looking for all the world like a knight in shining armor in his white jeans and open-throated shirt with his dark hair flowing over his shoulders, and he had said, softly, “Now, that is a beautiful smile.”
    It had been the most successful event Books and Nooks had ever hosted. The women attendees swooned over his French accent and his dark Gaelic good looks, and the store sold every copy. Sara, as hard as she tried to maintain a professional distance, was as caught up in his charm as any middle-aged tourist. And when he invited her—no, he insisted on taking her—to dinner to celebrate the evening’s success, she didn’t have a hope of resisting.
    Looking back, she saw she hadn’t had a chance since the moment he appeared in her doorway framed by the sun like some hero of yore, ready to sweep her away. She was forty-six years old, and falling for a fairy tale.
    He told her about his travels—to Nairobi, Bali, India, Hong Kong. He made her laugh until she was giddy with his tales of his multiple attempts to climb Everest, each one funnier—and more outrageous—than the last. His dark eyes softened and his fingertips touched her cheek as he told her that if he could paint her laughter, it would be musical notes bursting against a crystal sky. He took her breath away.
    They walked on the beach, they went sailing, they held hands at outdoor concerts. Neither Dixie nor her customers saw much of Sara that enchanted summer, and when Sara looked back on it now she realized that was exactly what it was—an enchantment. Daniel was a force of nature, a small sun that pulled everything into its gravitational path, and she had absolutely no desire to resist his magnetic power. She tumbled willingly, gladly, into the madness that was loving Daniel.
    She had lived half a lifetime without trust, without commitment, without love, and there was a part of her that knew this mad, wild adventure was completely reactionary, was totally insane . . . and that sanctioned it anyway. The little girl who had cowered in a closet, holding her sister tight in her arms, while her mother’s latest boyfriend shouted and broke things in the next room, disappeared when Daniel was with her. She did not have to prove anything. She did not have to be anything. She believed in fairy-tale endings.
    There was another part of her that knew, of course, that he was the type of man who would break her heart, and so he did. But first he married her.
    Because the real wonder of their entire, magical courtship was that this incredible man had, for some reason, fallen as much in love with her as she had with him.
    She didn’t know much more about him on the day she married him than on the day she had first read his publisher’s brochure. He told her that his parents had died, suddenly and tragically, in the 2002 bombings in Bali, where they had been on their first out-of-the Continent holiday in twenty years. There was a stricken look on Daniel’s face when he related this, as though he still could not quite accept the horror of it. He had no other family. The trip he had made to accompany his parents’ bodies back to France was the last one he had ever taken to Europe. He had stayed