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Besides, you promised you were going to be more spontaneous, remember?”
    She remembered no such promise. But it did seem unlikely they would make it to 34th Street with enough time left to take in the full spectacle, so she headed up the dark road. A few modest strings of Christmas lights illuminated the hodgepodge of houses. There were semi-shabby shingle-sided affairs, old farmhouses and duplexes. Semi-detatched as they were known in Baltimore. Tess always thought this would make a good term for relationships as well. Not hers, though. She and Crow were semi-attached—together, joined at the hip, and other body parts as well. She had lost him once, through carelessness and stupidity. She couldn’t quite say to him, forever and ever, but she could and did forswear stupidity.
    “There’s a meadow back there, and a park. You’d hardly know you’re in Baltimore proper at all,” Crowsaid. Tess didn’t point out they could still hear the traffic on Cold Spring. “What is this place?”
    “Evergreen.” She wasn’t sure how she knew the name, but she was confident of it from the moment she said it. “These duplexes—this is where the people who built the big houses in Roland Park lived during the construction.”
    “Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,” Crow said solemnly. Facts were serious, sacred things to Crow, but then—he had never been a reporter. “Roland Park had the first shopping center in the United States.”
    “I know, I read the historic marker outside the old Baskin Robbins, too.”
    “Let’s bring Esskay up to run in that meadow,” Crow said. “When spring comes. We could bring a picnic, explore the woods over there.”
    “It’s not even winter yet, and you’re talking about spring. Don’t get so far ahead of yourself. That’s what you promised, remember? One day at a time.”
    “Do you think,” Crow said with the smallest of sighs, “that the AA motto is really appropriate for a relationship?”
    She turned into a narrow lane, thinking it was an alley, but houses hugged the hillside here. Most were large, the legacy of Baltimore’s Catholic roots. Tess had grown up among people who had five children, eight, ten, even thirteen. Now her friends who had three children seemed vaguely apologetic.
    But there were some small cottages here, too, tucked among the rambling old Victorians. It reminded her of the Black Forest, not that she had ever seen the Black Forest. But she had been raised on Grimm’s, the real Grimm’s, where Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilated their feet to get into that glass slipper, and a father cut off his daughter’s hands and breasts out of pure spite.
    The words Black Forest made her think of cake, which made her realize how hungry she was. Time for dinner.

     

    Whitney Talbot had already been seated at their table in the Ambassador, a once fusty restaurant that had found a new, improbable second life as a lushly appointed Indian restaurant. Her face was turned away from the door, but Tess knew her by the long, sharp bones poking through her winter white pantsuit, the arrogant lift of her head. Really, Tess thought, all she needed was a pith helmet to complete the illusion that she was on the veranda of a grand old Calcutta hotel, snapping her fingers impatiently for another gin rickey.
    “Don’t tell me,” Whitney said in the clear, ringing tones of a Baltimore valley girl. “You were dressed and ready to go, then took one look at each other and ripped one another’s clothes off, carried away by the passion of your rediscovered love.”
    “Not at all,” Tess muttered, blushing, in part because Whitney’s voice carried so well and in part because she was not far wrong.
    “Hi, Whitney,” Crow said, taking the seat farthest from her. “How’s the job hunt?”
    “I’m not on a ‘job hunt,’” she corrected, lifting her chin higher still. “I’m trying to decide what I want to do with my life. My future vocation is just one element of my