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married six months later.
    Funny, for all the talking we did about Ivy, I couldn’t help but feel that Mallory’s true impression of her was based on tid-bits of information that she had picked up at firm events—and from rumors started by Shannon and her “gosse” of Saxton Silvers wives who had met Ivy that one time. Even though I counted my blessings for reconnecting with Mallory, I sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out if Ivy and I had just stayed on the cruise as planned. On our last night together, Ivy had made it clear that she was burned out and fed up with Wall Street. Without question, being married to Ivy would have meant leaving New York. Would my life have been better? I couldn’t say. All I knew for certain was that with a beautiful wife in the next room, one who had picked up a microphone and said “I love you” in front of a roomful of invited guests, thoughts like that made me feel guilty as hell.
    “Can you pour us some wine, honey?” she called from the next room.
    “You got it.”
    I went to the wet bar and dumped my overpriced glass of champagne down the sink. I had a conference call with the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart at nine A.M .—solar power was a hot green investment, and the Germans were years ahead of anyone in the United States—and I couldn’t risk a headache in the morning. Champagne was the only wine that affected me that way, which was one reason I never fully understood the horrific hangover I’d woken up with on the morning of Ivy’s disappearance. And there I was thinking of Ivy again, even as I was opening a bottle of pinot grigio for a woman who was determined to make my thirty-fifth birthday a night I would never forget. Papa’s husky old voice was suddenly inside my head, uttering what had become one of his favorite words since moving to Florida.
    Schmuck.
    I poured the wine and then checked the label. It was the same Italian wine that Mallory and I had shared on our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast. Somewhere in my DNA was a male chromosome that wanted to give myself points for at least noticing her sentimentality, but it was Mallory who deserved all the credit tonight. I was thirty-five years old, this was my life, and it was time for me to be more like Papa and focus on what I had, not on what I’d lost. Mallory was not a woman I had settled for. I was lucky to have her. My career was soaring beyond my wildest dreams. Eleven years ago, fresh out of business school, I’d set rather realistic goals to have a net worth of such and such by age thirty, by age thirty-five, and so on. I was way ahead of those numbers.
    I took the wine and knocked on the bathroom door. The shower was running, and I knew what that meant. Mallory always showered before marathon sex. Tonight would be no quickie.
    “Your wine, madame ,” I said as I opened the door.
    That double-paned shower really didn’t fog, just as the bellboy who’d showed us to our room had promised. As I stole a glimpse of my fitness-crazed wife, I went ahead and silently thanked that voyeuristic genius, whoever he was, for having invented it.
    “Thanks, honey. Leave it on the counter.”
    The deluxe suite came with satellite everything, so I found a jazz station on digital radio and then swapped out my tuxedo for a bathrobe. It had been at least seven hours since I’d been online—a world record for me—so I opened my laptop and kicked up my feet. Hoping to fall deeper into a “be thankful for what you have” mind-set, I went to the Saxton Silvers Web page, entered my ID and password, and logged onto my personal investment account. I’d stopped managing my own portfolio years ago, and my buddy out in San Francisco, James Dunn, had agreed to do it only if I promised not to second-guess him on a daily basis. I checked it every few days, and today was a milestone. My liquid assets alone—excluding real estate and other things that couldn’t be quickly converted to cash—were almost ten