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disasters that crowded the waiting room.
    There shouldn’t be Christmas decorations in the emergency room. Not when people might be dying.
    Howe couldn’t die.
    But he might.
    Should she call the children?
    No. What good would it do at this point? They couldn’t seehim. And he might pull through. No need to frighten them unnecessarily. She’d wait till she had a verdict from the doctors.
    Or he died.
    In all her fantasies of being respectably free of their empty marriage, she’d never imagined that losing him would even affect her, much less send her into a tailspin, but it did. Now that widowhood stared her in the face, it terrified her. Elizabeth was a wife and mother, part of a couple. She had a place in Whittington as Howe’s wife. Without him, she would lose that place. Elizabeth couldn’t be alone. Not in that huge old house that had never quite felt like her own. Not in the town her husband’s family had controlled for over two centuries. She just couldn’t.
    And anyway, Whittington wasn’t big enough for two Whittington widows. Without Howe there to buffer her, his mother would eat Elizabeth alive.
    Once, Elizabeth had dreamed of escaping, but now, she raged inside that her mother-in-law had stolen that dream from her and from Howe. And even worse, Elizabeth had let her. Where would she go if she left? What would she do?
    Chest tight, she wrapped her arms across it as if to shield herself from what might happen. With every unfocused step, she marked out what she needed to do: don’t panic; think. He’s still alive. Hold on to that. He’s still alive.
    Whittington men lived well into their nineties, with all their faculties intact.
    Except his father, of course, she reminded herself with a jolt, who simply hadn’t woken up three weeks after his fifty-ninth birthday.
    That sat her down, good and proper, a wave of nausea welling through her. She stared unseeing through the automatic glass doors into the ER parking lot, conjuring with crystalline clarity the day they’d gotten the news that Howe’s daddy had died. She might as well have buried her own hopes for happily-ever-after in the casket with him.
    Howe’s mother had glommed on to her son, saying he couldn’t leave her alone to run the bank. She’d been so pitiful and so insistent that she’d worn Howe down until he’d abandoned his own dreams for his mother’s sake. His one act of defiance was taking Elizabeth to Baltimore to marry her, then showing up with her at the funeral, his grandmother’s diamond weighting the hand he gripped through the service, his mother’s pent-up outrage colder and more brittle than the three-carat stone.
    Howe had leaned on her, then. Shared his sense of loss, his frustration at having to abandon his hopes of practicing law away from his mother’s interference. He’d been so close to Elizabeth. She’d loved him so, believed that their love was strong enough to weather anything.
    She hadn’t realized that the Howe who had captured her heart would slowly disappear as he assumed his father’s place.
    Now he was the same age his father had been when he died, and suffering the same catastrophe.
    The cell phone rang in Elizabeth’s stylishly huge leather purse, sending her half out of her skin as it jarred her back to the present. Assuming it was Howe’s mother, she reluctantly rummaged past her day planner, checkbooks, makeup, coupons,lipsticks, and combs, finally locating it by the pale glow of the screen.
Insufficient information
showed there. “Hello?”
    P.J.’s familiar voice answered with unexpected intensity. “How is he? Tell me. I need to know.”
    How had
he
found out?
    His emphatic tone grated on her. “He’s alive. For now. That’s all I know.” She caught herself casting a guilty glance around to make sure Howe’s mother was nowhere in sight. Why was P.J. calling her there?
    When he’d pressed her to leave Howe the week before, she’d made it clear that there could never be more than a