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clubroom that overlooked the pool was only open for specific activities, but the fitness center was right across from it. She’d seen the equipment when they’d first toured the building, sworn to use it, and had never gone back.
    Exercise would be positive. If she did enough of it, maybe some of those endorphins she’d read about and never actually experienced would kick in and make her feel better. She looked down. She
was
wearing expensive workout clothes.
    Before she talked herself out of it, she gathered her keys and headed for the door. Thirty minutes. The Realtor had told them that the equipment was state of the art and extremely user-friendly. So simple, she’d claimed, that even a child could program it. She’d get on a treadmill or an elliptical machine, put it on low speed, and exercise for thirty minutes. She could do anything for thirty minutes, right?
    * * *
    SAMANTHA LAY IN BED LISTENING TO THE STEADY patter of rain falling on the balcony outside her bedroom. She should’ve been in the middle of her morning workout right now, but Michael had called thirty minutes before he was due, his voice so nasal from a cold that it took awhile to decipher who it was. Before he’d hung up, he’d made her promise that she’d do the workout on her own or at least do cardio. Instead she’d lain here for almost an hour listening to the rain and contemplating what it might feel like to do that for the rest of the morning. Maybe she’d even download a book and lie here reading it just for the pure pleasure of it.
    She smiled as she imagined her mother-in-law’s shock and horror at such slothful thinking. Then she pictured her husband boarding the seven a.m. flight for Los Angeles, working all day, taking clients out for dinner. Her smile dimmed. Jonathan could have easily afforded to work half as hard as he did or not at all, but he was no dilettante. Vacations were carefully planned and scheduled; even weekends or holidays at the lake house were fit in around his client’s needs; a work ethic far more reassuring than her father’s all-consuming passion for money and position and her brother’s schemes and plans, few of which involved any actual work at all.
    Her “job” as his wife did not include lying around in bed reading regardless of the weather or the health of her personal trainer.
    Dutifully rallied, she threw off the covers and put on the workout clothes she left folded on the chaise longue near her side of the bed. Then she washed her face, brushed her teeth, and pulled her hair up off her face. A quick glass of orange juice and she was on her way down to the eighth-floor fitness room, which was always empty.
    She spotted the chubby red-haired woman through the plate-glass wall as she rounded the corner. Biting back a groan, Samantha entered the glassed and mirrored space and moved toward the vacant elliptical machine next to the one the other woman occupied.
    The big-screen TV on the wall in front of the machines wasn’t on. Samantha cut her eyes to the other woman whose head was bent over the control board. Samantha couldn’t tell if she was studying the digital readout or praying. Her feet were in the footpads, her legs frozen as if in midstep. Her workout clothes looked both new and expensive, but they stretched across her rear and back a little more tightly than they should. She’d seen her in the building before—the last time in the lobby with a dog and two little girls.
    “Do you mind if I turn on the TV?” Samantha asked.
    The woman shook her head, but she didn’t look up. “No.” Her voice caught on the word.
    Samantha put on the TV and skimmed through the channels finally settling on the
Today
show. Telling herself she didn’t know this woman and shouldn’t pry, she got on the elliptical and began to answer the questions that flashed on the digital screen. She committed to forty minutes, plus the automatic five-minute cooldown. But then came the annoying weight query. Did the