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will.
    Jane and I had never had that conversation because I never spoke about my father.
    “So was I right?” Jane asked, shaking sand out of her shoe. “Is it possible that what’s going on with your cold feet has something to do with your family?”
    “I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I couldn’t talk about it.
    But I was going to have to. Because a month from now, my brother and father were expected in the Wow photography studios for a family-photo shoot.
    “Are you going to hire stand-ins?” Amanda asked.
    I shrugged. “I guess.”
    Hello, I’m looking for a fake father and a fake brother to stand in for my real father and real brother at a photo shoot. They should wear black T-shirts, and use hair gel for that “urban appeal.” No, I don’t need to meet them beforehand; the more like strangers they seem, the more like my real family they’ll be!
    “El-eez sad?” baby Summer asked, peering up at me from her mother’s lap, her sandy little hands wrapped around her sippy cup.
    I played with her pretty auburn curls peeking out from under her knit hat. “No, sweetie. Eloise happy.”
    Summer smiled, handed me her Elmo mold and began clapping. “Elmo. Elmo!”
    Making Elmo pies with a two-year-old till the sun went down sounded pretty good to me at the moment.

chapter 3

    L iving with Noah was a lot like living alone, except that I now lived in a very nice one-bedroom brownstone on the Upper West Side, a five-minute walk to Central Park and the Bethesda fountain with its Angel of Waters statue, where I did my best thinking. And, there was his stuff, of course, guy stuff—electric shavers and black Calvin Klein underwear and button-down shirts and big black shoes and gigantic Boston University gray sweatshirts that I put on whenever he left for one of his trips.
    As an investigative journalist, Noah was always leaving at a moment’s notice for business trips to a scandal-ridden somewhere. One minute he could be brushing his teeth and the next he would be on a plane to L.A. to cover a pop star’s fight with her boyfriend, toothbrush still in hand.
    This weekend he was in Washington with Ashley, his annoyingly voluptuous co-worker who tended toward tight V-necked sweaters. Apparently, the daughter of a famous politician and her aging rock-star husband were holding a press conference outside her father’s office. Noah and Ashley often did a He Said, She Said sidebar on the same story, offering each of their thoughts from a gender perspective. In Hot News focus groups, their He Said, She Said column was rated as a subscriber favorite.
    Translation: Noah and Ashley weren’t going to be sent to opposite ends of the earth anytime soon.
    In my little corner of the world, though, on the sofa that Noah and I bought together, our first major purchase as a couple, was a two-foot-high chocolate Santa with a note: I love you, fiancée of mine. See you Monday night.—N.
    I shook the sand out of my shoes, picked up my Santa and unwrapped a leg. I was a chocoholic. I loved these awful hollow chocolates that drugstores and supermarkets sold for every possible holiday. Noah had a stash from Christmas to last me until Valentine’s Day, when he’d start hoarding giant red-foil-wrapped chocolate lips. Every time he left on a trip, he’d leave me a giant chocolate something with a lovey-dovey note.
    I’d rather have Noah. Around. Home.
    “I love you too,” I said to the empty apartment. “I do, I do, I do.”
    I did. I changed into his big gray Boston U sweatshirt and inhaled the yummy smell of his soap and aftershave, flopped on the couch, broke off one of Santa’s legs and stared at my diamond ring, twinkling in the dim light.
    I’m engaged. I’m getting married.
    A moment of elation.
    Then a dull panic.
    I twisted the ring around my finger.
    Two days ago on the subway, the total stranger sitting next to me said, “You know what that means, when youtwist an engagement ring or a wedding ring