1046,

s there
whenever she needed it, it vanished as easily, and it never asked
questions, expected witty replies, made awkward suggestions, or
otherwise overcompensated for its own inability to right the wrongs of
the world. She had packed a friend-a-day supply for this trip. That was
all the company she needed.
The hardcover in her hand was a biography. She opened it now, and was
suddenly caught up in the same world she was trying to flee. On the
inside cover of the volume was an inscription that she hadn't noticed
earlier. It brought back a storm of memories.
"To my favorite sister-in-law. Have a marvelous vacation and be sure to
spend a week with us when you get back. Maryellen."
From the first, Jeff's family had adored her. They had always insisted
that they would hold Jeff personally to blame if the marriage ended. In
that spirit, they had stayed so close to Anne's side that she had to
finally beg them for space. They had eased off, but with reluctance.
Anne's parents had persisted, urging her to give up the apartment and
move back home, but she refused. She knew that as crammed with reminders
of Jeff as the apartment was, it was better than the Westchester home
where she had grown up. To return there would be an admission of
failure-failure to make the kind of happy life her parents had.
A ghost of a smile lifted the corners of her lips. Her childhood had
been happy indeed, even those awkward adolescent years when she was an
ugly duckling, by modest accounts. Oh, her parents denied it, but the
mirror didn't lie, and, anyway, the ugly duckling became a swan well
before the Senior Prom. By that time she was quiet and graceful,
thriving academically, socially, and emotionally. Nothing in her rosy
first twenty-seven years had even remotely begun to prepare her for the
heartbreak at the start of her twenty-eighth.
Brought back to the present by a pang of hunger, she closed the
untouched book and went to the kitchen. She flipped on a single light,
mixed tuna into a sa