Dear Emily. Fern Michaels

weaned away from that killer load I’m suddenly out in the cold. At least that’s how I feel. I guess I just don’t know how to react. I didn’t expect this, wasn’t prepared. I appreciate it. All I’ve ever known is work and more work.”

      “And now you don’t have to work anymore. Now you can have your legs taken care of. All the things you couldn’t do before, all the things you said you wanted to do. I think you need to finish this wine by yourself and think about things. I’m going to bed. By the way, I’m taking the green room at the top of the steps. Yours is the yellow one. This way I won’t wake you up with my middle-of-the-night departures and the phone ringing.”

      “But Ian, I thought we…” Don’t beg, Emily, please don’t beg, she pleaded with herself. “Good night, Ian,” she said quietly.

      Separate bedrooms. My God, she thought. So it’s come to this. She couldn’t help but wonder if the try for the baby would be a one-shot deal or if he’d back off from her all together. She looked around at her new house. There was no way in hell she was climbing those stairs and sleeping in a yellow bedroom someone else had decorated.

      God, what was wrong with her? Maybe she needed a shrink. Well, she could certainly find the time now to visit one. In secret, of course. Ian would explode if he thought a colleague was hearing her troubles. Maybe she could go into New York and give a false name and pay in cash. Maybe she’d get pregnant right away and she wouldn’t have to do anything but take care of the baby. That would be blissful heaven.

      She finished the wine before she curled into a tight ball and slept on the hard, new sofa that smelled of packing materials.

      Emily woke to silence that was so total she shook her head to clear it. At first she felt disoriented, sluggish and then fearful. A faint amber glow from the streetlight outside gilded the middle of the room. Then she remembered where she was and why she’d fallen asleep on the scratchy new sofa. From somewhere in the house a clock chimed the hour. She counted one, two, three, four, five. Five o’clock in the morning.

      The smelly pillows she’d been sleeping on caught her as she flopped backward. How could something beautiful and wonderful end so disastrously? Unless that was the way Ian had intended the evening to end. Separate bedrooms. Hers was yellow. She started to shake, was unable to stop, and there was no quilt, no afghan to cover herself with. She didn’t even know where the thermostat was. She wanted to feel anger, to go upstairs and demand Ian tell her exactly what was going on in their lives.

      Well, she was going to find out and she was going to find out right now. Her trembling ceased and was replaced with ramrod stiffness as she mounted the steps to the second floor. She thrust open the door and peered into the darkness. The bed had been slept in, but was empty now. Ian must have gotten called out to one of the clinics during the night. She turned on the light, gathering one of Ian’s pillows to her chest. It smelled faintly of his after-shave, a potent concoction from a grateful patient. Tears dripped on the pillow. She brushed them away. Crying never helped. Crying gave her headaches. “Damn you, Ian.” She wanted a friend then more than she’d ever wanted anything. Someone to call up and talk to. Where was her old friend Aggie? For years they’d sent Christmas cards and then one year there was no card and she didn’t know where to send hers to so she’d scratched Aggie’s name off her list. Well, she was going to have a lot of spare time now. Maybe she could track Aggie down.

      Ian had his own bathroom. She looked around carefully. If she remembered correctly, this was the largest of five bedrooms—the master bedroom. The yellow room, hers, wasn’t quite as large. Ian had huge double closets. The yellow room had an oversize closet with a mirror on the door. And why the hell not, Ian needed more room than three women with all his shirts and suits. Her own wardrobe was meager compared to his.

      Who was going to clean this monstrous house? When was a housekeeper going to materialize? If that didn’t happen, she and she alone was going to have to do it. It would take her all day to dust and polish, to keep things the way Ian liked them. She’d need two vacuum cleaners, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. A set of cleaning supplies would have to go into the upstairs linen closet. Or would Ian expect her to lug things up and then down?

      From long habit, Emily made the bed, but she did it with anger in her eyes and murder in her heart. The linen closet in the hall was full of towels and sheets. There was no vacuum cleaner, no cleaning supplies.

      Emily opened the door to the yellow room. It was pretty enough in a frilly kind of way. She almost choked when she opened the closet door to see her clothes hanging neatly. She yanked at the dresser drawers to see her underwear, her stockings, her nightgowns neatly folded. She pawed through them. How dare Ian do this to her! Her personal things were no one else’s business. She did cry then when she saw her panties, the ones where the elastic was coming away from the material, all neatly folded on the bottom of the pile. Some stranger Ian hired had seen and touched her underwear. She felt ashamed, embarrassed that she didn’t have sexy, beribboned undies, the kind you bought from Victoria’s Secret. She didn’t have time to shop for such things, and goddamn it, she liked cotton underwear. Size eight. She shuddered as she slammed the drawers shut.

      The yellow room had its own bathroom. It wasn’t as large as Ian’s and didn’t have a bidet and only one vanity. She fingered the apple-green towels that were larger than beach towels and twice as thick. They were called bath sheets in the Sears Roebuck catalog.

      There was a hollow feeling in her stomach when Emily made her way downstairs to the kitchen. She passed the thermostat on the way and turned it up to 80.

      It was a beautiful, modern kitchen complete with dishwasher, trash compactor, and garbage disposal. There was a center island with cabinets underneath, lots and lots of gorgeous oak cabinets, all of them full of new dishes and copper-bottomed pots and pans. A string of garlic hung from one of the beams, which had a little note attached to the bottom that said, “Good luck in your new house.” “Up yours,” Emily muttered.

      Everything was where it should be, just the way she would have positioned things if she’d decorated the kitchen herself. She made coffee, and while it perked, her mind raced. Down the hall and around the corner of the steps was a home office for Ian, completely outfitted. Suddenly it was important for her to see that office, to see what was in it.

      It was manly, professional-looking. An Ian office if there was such a thing. Wainscoting, deep leather chairs, chocolate-colored carpeting, a mahogany desk that was so shiny she could see her reflection in the top. Everything shrieked newness. It even had a fireplace, a neatly laid stack of wood waiting for a match to ignite it. Medical books lined the walls in what Emily knew were custom-made bookshelves.

      In their entire married life she’d never, ever gone through Ian’s things. Even at the clinics she’d never opened any of his drawers, never touched anything. She yanked at first one drawer and then another. Files, folders. Records. In the middle drawer where people had a tendency to toss bits and pieces because of convenience she saw a lone folder labeled Park Avenue Clinic. She read through it, stunned at what she was reading. When she was finished, she replaced it exactly the way she’d found it, closed the drawer, got up, gave the seat of the leather chair a hard smack to erase the indentation, pushed it back, and left the room.

      Emily’s eyes were wild when she poured coffee into a gaily colored mug. There seemed to be a set of cups, each with a flower painted on the side. The one she was holding was a pansy pattern with beautiful shades of purple. At first she thought it was a decal. On closer examination she saw it was hand-painted. It took both hands to hold the mug, to bring it to her lips. Until she tasted the scalding coffee she wasn’t aware that she’d forgotten to add sugar and cream.

      The Park Avenue Clinic was going to be an abortion clinic. Over her dead body. She had something to say about that. Ian knew she was going to object and that’s why everything was so secret. Which just went to prove this new house, last night, was nothing more than window dressing until he got down to what he was setting her up for.

      Was she supposed to go to the clinics today? She couldn’t remember. Obviously it didn’t make a difference or someone would have called by now to find out where she was or at least to ask if