New Year Escapes. Leslie Kelly

you!”

      George heard the sound of her standing abruptly and stalking away. He squinted to look for her, but the room began tilting again. “Just doing you a favor,” he said to her back.

      Sophy turned and slapped her hands on her hips. “I don’t need you—or anyone—doing me favors like that!”

      He looked up at her. “Just saying, you don’t want to go out with Sam.”

      “I’ll go out with whomever I damn well please!”

      “Sam’s a womanizer.”

      “Ari was a womanizer,” Sophy said. “I know all about womanizers.”

      George went suddenly cold. Ari. It always went back to Ari. He dropped his head back on the pillows. “And that’s what you want, isn’t it?” he said dully. “Go away, Sophy. You’re making my head hurt.”

      Deliberately he shut his eyes.

      He refused to eat the chicken soup she made.

      She told him if he didn’t, she’d call Sam.

      He gave her a baleful look, but when she picked up her phone and started to punch in Sam’s number, George glared at her, but picked up his spoon and began to eat.

      In the end he ate two bowlfuls because once he started he finished the first bowl quickly and Sophy refilled it without even asking him.

      She hadn’t intended to eat with him, retreating to the kitchen after she’d filled his bowl a second time. But when she didn’t come back into the living room, he called after her, “Hiding in the kitchen, Soph?”

      “No, I’m not hiding in the kitchen,” she retorted irritably. “I’m feeding Gunnar.” But then, when Gunnar finished his food and trotted happily back to be with George, she had no recourse but to bring her own bowl and return as well.

      He looked a little better now. After another hour’s sleep following the Sam incident, he had a bit of color in his cheeks again. He said his headache was better and the room had stopped spinning. So he had sat up on the sofa to eat and he was still sitting up now.

      “It’s good soup,” he told her.

      “Thank you,” Sophy said stiffly.

      “You always were a good cook.”

      “Thank you again.”

      He looked up at her. “You could sit down. A guy could get a stiff neck staring up all the time.”

      She wanted to say he didn’t have to look at her. But instead she just sat or, to be more accurate, perched on the edge of the recliner, holding her soup bowl in one hand and her spoon in the other. But she couldn’t help giving him an arch look.

      “Better?”

      “Oh, much,” George said drily, which had the effect of making her feel as if her irritation was petty and unreasonable at the same time he made her want to laugh.

      Damn George could always make her laugh.

      It was one of the most surprising things about him—that a man so serious, so responsible and so … so … annoyingly “right” all the time could have a certain subtle wryness that could make her stop taking herself so seriously, could make her smile, could make her laugh.

      Could make her fall in love with him again.

      No, oh, no. He couldn’t.

      Abruptly Sophy stood up. “I’m going to take Gunnar for a walk.”

      She didn’t wait to hear what George thought about that. She just grabbed Gunnar’s leash and they left. Because it was night, she took the dog over to Amsterdam Avenue and they walked south from there. Tomorrow morning, she promised him, they would go to Central Park where dogs could run off the leash before nine.

      “This one isn’t for you,” she told him. “This walk’s for me.”

      She needed it to give herself some space—a little more breathing room and a little less George Savas and all the feelings he evoked.

      She walked briskly—Gunnar was a good pacesetter—trying to regain her equilibrium, to put her mixed-up feelings in a box and lock it up tight. This was a job. It was not a second chance. It was doing what needed to be done so she could walk away knowing that the scales were balanced, that she owed nothing more to the man who had married her.

      She lectured herself all the way down to 72nd St. before she felt the adrenaline surge level off. Then they walked more sedately back while she told Gunnar all about Lily and how her daughter loved dogs. Focusing on Lily helped. And when she got back to George’s she felt calmer and steadier and as if she was in control again.

      The minute she opened the door and unclipped his leash, Gunnar went shooting straight for the living room. Sophy followed at a more sedate, far less enthusiastic pace.

      “So,” she said as she came down the hallway to enter the living room, “how’s the headache now?”

      George wasn’t there.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      “GEORGE?” SOPHY BLINKED at the sight of the empty couch, as if once she did so he would suddenly rematerialize there. But no matter how many times she blinked, no George appeared.

      “George!” She raised her voice a little and she poked her head in the kitchen, expecting to see him standing there, leaning on his crutches, making a forbidden cup of coffee. When she found the kitchen empty, she checked the first floor bathroom. No George there, either.

      She whirled out of the bathroom and back into the living room. “George!” She yelled his name now. “Damn it, where are you?”

      His crutches were leaning beside the couch. But he hadn’t used them to get up the steps to the house earlier. So he’d probably taken advantage of her not being here to make his way on his own upstairs.

      “Idiot,” she muttered under her breath.

      He could have fallen. He was the one who’d said the world was tilting earlier. She pounded up the stairs two at a time, past her own room, up to the third floor, to George’s master bedroom, where she’d come to get his clothes earlier.

      Then she had deliberately got in and out as fast as she could, refusing to allow herself time to look around, to imagine George in his surroundings. She’d deliberately rung Natalie so she wouldn’t. And she’d barely done more than glance in the direction of his king-size bed.

      Now Sophy stalked into the room and flicked on the light, hoping it made his head hurt just a little. She was glad he’d had the sense to go to bed, and at the same time annoyed that he had waited to do it until she was gone.

      “Damn it, George! You can’t do things like this! You’ve got to—”

      Be careful, she was going to say.

      Except there was no one to say it to. The bed was empty.

      He wasn’t in the adjoining bathroom, either. Nothing had changed from when she’d come up the first time. Now she did feel a shaft of concern. Surely he couldn’t have had a relapse and called 911 in the half hour she had been gone, could he?

      “George!” Back down the stairs she went, pausing to poke her head worriedly into the room she’d slept in just in case he’d only made it that far. But it was empty, too.

      Maybe he had tried to get up, had fallen and was lying somewhere comatose.

      “George!” she bellowed again when she reached the main floor, heading back toward the living room to check again.

      “For God’s sake, stop shouting.” The disembodied voice came floating up from the garden floor office.

      Sophy’s