"I don't have it. But I do have Hope's. His girlfriend's."

Portia dismissed the reminder with a toss of her hair. Two weeks after having her heart broken by a stolen lover, and she was ready to do the same to another woman. No one gave a shit. It didn't matter who got hurt, so long as you got what you wanted.

"Portia, you can't – "

"Do I pay your wages, Rob?" The snap in Portia's voice made a few people look their way. "I'll expect that number in the morning. Now call Tim. Tell him to bring the car around. I'm going to touch up my makeup."

Robyn didn't argue. Her job was to get Portia out of public confrontations, not start them. Come morning, Portia would forget all about it anyway.

It took Portia fifteen minutes to make the rounds, saying her goodbyes and handpicking a few to invite to the next club. The moment she was gone, the uninvited dispersed, as if fearing they'd look like they were hanging out with Portia Kane's dowdy PR rep.

Robyn gazed around the club, at all the twenty-somethings, laughing and hugging, and she couldn't believe they were her species, let alone her generation.

Widowed at twenty-eight.

She thought of all the people who'd come up to her on the day of the funeral and said she was still young, as if she should be thanking God for taking her husband before she was too old and ugly to attract a new one.

Did they know what she'd give to have spent those years with him? If God had said, "I'll give him to you for six more months, but you'll never marry again, never fall in love again, never touch a man again," she would have screamed, "Yes, please, yes!"

Her own mother had hugged her, and in a whisper, asked whether she was pregnant yet. When Robyn said she wasn't, her mother had said that was for the best. A remark uttered in thoughtlessness not cruelty, but Robyn would never forget it. Just as she'd never forget that day three weeks later when she'd glanced at the calendar and realized her period was late and her knees had given way as she prayed. But even that scrap of mercy had been too much to ask for.