The tears that wouldn’t come earlier, now flowed down her cheeks. “It is time to move on,” Roxanne said. “I didn’t believe that until today, but my life as a married woman is over. I’m on my own now and I’ve got to be strong for my kids.”

“And you never know. That Lawrence guy has a radio station. You majored in mass communications in college. This might be good for you.”

“I don’t have the time to think about myself right now.”

“You need to make the time,” Renee said. “Why don’t you put on a pot of coffee and we’ll get started? I’ll give you a pedicure. And we’ll decide what you should wear to your dinner. What do you think of that Mr. Lawrence? He’s kind of cute.”

Roxanne started toward the kitchen. “He’s old enough to be my father.”

“Yeah, but a guy that age wouldn’t run off with a professional wrestler. A guy like that would appreciate a woman like you.”

Roxanne sighed inwardly. Was this what she’d be faced with out in the dating world? Finding a man whose only redeeming quality was that he wouldn’t be attracted to professional wrestlers? Suddenly, she had the overwhelming urge to crawl back in the hall closet and never come out again.

KIT LAWRENCE pulled his car into the restaurant parking lot, steering the BMW into an empty stall. He stepped out and set the alarm, wondering why his father always had to choose some strange, out-of-the way restaurant for their regular Monday night dinners.

Since Kit’s mother had died ten years ago, Carl Lawrence had become more and more eccentric. He’d gradually turned his business interests over to Kit, who had transformed a string of east coast radio stations into what Fortune magazine had recently called a “new media empire.” Lawrence Media Enterprises now owned twelve radio stations, three newspapers, a television station, seven magazines and eight Internet providers up and down the Atlantic coast.