“See you Tuesday. Just wear jeans. We'll go have a hamburger, or order room service or something. See ya…” And then she was gone, and Mary Stuart was thinking of her, and the days in Berkeley, before they had all moved on to their lives, before life had gotten so full, and so hard, and they had all had their dues to pay. It had all been so easy then… at first. Until Ellie had died, just before graduation. That had been their entry into the real world, and as she thought of it, she glanced at a photograph on her night table, of the four of them in freshman year. They looked like children to her now, even younger than her own daughter. She saw Tanya with her long blond mane, looking sexy and sensational, and Zoe with long red pigtails, so earnest and intense, and Ellie so ethereal with a little halo of blond curls, and Mary Stuart herself, all eyes and legs and long dark hair, looking straight into the camera. It seemed a hundred years ago, and it was. She thought about them for a long time, and eventually she fell asleep on her bed, in her jeans and her pink T-shirt. And when Bill came in at eleven o'clock, he found her there. He stood looking at her for a long time, and then turned off the light. He never spoke to her and never touched her, and she slept in her jeans all night. And when she woke the next morning, he had already gone back to the office. He had simply passed through her life once again, like the stranger he was now.

Chapter 2

When Tanya Thomas woke up in her Bel Air bedroom the next day, Tony was already in the shower. They shared a single bedroom, and two huge, separate dressing rooms, each with their own separate bathroom. The bedroom was large and airy, decorated in French antiques, with enormous pink silk curtains, and miles of pink floral fabrics. Her dressing room and bath were pink marble, and the fabrics were pale pink silk there too. And Tony's bathroom was done entirely in black marble and granite. Black towels, black silk drapes, it was the consummate male bathroom.