And so it was decided. Joe would be generous and keep the apartment.

Betty had been married before she met Joseph Weissmann. Her first husband had died suddenly and young in an automobile accident, leaving her with two little girls, Annie, age three, and Miranda, two months. Joseph came into their lives not quite a year after the accident. He married Betty, and though they ate dinner in the kitchen before he came home from work and never saw him on the Saturdays when he went to the office, the girls took his last name, called him Josie, considered him their father, and loved him as if he were.

When Annie got the phone call from her mother announcing Joseph's discovery of irreconcilable differences after almost fifty years, she immediately urged a visit to a neurologist. Had Josie been complaining of headaches? Erratic behavior, headaches, dizziness: Of course it was a brain tumor. Did her mother remember her friend Oliver from graduate school? He died just like that. Betty had better get him to a doctor that day. Poor Josie.

"It's not a brain tumor," her mother said. Joseph was feeling better than he had in years. "And you know what that means."

Annie grudgingly accepted what her sister, Miranda, understood immediately.

"He is in love," Miranda said when Betty called her to tell her the news.

"I'm afraid he must be," Betty said.

The two women were silent. They were both believers in love. This love was heresy.

"What does Annie say?"

"She's going to speak to him. And she suggested I get a lawyer."

"A lawyer?" Miranda's voice was disapproving. "What does Josie say about that?"