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pedestal. "My tweed sofa and glass end tables balanced those two
leather recliners of Noah's that he put in front of the brick
fireplace. His double bed fit the two of us just perfectly and my
single set was put in the extra bedroom."
    Her eyes inspected the ornate Oriental-style
furniture, then looked down at her hands. "How well I remember
stripping and staining that oak claw-footed dining table and
sideboard we bought at a garage sale."
    For the millionth time Marlayna wondered
what had happened to all their shared treasures. Anger, fear,
confusion and tears had been her only companions when she'd fled
Atlanta, and afterward she had let Sylvia's lawyer handle any
further communications with Noah's legal representative. There had
been a settlement check and the usual signing of documents, but she
had been too sick to be interested and Sylvia convinced her that it
was beneath her, as a woman, to care.
    The trouble was, she did care; she had never
stopped caring and wondering and thinking. Always about the past,
never about today, no thoughts of tomorrow. "One minute life was
simple; the next, so complicated." She inhaled deeply. "Maybe it
would have been better if I had taken all of this more seriously." All of this included much more than her living quarters.
    The fascinating events that changed her life
after her divorce from Noah had been more obstructive than
constructive. Marlayna had chosen New York City as a place in which
to disappear from the face of the earth, but Fate had decided
otherwise.
    And yet, hadn't she actually become what
millions of young women dream of becoming? From obscurity to
celebrity—her face and figure were now splashed across fashion
pages and magazine covers. Somehow, somewhere, in some other
dimension of time, there had been a little mix-up and Marlayna was
living someone else's dream.
    Her mouth twisted in an impertinent grin. It
was really quite funny. H er dreams had never been
filled with fame and fortune. A little cottage, rimmed by a white
picket fence, a smiling husband, laughing children and a sleepy
schnauzer—that was the stuff her dreams had been made of.
Dreams that had come true and turned into a nightmare.
    But the beginning had been beautiful, she
reminisced, the perfect fairy-tale story. She had found her Prince
Charming in Noah Drake, or as he had said more correctly, "I've
finally found the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with,
the woman I want to love and care for and raise children with and
grow old with." Marlayna had believed him.
    "Why wouldn't I?" She again spoke to the
unicorn. "We wanted the same things. We were two alike."
    They both had been the only child of only
children. If either had aunts, uncles or cousins, their relatives
had been well hidden. Her father had suffered a heart attack when
she was sixteen and her mother was felled by the same, leaving
Marlayna totally on her own at twenty. Noah's parents had been
killed in a car accident just after he graduated from high school,
and he had let the Marines play surrogate for two tours of duty. At
twenty-six, he had settled in Atlanta to enter a non-saluting
world.
    Noah had been twenty-eight to her twenty-one
when they married, and their life together had been a happy one for
two years. She was head of admissions in the emergency room but was
taking courses at the community college to become a medical lab
technician. At the construction company where Noah worked, he was
promoted to foreman, but at night he was a student accumulating
college credits toward a degree in architecture.
    Working and studying had been the main
activities for Mr. and Mrs. Noah Drake. Each seemed to thrive on
the other's achievements; each needed the other to bolster an ego
during a failure; and both reveled in designing their future.
    "I'm going to build you the house of your
dreams." Noah's voice rang fresh in her ears.
    "The perfect place to live with the man of
my dreams."
    "Who's that?"
    "You, of