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changes since the delivery. On the upside, it had finally stabilized her wildly irregular period. On the downside, she couldn’t even drink so much as a single glass of white wine anymore without risking losing her supper—though vodka sat fine for some reason.
    That, and her hands got dry.
    It wasn’t too bad as trade-offs went.
    Especially when you factored in Melissa.
    She was napping and Amy was loath to wake her. But now that David was up she needed to get to the vacuuming. Claire and Luke were expected around two and she wanted to get in at least an hour’s work on the design before they arrived.
    So she supposed she’d have to risk it.
    Nah
, she thought.
Get to work
now.
Let David do the vacuuming after he’s had breakfast
.
    He won’t mind. He never did
.
    Her PC was directly across the big oak desk from his. Sitting there together facing one another on those—nowadays—rare times that their schedules coincided they’d kid about feeling like the Fabulous Baker Boys, sans Michelle Pfeiffer. David sans hairpiece.
    She poured a cup of coffee, dosed it with milk from the Coolerator, went to the desk and sat down.
    She used her toe to switch on the power tap and pushed her disks into the disk drive. Then sat back ready to look at yesterday’s work.
    While it booted up she thought of Claire.
    She should have been happy thinking about Claire, but the way things were these days the first feeling that came was anger. Not at her—she and Claire had been best friends since college, and nothing had changed about that.
    But at Steven, her husband.
    She’d seen it from the first, almost ten years ago.
    Unfortunately, Claire hadn’t.
    Something vaguely
sneaky
about him. A kind of spinelessness behind all the good humor and courtesy and all his supposed caring for Claire. He had the habit of indirection, of never quite looking at you when he was talking to you. Then you’d catch him staring at you when you’d been looking elsewhere.
    The men all liked him. Even David.
Mister Regular Guy
. Always ready with a drink or a laugh.
    Amy hadn’t trusted him for a minute.
    She’d told Claire as much, as gently but firmly as she could, as soon as she realized that they were heading for marriage.
    But he’d been smart. The way these low-level sociopath types were often smart, she guessed. He’d played it perfectly. He’d come on like a friend and nothing more for months before declaring himself a potential lover. Got her into the habit of being around him—after a while, pretty much constantly. Edging into her circle of friends. Nice and easy.
    Claire was on the rebound at the time. She’d finally found the strength to dump the guy she’d been living with since college, a guy so jealous and possessive and so
inappropriate
in his jealousy it would have been comical had it not led to a series of raging arguments, which culminated in a drunken scene one night outside her apartment with the boy proclaiming loudly that she was no goddamn better than his mother. By then Claire was vulnerable to the soft approach. And Steven had it down pat.
    We’ll be friends first and foremost
, he always seemed to say.
I respect you
.
    Amy remembered it well, cloying and phony.
    But coming off this other maniac it was perfect. The sex was good. And it was easy for Claire to mistake attentiveness for caring. To assume he actually
liked
her. Loved her.
    Amy doubted that Steven had ever liked or loved anybody.
    She often wondered when, and why, Steven had decided he wanted her. Claire was uncommonly pretty and maybe that was it, because Steven washeaded for some high-powered New York law firm, everybody who knew him was aware of that, and Claire would look good on his arm, good to the partners and to the clients, and because she was modest and graceful, even good to their wives.
    She’d warned her. Probably too often. But Claire hadn’t bought her arguments—either then, about the marriage, or later, about the advisability of having