The keeping room had grown darker, and he realized that the fire was burning down. He glanced at his watch. Nearly midnight.

How many hours until they could go home?

How many hours could he keep Ellie here at the inn and convince her...to make love with him? To forgive him? To call off the lawyers?

To tell him the d.a.m.n truth about the time she'd spent with that n.o.ble doctor in Africa?

He kept his tone light when he said, "What do you say we go back upstairs and watch some more of your life on TV."

Her eyes flashed, shadowed with doubt. "Curt, what happened outside..." Her voice faded into a sigh.

Outside the building or outside the keeping-room doorway? The blush that rose to her cheeks told him she was thinking about their kiss. "You were as much a part of that as I was," he reminded her.

She pressed her lips together, then leveled her gaze at him. "I'm a human being. And you're a good kisser. But we can't-I mean, we've already decided..."

To get a divorce. To treat each other with chilly civility until then. To avoid anything the least bit pleasurable, the least bit s.e.xual, anything that might remind them that they'd once been crazy in love with each other. "I won't do anything you don't want me to do," he said, filtering the resentment from his tone. It was a promise he could keep. He'd never forced himself on Ellie. Never. She'd always been willing.

Except maybe for what had happened in the hallway outside the keeping room. But she'd been willing then, too. Surprised at first, perhaps, but she'd kissed him back. G.o.d, how she'd kissed him.

Her hesitation rankled. "The h.e.l.l with it," he muttered. "Why don't we just go home and tell the girls what's going on. We don't have to be prisoners at this freaking hotel. If you don't want to stay, we'll leave."

"No." The word slipped out of her mouth before she could have given much thought to her response-and her cheeks grew rosy again. She managed a crooked smile. "I want to see the rest of the movie."

"Okay." Hoping he didn't look too pleased, he pushed his chair back from the table. Glancing around the keeping room, he spotted their waiter, who hurried over with a check. Curt signed it to the room, stood and extended his hand to Ellie.

She peered up at him for a long moment, then slipped her hand into his and let him help her out of her chair.

That simple gesture shouldn't have felt like some kind of victory, but it did.

BACK IN THE ROOM, Curt settled into the easy chair. Ellie was grateful; his avoidance of the bed was clearly an attempt to let her know he wasn't going to make any unwelcome overtures. Not that she'd expected him to pressure her. He was Curt, for G.o.d's sake.

Still, when he'd grabbed her in the hallway and spun her around and kissed her...Even then, he hadn't pressured her. He'd startled her, certainly, and she still wasn't sure how she felt about that kiss as she kicked off her shoes and resumed her seat on the bed, leaning back into the pillows she'd propped up against the bra.s.s headboard. That she'd responded to his kiss was only natural-he was her husband, the only man she'd ever loved. But she hadn't expected to feel such need in him, such yearning. She'd thought they were beyond all that by now. He had his car, after all. She had Ghana. They'd agreed to go their separate ways.

Yet a treacherous desire gnawed at her, a desire for Curt to join her on the bed, to arch his arm around her and offer his shoulder to lean on. It would be more comfortable than pillows against a headboard. It would be more...

Loving.

Fortunately, he distracted her from that thought by turning on the TV and hitting the play b.u.t.ton for the DVD. The video biography of her life would keep her from dwelling on any idea that included both Curt and loving.

"Don't cry for me, carpool mother," crooned a man's voice on the soundtrack, accompanied by a montage of pictures that ill.u.s.trated the frantic scheduling of Katie's, Jessie's and Peter's various activities. A photo of a soccer ball appeared, followed by a photo of Jessie in a green leotard and a headdress of large, floppy yellow petals, the costume Ellie had sewn for her when she'd landed the role of a sunflower in a dance recital. A photo of all three children in swimsuits at the community pool. A photo of Peter climbing the jungle gym at the town's toddler playground. A photo of Katie playing the piano at another recital. A photo of Jessie holding a soccer trophy. A photo of the three at day camp, displaying clay models of horses they had made in arts and crafts-although Peter's horse looked more like a Salvador Dali nightmare vision of a melting giraffe. A photo of Peter in his T-ball shirt and a Red Sox cap. A photo of Katie holding a soccer trophy. A photo of Peter holding a soccer trophy. A photo of the bookshelf in the family room, the top surface of which was covered with soccer trophies, several dozen of them.

"I never bought into that philosophy of handing every kid in the league a trophy," Curt remarked.

"It built self-esteem," Ellie argued mildly. "It made every partic.i.p.ant feel like a winner."

"Yeah, but most of the kids weren't winners. Why make them feel like something they aren't? It devalues the trophy."

"I remember how excited our children were whenever they got a trophy. They were more excited by the trophies than by the game."

"Yeah...well, it was soccer," Curt said, then laughed. "How can you get excited about soccer? All you do is run around and kick a ball. Big deal."

She knew he was teasing, so she didn't bother replying.

"Now, this..." He gestured toward the screen, where the girls had spliced in some video footage of Peter, a few years older, hitting a double at a Little League baseball game. Ellie and Curt had been experimenting with their new video cam, and the shots weren't exactly brilliant. But even though the film was as jumpy as a silent-era movie and Peter wasn't always centered in the frame, it was clear that by the time he was eight he had a natural swing and he ran like a jaguar, every bone and joint in his body moving in perfect synchronicity. "Baseball is a real sport."

Tears beaded along Ellie's eyelashes, but she refused to cry. Peter had been such a beautiful, talented child. That he'd died was so wrong. It made no sense. Why couldn't she have died, instead, and he have grown into manhood?

Don't think about it, she ordered herself. She took deep breaths and stayed focused on the screen, as Peter tagged a runner out at second base and a country-sounding song, about sitting in the cheap seats and watching the boys. .h.i.t it deep played on the soundtrack. Ellie had never heard the song before, but she remembered sitting on the hard bleachers at so many games. The winter Peter was seven, Curt had bought her a bleacher cushion for Christmas. She'd used that padded seat until the seams wore out, then mended it with duct tape and got a few more seasons out of it.

Oh, yes-that Christmas. The bleacher cushion was one of the best gifts she'd ever received, more practical than jewelry, more satisfying than a new food processor, as comfortable as a bathrobe but better, because she could use it while watching her children. They'd all loved sports, the girls graduating from soccer to field hockey and softball while Peter played baseball all spring and summer and basketball through the fall and winter. She'd loved watching her children play, especially once she had her padded bleacher seat.

But that was still an awful Christmas. So many years ago, yet the pain of it swept over her, as fresh as a night breeze. The Christmas disaster that year had been about a gingerbread house. And about Peter.

NINE.

Ten years earlier "CAN I HELP?" Peter asked.

Ellie surveyed the mess that had once been her kitchen and decided nothing her seven-year-old son did in the room could make it any worse. Flour had spilled across the table and drifted onto the floor like incredibly fine snow. The shrink-wrapped turkey thawing on the counter had leaked a puddle of pink water that dribbled down into the sink. Jessie and Katie had left their school backpacks on two of the chairs, and a jumble of damp boots lay heaped by the mudroom door. Someone's scarf had been slung over the pantry door, which stood open to reveal the usual clutter of food and utensils crammed onto the shelves. The room smelled of wet wool and dishwasher soap.

The day before Christmas, people's houses were supposed to smell of cinnamon and cloves, evergreens and eggnog. They were supposed to be clean and tidy, ready to welcome the visits of neighbors and relatives. New tapers were supposed to stand in candlesticks and chains of holly were supposed to coil around the staircase railing. People were supposed to be filled with peace. Wasn't that what Christmas was all about?

Ellie was never filled with peace before the holiday. Most years, the frenzy of shopping and baking and planning and budgeting frazzled her so thoroughly that she fantasized about converting to Judaism, just so she could turn her back on the season's insanity.

Things were slightly more insane this year because the girls had prevailed on her to make a gingerbread house. Katie had found elaborate instructions on the Internet. Ellie could bake a serviceable cake using a mix-she was quite capable when it came to adding eggs and a tablespoon of oil-and she believed that whoever invented those sausage-shaped tubes of cookie dough deserved the n.o.bel Prize. However, baking gingerbread from scratch posed an enormous challenge to her culinary skills.

"I could break the eggs," Peter volunteered.

She peered down at her son. His blond hair was hidden beneath his ever-present Red Sox cap, and his sweatshirt also featured the Red Sox trademark, a gothic red capital B emblazoned across his narrow chest. His blue jeans hung loose on his skinny frame, but they were already too short. He must have experienced another growth spurt when Ellie hadn't been watching.

"We don't need any eggs in the dough," she told him. "But if you want, you can whip the cream and vanilla. Would you like to do that?"

Stupid question. Whipping the cream involved the use of her electric eggbeater-a power tool that made noise and moved fast. Of course he would like to do that.

"This is gonna be the best gingerbread house ever," he said a minute later, kneeling on one of the empty chairs and steering the eggbeater through the foamy white cream in a bowl on the table. "Is this done yet?"

"No." She glanced up from another bowl, into which she was measuring sifted powdered sugar. Who sifted powdered sugar, other than the folks who'd come up with this recipe? Ellie didn't even own a sifter. She'd had to race next door, dodging the snow flurries that swirled out of the late-afternoon sky, to borrow her next door neighbor's sifter. "You've got to whip it until it stands in peaks."

"What does that mean?"

"I'll tell you when it's done," she a.s.sured him.

"Danny Barrone is such an idiot," Peter declared as he stared at the cream he was frothing with the beater.

"Oh?" Who was Danny Barrone? And where had she put the mola.s.ses? She spun around, searching the counters until she spotted the dark brown bottle near the microwave.

"He said there's no such thing as Santa Claus. He thinks he knows everything because he's the oldest kid in the cla.s.s. But I think he must be stupid, because if he's so old he should be in third grade, right?"

"That depends," Ellie said, carrying the mola.s.ses and her measuring spoons to the table. "Just because he's older than everyone else doesn't mean he's stupid."

"He's gotta be stupid if he thinks there's no such thing as Santa Claus. Who does he think brings all the presents?"

Was seven too young to learn the truth about Santa Claus? The girls had been diligent about keeping the myth alive for Peter. He was so young, so trusting, so eager to believe. Every year he was the first one out of bed on Christmas morning, shouting throughout the house that the cookies and milk Ellie had left on the table near the fireplace for Santa had been consumed, which proved beyond a doubt that the jolly old man existed. Of course, all those presents under the tree proved he existed, too.

Why not let him live with the fantasy a little longer?

"You know," she said carefully, "different people have different beliefs. Some people don't celebrate Christmas at all. Some celebrate it differently than we do. And some celebrate it the way we do."

"So Santa only comes to people like us?"

Ellie nodded. "He only comes to houses where people believe in him."

"Well, I sure believe in him. Is this peaks yet?"

Peter grew tired of beating the cream well before it stood in peaks. His hand hurt, he insisted. The eggbeater was too heavy. After lifting the appliance out of the bowl while the beaters were still spinning, and splattering vanilla-flavored cream all over the table, he bolted, evidently concluding that viewing television cartoons in the family room was more important than making gingerbread.

Ellie sighed as the kitchen settled into stillness around her, and then read the recipe again. It seemed awfully complicated. She should have gone with one of those prebaked kits or subst.i.tuted graham crackers for gingerbread. But the girls had pleaded with her to make the genuine article from scratch. It would be nice if they'd offered to help-this was their idea, after all-but they were shut inside their bedrooms upstairs, no doubt wrapping gifts or jabbering on the phone. Their school's winter break had begun at three-thirty that afternoon. They'd been on the phone with their friends ever since they'd emerged from the middle-school bus and burst into the house, shedding boots and backpacks and then vanishing up the stairs.

Ellie glanced at the window above the sink. The sky was growing dark and the snow was falling harder. She hoped Curt would get home soon. His firm was having its holiday party that afternoon, and as a partner he had to be a dutiful host and stick around at least until all the a.s.sociates and support staff received their year-end bonuses. He and the other partners also had to make sure no one consumed too much of the holiday punch to drive safely, and had to summon cabs or arrange carpools for those employees who'd exceeded their limits. Ellie wasn't sure what, besides guzzling holiday punch and distributing bonuses, went on at the firm's annual party, but Curt a.s.sured her nothing more tawdry than some harmless flirting took place. "If there's anything X-rated going on," he added, "I don't know about it. And I don't want to know."

Fine. He was nursing a cup of holiday punch and flirting harmlessly while Ellie confronted her culinary limitations without even a gla.s.s of wine to bolster her. She abandoned the dry ingredients for the cream, whipping it with the beaters until it was stiff. She considered hollering for Peter to come back to the kitchen, just so he could see what peaks looked like. But he probably didn't care. He'd helped her with the gingerbread only long enough to confirm that Santa Claus existed.

Eventually, the dough looked and felt right. Following the recipe's instructions, she rolled it into two sheets that weren't quite uniform in thickness but were the best she could produce. Once they were baking in the oven, she searched the kitchen for the templates she'd cut out-four wall pieces, two roof pieces. Why couldn't she have built a gingerbread tent, instead? A pup tent-two sheets shaping an angle, propped up by stale sticks of licorice.

Through the ceiling she heard the thump of footsteps. The girls were clomping back and forth between their bedrooms above the kitchen. Ellie considered summoning them to help her clean some of the mixing bowls and utensils, but it was Christmas Eve. Shrewishness and nagging were not suited to the spirit of the holiday.

So she scrubbed the bowls and utensils herself. Once she had everything balanced in the drying rack, she reread the recipe for the tenth time in preparation for tackling the frosting.

What crazed person had invented gingerbread houses? she wondered. The Brothers Grimm? They wrote all those s.a.d.i.s.tic German folktales about witches devouring children and mothers giving their daughters poisoned apples to eat. Didn't the witch in Hansel and Gretel live in a gingerbread house? And look at what had happened to Hansel and Gretel: they'd died. Or killed the witch. Or something.

Where the h.e.l.l was Curt?

By the time he arrived home, the sky had gone black and an inch of snow covered the ground. Wearing a big grin, he swept into the kitchen from the mudroom, his tie loosened and his hair damp. "Whoa, it smells good in here!" he boomed before sweeping Ellie into a hug.

The baking pastry had managed to fill the air with a holiday fragrance. Her frosting was lumpy, and the unevenness in the gingerbread sheets appeared obvious now that they were cooked. When she'd pulled the trays from the oven, she'd seen that the edges of each sheet had turned a dark, tarry hue and the centers were puffy. Somehow, she didn't think her gingerbread house was going to be up to code.

She hoped it would taste better than it looked-the parts that weren't burned, anyway. And if it didn't, at least she could a.s.sure herself that she'd tried her best. Certainly her effort had to be worth a few mommy points, regardless of the outcome.

She felt a lot mellower about the project once Curt closed his arms around her. She relaxed against the soft cashmere of his coat, which was chilly from the outdoors. The scent of baking mingled with the scent of him, of snow and the night air and his aftershave and...another smell. A flowery smell.

Perfume?

"How was the party?" she asked, easing out of his arms.

"The usual," he said as he pulled off his coat and carried it to the coat closet by the front door to hang up. Unlike his children, he didn't leave his c.r.a.p all over the kitchen. "Everyone had fun. A few people got a little tipsy." He returned to the kitchen, peered at the sheets of gingerbread and then at the recipe. He looked impressed-and ridiculously handsome with his tie dangling loose, his hair mussed and a shadow of beard darkening his jaw. "People were thrilled with their bonuses. That always fills them with holiday cheer."

Ellie caught another whiff of the unfamiliar perfume, faint yet obvious because it didn't belong. "Who threw herself at you?" she asked. She wasn't jealous. She had absolute faith in Curt. She just didn't like the idea of a female colleague drinking too much and nuzzling him. Didn't that qualify as s.e.xual hara.s.sment?

Curt chuckled. "Four secretaries, two paralegals and Gretchen." One of the founding partners, Gretchen was in her sixties and resembled a mastiff. "Moira Kernan just couldn't resist me, and Lindy Brinson made pa.s.ses at all the partners and also a potted plant. Oh, yeah, and Bill Castillo put the moves on me. Whenever he has a few drinks his true bis.e.xual nature emerges."

Ellie scowled. "Does he wear perfume?"

Curt slung his arm around Ellie. "Everyone was throwing themselves at everyone. That's what happens when people get big bonuses and consume a lot of Christmas punch." He pressed a kiss to Ellie's temple, which he knew was one of her most sensitive spots. A reflexive heat whispered through her. "n.o.body at the party was as beautiful as you. Did you know you've got flour on your nose?"

"I do?" She rubbed the tip of her nose.

She must have missed the spot. He moved his thumb gently along the side of her nose, just below the bridge. "So, you're really going to build this thing into a house?"

"The girls asked me to. It's Christmas eve. How could I say no?"

"Like this." He released her, gazed down into her eyes and murmured, "No." Then he bowed and kissed her, a real kiss on the mouth. "I wish you could've joined me at the party, but we've got that d.a.m.n no-guests rule. If I brought you, everyone would want to bring their husbands and wives, their boyfriends and girlfriends and their cousin from Quincy."

"I'd be bored at your party," she said, although being wrapped up in Curt's arms, the taste of his kiss lingering on her lips, was anything but boring.

"Believe me, there's nothing boring about listening to Sue Pritchard sing 'Good King Wenceslas.' She sings it really slow, like a torch song. I think in another life, she had the hots for the good king."

Ellie grinned. Sue Pritchard was the firm's senior-most secretary. She'd been there longer than Curt, and in that time she'd been through three marriages. All her divorces had been handled by Gretchen the mastiff, and Sue had emerged from each one exponentially wealthier.

"Well, some of us actually had to work today," she said, giving Curt a parting hug before she turned back to the table to arrange her templates on the gingerbread. "I saw two kids with upset stomachs, one with what looked like conjunctivitis and one with a splinter. Then I came home and baked."

"Santa will reward your hard work," Curt promised as he headed toward the stairs. "You've been good, for goodness' sake." With that he was gone, announcing to his children that he was home.

Ellie didn't construct the gingerbread house until after dinner-a snack of cold cuts on rye bread. Tomorrow her parents would be coming for dinner; she'd be preparing the turkey, along with stuffing, winter squash, corn bread and steamed beans, and brownies and Christmas cookies for dessert. That plus the gingerbread house seemed like more than enough food preparation to earn her a sleigh full of presents.

The kids didn't mind a supper of sandwiches, anyway. Ellie suspected that they preferred the light meal to a roasted turkey.

After dinner, the children were giddy. Twelve-year-old Katie considered herself the epitome of cool sophistication, but she couldn't conceal her excitement about the holiday. Ten-year-old Jessie veered wildly between preadolescent aloofness and childlike glee. She insisted that the family watch a DVD of Frosty the Snowman, which even Peter considered infantile, followed by a showing of A Christmas Story, which they'd all seen so many times they could recite most of the script along with the characters.

Before bed, the children brought the gifts they'd bought for one another downstairs to the living room and arranged them under the tree. Ellie had explained to Peter a few years ago that while Santa brought most of the presents, people also gave gifts to their loved ones, because Christmas was all about giving. Peter had a tendency to give the sorts of gifts he would love to receive: packages of Gummi Bears for his sisters, baseball cards for his father and-usually because he'd run out of money-a crayon drawing in a Popsicle-stick frame for Ellie. She treasured his drawings and counted her blessings that he never gave her Gummi Bears.

"All right-bedtime," Curt announced at around nine-thirty. He'd changed from his suit into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, and he looked tired and comfortable and glowing with the serenity the holiday was supposed to bring.

The kids exerted themselves to shatter that peace. "It's too early! We're not babies! We can sleep late tomorrow!"

No one was going to sleep late tomorrow, not with Peter rampaging through the house, shrieking that Santa had once again consumed the cookies and left a ton of packages under the tree. "Santa doesn't visit houses where the kids stay up late," Curt warned, and all three reluctantly kissed him and Ellie good-night and trudged up the stairs.

An hour would pa.s.s before they were asleep, Ellie knew. She and Curt couldn't arrange the presents under the tree until the children were in dreamland-especially Peter, since he still believed fervently in Santa, his cla.s.smate's statement notwithstanding.

But that hour of settling-down time was fine with Ellie. It would probably take her close to an hour to a.s.semble the gingerbread house.

"I'll help," Curt offered, rolling up his sleeves and surveying the pieces of gingerbread she'd cut using her templates. "What do you want me to do?"