'Are you sure?'

'Of course! You know I do. Please, let's not start talking about the children, or I'm going to feel very homesick and sad.'

Four storeys below Ed and Annie's hotel room, a cab was honking impatiently. On the other side of the street, a rowdy, open-windowed party was in full swing. Every half an hour or so, hotel guests would wander up and down the corridor; one even tried to open their door with his key-card.

But still Annie and Ed remained very soundly, very deeply asleep. They were lost to the sleep of exhausted parents, over-toured tourists and deeply satisfied, reconnected lovers.

The headboard had been well and truly bounced. The household routine, the children's timetables, all the stresses and strains of running a family together had been completely obliterated by fifty-eight minutes of increasingly free and abandoned love-making.

They had been with each other fully, with their absolute attention, absorbed in all the ways of making one another thrill without any distractions.

Now they were fast asleep: skin salty with dried sweat, hair messed and limbs thrown out, carelessly entangled, across the bed.

Until the sound of Annie's phone tore through the room, forcing her to surface from her deep, deep sleep. She s.n.a.t.c.hed it up.

'Hi,' she said in a whisper, just awake enough to register that the phone hadn't woken Ed.

'Mum, it's me,' Lana said and burst into a volley of sobs.

'What's the matter? Are you OK?' Annie asked, now as awake as if she'd been doused with cold water.

'No! No, I'm not OK.'

Lana sounded almost hysterical.

'Lana, where are you?' Annie asked, getting out of bed and hurrying to the bathroom. She closed the door, turned on the lights and tried not to panic.

'I'm at Elena's. And he's gone. He's gone for good. I'm never going to see him again ...' Lana couldn't say any more because she was so overcome with sobs.

'Sit tight, babes, just sit right where you are. I'll be there in ten minutes. OK?'

'No. No, it's OK, I just wanted to-'

'Don't be silly,' Annie interrupted, 'I'm coming over. Of course I'm coming. You've got to have someone to put the kettle on. And I'll bring hankies. I don't think there are any in the flat. You can't blow your nose on toilet paper darlin', it makes it all red.'

For a moment, Annie could hear snuffling and gulping down the other end of the line.

But then Lana managed, 'Thanks, Mum.'

As quietly as she could, Annie tiptoed into the bedroom. By the light shining from the half-open bathroom door, she rummaged through the overnight bag she'd packed in haste for the hotel, found tomorrow's 'sightseeing in Manhattan' outfit and slipped into it, then slid into her sensible tourist pumps.

She scribbled Ed a bedside note: 'Had to go comfort Lana in middle of night. I was right about Taylor creep! Sleep baby, call me when you're ready for breakfast and I'll join you. Love A xx'

Then as quietly as she could, she closed the hotel door behind her and slipped out of the lobby and into the street.

On the side streets, all was peaceful, just a couple or two heading home after a night out. But out on Fifth, it was still busy. Yellow cabs nose to tail, looking for that big fare from a nightclubber with a long journey back.

On Elena's street, Annie stepped into the brightly lit glare of an all-night grocery store and bought Kleenex, those strange Lipton's teabags which everyone seemed to think were so English, and an industrial-sized bar of chocolate, although she already knew that American chocolate just wasn't the same.

As soon as Annie exited the lift she heard the apartment door unlocking and there stood Lana, in skimpy pyjamas, looking totally fraught.

Annie held out her arms and hugged her.

'You were right,' Lana moaned into her ear, 'everything you said about him was right. He's a terrible arrogant selfish guy, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. It hurts ... it really hurts.'

Annie steered Lana back into the apartment and sat her down on the sofa bed, arm tightly around her daughter, to hear the very raw, very worst of it.

Lana had really liked him, really trusted him. Over the past two days, they'd been having s.e.x. Annie felt her toes curl at this news, but she didn't say anything, just let Lana carry on.

When Elena had come back to the apartment at 2a.m. or so tonight, Taylor had woken up and got dressed. Lana had asked him if they were going to see each other tomorrow, and he'd shrugged, said he was pretty busy and anyway, she was going back to London soon ...

'What's the point? He asked me, w-w-what's the p-p-point?' Lana's shoulders heaved with sobs as she said this.

That's very cruel and very unkind,' Annie said rubbing her hand soothingly up and down her daughter's back. In her head, Annie was silently raging: You slept with him?! You slept with that arrogant prat?! How could you?!! I told you ... I warned you to go home alone until you knew him better!

Annie didn't think Lana had slept with anyone else before. There had been close encounters of the teenage kind, but now she'd gone and actually slept with this ... this specimen.

And the first time was after drinking wine her mother had paid for! It just got worse and worse.

'I shouldn't have let you go out with him after dinner yesterday,' Annie complained, 'I knew you'd had wine ... but he said it was just coffee and then he'd walk you back.'

'I liked him so much though, Mum. It wasn't the wine, and you wouldn't have been able to change my mind.'

'I know baby, I know,' Annie said, but still she was kicking herself. How could she have let her daughter be hurt like this? Anyone older than 25 would have been able to spot what a t.o.s.s.e.r he was. Ed hadn't wanted her to be too harsh, but Ed had been wrong too.

Annie's thoughts were jam-packed with plans of revenge. How could she organize for Taylor to wake up one morning with the words 'I am a jerk' tattooed on his forehead? How could she have him walk down Fifth Avenue naked? There must be a way.

Annie broke open the teabags, the tissues and the chocolate: all the ingredients a romantic crisis of this magnitude required.

When Lana had drunk half a cup, her sobs subsided a little; from frantic, racking bursts, to small, tearful, hiccuping sobs.

'How come we've not woken Elena?' Lana asked quietly.

'If she only went to bed at 2a.m., she's probably deeply asleep just like we should be.'

But even when they'd snuggled down into the sofa bed Annie trying not to mind too much that Ed was sleeping with utter abandon in king-sized bliss they found they were both too awake to sleep and Lana wanted to talk anyway.

'Who was the first person you ever slept with, Mum?' she asked in a small voice out of the darkness. 'Was it my real dad?'

Annie smiled to herself, she liked the way Owen and Lana now called Ed 'Dad', totally naturally as if they'd been doing it all their lives, and Roddy was given the honorary t.i.tle of 'my real Dad'.

Annie and her children had lost Roddy many years ago now. 'Lost' didn't feel like the right word. It wasn't that they'd misplaced him carelessly. He hadn't casually wandered off never to be seen again, the way some dads do ... Annie's for instance.

No. They'd lost Roddy after a tragic accident. In a small, calm hospital room, with a view of the hospital car park and the busy ring road beyond, life support had been switched off, disconnected, unplugged and wheeled away.

Life support.

That's just what Annie was trying to give Lana now.

She'd been unable to give life support to Lana's father, but she was d.a.m.n well going to be here for every moment Lana needed her. Just the way Roddy would have been.

Annie considered the question carefully: 'Who was the first person you ever slept with, Mum? Was it my real Dad?'

It would have been romantic to answer: 'Yes.' To say that Roddy had been her first love and the very first person she'd made love with.

But it wasn't the truth.

Maybe for Lana's sake, it was lucky it wasn't the truth. Maybe Lana would feel a little comforted to hear that her mum had gone through something not so entirely different to this.

'Your dad was the third person I slept with,' Annie broke the news gently, 'there was someone first who I was totally crazy about and it lasted about a year or so. He was at Art College with me, but he dropped out and moved away. When we broke up, I thought I was going to die of a broken heart. I really did. I thought I was going to cry myself to death. It was awful.' Annie reached over to stroke Lana's hair.

'And then?' Lana asked, her back still turned, but obviously interested in what her mum was going to say next.

'Well then, I was all numb and traumatized and I didn't care about anything, so the cla.s.s Romeo just scooped me up for a wild fortnight. I was crazy about him too, but when that ended it didn't hurt at all, because I was still too upset about the first guy. And just at that point ... that's when I b.u.mped into a very attractive, dark-haired, blue-eyed actor.'

'My real Dad?'

'Yeah. Just when you're heartbroken and not really looking, that's when you meet the really, really good guys. So you'll need to keep a sharp lookout from here on in.'

Lana gave a half-hearted laugh but then in a choked voice, added, 'I thought he was a really good guy. I did, Mum.'

A forehead tattoo wouldn't do for Taylor, it really wouldn't. Annie's mind ran through all the other possibilities: running him over, b.o.o.by-trapping his camera so it blew off his head, hiring a hit man ... This was New York: how hard could it be to find a hit man?

Chapter Twenty.

The rose seller: Red shirt with ruffles (Flamenco! Flamenco!)

Black jeans (Old Navy sale)

Black pointed shoes (stolen from cousin)

Amla hair oil (Dabur)

Total est. cost: $65

'I think you both movieee starrrrs.'

When Annie crept back towards the sofa bed after an early morning bathroom visit, Lana woke up and immediately burst into tears. 'Oh, it's all true, isn't it?' she asked mournfully as she pulled the sheet over her face.

Annie sat beside her and stroked her back. 'Why don't you come back to the hotel with me? Have breakfast with us. You'll feel much better once you've washed your face and had something to eat.'

'But what will Dad say?'

'About what?'

'About the whole Taylor thing. I mean, we were just having dinner with you on Friday night. It's only Sunday morning and I'm already dumped,' she wailed.

'Ed will only say nice things. You know he will. He'll feel very sorry for you and want to cheer you up. So c'mon, wash face, nice outfit and we'll go and have a lovely breakfast.'

This was Ed's last day in New York as he was leaving very early on Monday morning. There were many special things he'd planned to do on his last day: a music museum visit, the Empire State Building at sunset once again, a candlelit dinner in a tiny Jewish restaurant. But now all these plans came with a terribly sad teenager in tow.

Ed and Annie totally wanted Lana to come with them. They were hoping to cheer her up and could never have left her weeping by herself in the apartment. But the day wasn't as either of them had imagined. Lana was a sighing, tear-stained presence. She tried very hard not to cry all over the sparkling city views, but letting her drink a c.o.c.ktail turned out to be a vast mistake.

Finally, right in the middle of dinner, she declared a terrible headache and Annie and Ed found themselves gulping down the remains of their meal so they could hurry her back to Elena's.

'Do you want me to stay with you, my darlin'?' Annie asked with as much big-heartedness as she could muster at the apartment door.

Fortunately Elena was there to intervene. She put her arms around Lana and insisted that she would be in charge of her for the night.

'I don't think Lana wants to go out,' Annie warned.

'No. I stay in too,' Elena replied, 'but you two must go out. Lana and I look after each other. Single girls have to stick together. You two lovers go off and enjoy Ed's last night in New York.'

'Are you honestly single?' Annie asked Elena, 'have you not made up with-'

Elena shook her head vigorously and waved away any further questions about Sye.

'But ...' Annie tried to protest.

'Go out!' Lana told her. 'Or I'm going to feel even worse.'