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bugged him too. But what should she have done? Quit? Why? In her case why not work? They couldn’t have a baby and John had never wanted to adopt one. “It’s not the same if it’s not your own.” “But it becomes your own. Look, we could adopt a newborn, we’re young enough to qualify for the best. A baby would mean so much, sweetheart, think about it.…” Her eyes had glowed when they discussed it, his had always glazed, and then he would shake his head. The answer to the question of adoption was always no. And now he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. In three more months he would have his first child. His own. The thought of it always hit Samantha like a physical blow.
    Samantha tried not to think about it as she reached the top landing and opened her front door. The apartmenthad a musty smell these days. The windows were always closed, the heat was too high, her plants were all dying and she had neither thrown them out nor taken care of them. The entire apartment had an aura of unlove, of disuse, as though someone were only changing clothes there, but nothing more than that. And it was true. Samantha hadn’t cooked anything more than coffee there since September. She skipped breakfast, ate lunch with clients as a rule, or with other executives of Crane, Harper, and Laub, and dinner she usually forgot. Or if she was absolutely starving, she grabbed a sandwich on the way home and ate it in the waxed paper, juggling it on one knee as she glanced at the news on TV. She hadn’t seen her plates since the summer and she didn’t really care. She hadn’t really lived since the summer, and sometimes she wondered if she ever would again. All she could think of was what had happened, how he had told her, why he had left her, and that he was no longer hers. Pain had given way to fury, which led to sorrow, which grew to grief, which reverted once again to anger, until at last by Thanksgiving her emotions were so frayed at the edges that she was numb. She almost blew the biggest campaign of her career, and two weeks before that she had had to go into her office, lock the door, and lie down. For a moment she had felt as though she were going to have hysterics, faint maybe, or perhaps just put her arms around someone—anyone—and burst into tears. It was as though there were no one now, no one to whom she belonged, no one who cared. Her father had died when she was in college, her mother lived in Atlanta with a man she found charming but whom Sam did not. He wasa doctor, and pompous and self-satisfied as hell. But at least her mother was happy. Anyway, Sam wasn’t close to her mother, and it wasn’t to her that she could turn. In fact she hadn’t told her of the divorce until November, when her mother had called one night and found Sam in tears. She had been kind, but it did little to strengthen the bond between them. For Sam and her mother it was too late. And it wasn’t a mother that she longed for, it was her husband, the man she had lain next to, and loved, and laughed with for the last eleven years, the man she knew better than her own skin, who made her happy in the morning and secure at night. And now he was gone. The realization of it never failed to bring tears to her eyes and a sense of desolation to her soul.
    But tonight, cold as well as weary, for once Samantha didn’t even care. She took off her coat and hung it in the bathroom to dry, pulled off her boots, and ran a brush through her silvery gold hair. She looked in the mirror without really seeing her face. She saw nothing when she looked at herself now, nothing except a blob of skin, two dull eyes, a mass of long blond hair. One by one she peeled off her clothes as she stood there, dropping the black cashmere skirt, the black and white silk blouse she’d worn to work. The boots she’d pulled off and thrown on the floor beside her were from Celine in Paris, and the scarf she unknotted at her neck was a black and white geometrical pattern from