Snowblind Read Free

long time she’d resisted the urgings of her friends to date again. When she’d finally given in, she had gone on a brief flurry of awful first dates and exactly three disappointing second ones. After the last of these, she’d been sitting alone at a table in Krueger’s Flatbread and had just started to laugh. She had covered her mouth, hiding her grin and stifling her laughter until it subsided, and only then had she realized that she had begun to cry.
    Niko had been eating at the bar with Miri, then in the fourth grade. They knew her, of course—the year before, she’d been Miri’s teacher, and Allie had certainly noticed Niko. It would have been impossible not to, handsome as he was with his regal, sculpted features, olive skin, and eyes the same copper as his daughter’s. And here she was making a public spectacle of herself. Hideously embarrassed, Allie had risen and made a beeline for the exit, smiling politely as she passed them at the bar.
    “Ms. Schapiro,” Niko had said, in that silky voice that made her pause.
    “Mr. Ristani,” she had managed.
    He had not smiled, not attempted to placate her. Instead, he had said three words that had alternately infuriated and inspired her for more than a week afterward.
    He had said, “Laughter is better.”
    Troubled, she had mumbled something and departed and for a week had avoided even looking at Miri in the halls at Trumbull Middle School. And then she had dug through the school phonebook and called him out of the blue on a Friday night and asked him if he remembered what he had said to her in the restaurant. It had surprised her that he did.
    “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “And to tell you that I agree.”
    They had been dating for more than a year. Darkly handsome, kindhearted, and staggeringly good in bed, he was everything she could have hoped for. Her mother ought to have been ecstatic that Allie had found a man who loved her. The woman had always wanted her to date a doctor. But, as she had made very clear, she had meant a Jewish doctor, not an Albanian one. Fortunately, Allie had stopped giving a crap what other people thought of her choices on the day she became a widow.
    Things weren’t quite so simple for the boys, or for Miri. It was for their sake that she and Niko had kept their relationship fairly quiet, wanting to spare their children the gossip at school and to save Miri from being interrogated by her mother, Niko’s ex-wife, Angela. Tensions still lingered between Niko and Angela, who was a nurse at the hospital where he worked.
    “Hey,” Niko said, giving her a nudge. He searched her eyes. “I thought this was your favorite movie.”
    Allie took a handful of popcorn from the bucket on his lap. “One of them.”
    “You seem far away.”
    “No,” she said, smiling. “I’m here.”
    She kissed his cheek out of reflex, just a bit of reassurance that all was well, and saw that Miri had been watching the exchange closely. Allie arched a querulous eyebrow and Miri gave her a shy smile and returned her attention to the movie.
    A gleeful flutter touched her heart; Miri was onboard! Several of her friends had told her that she needed to focus on her relationship with Niko, that the kids would just have to deal with it because eventually they’d all be grown up and off to college and she couldn’t let their needs dictate her life. But she wanted Miri to like her, to feel comfortable with her, and she wanted—no, needed—Jake and Isaac to feel the same about Niko. If she and her handsome man had any chance at a future, it had to include their children.
    Tonight had been the beginning of an effort in that direction, carefully planned. Dinner and a movie, in and of themselves, were not a big deal. But the night would end with Miri and Niko sleeping over, with Miri in the spare room and Niko in Allie’s bed. She had to fight back her own awkwardness at the thought of it so that the kids would not read it in her face and think she and