The Way You Look Tonight Read Free Page A

Virginia,’ she was saying. ‘That’s seven times in three years. And that last girl. Poor thing. She was a nurse with a little kid. She’s still hanging on, but they don’t expect her to live.’
    Deborah cringed. She supposed it was only natural that the serial killer would be mentioned at the party, but this was supposed to be a festive occasion and the discussion of violent death threw a definite pall over the evening. So much for holiday cheer.
    Deborah moved on, turning down the thermostat five degrees and seeing that her guests were comfortable. Few were friends of hers. Most of them came from Steve’s world, and she sensed a lot of them thought Steve had married beneath himself. Steve told her she was imagining things, but she felt their distance. Part of it was her own fault, though. She wasn’t the life of the party or the confident socialite. In fact, she had come to hate the Christmas parties, which had been a pleasant ritual she and Steve started the first year they were married and over the past seven years had turned into an ordeal. Maybe this one would be the last, Deborah mused. Maybe next year she could talk him into having only a few close friends over before Christmas.
    She retreated to a corner of the living room, Campari and soda in hand. Light refracted off the layers of smoke. Even the lights on the Christmas tree seemed muted, as if circled by fog. Her eyes stung beneath her contact lenses and although she had given up smoking two years ago, Deborah now felt an overwhelming desire for a cigarette – anything , even if it were one of the reduced tar and nicotine brands she used to hate. She would be tempted to smoke again until the room aired out, which would take a couple of days, she thought unhappily. Thank goodness she and Steve had only one party a year. If the house smelled of smoke too often, she’d never control her urge for nicotine.
    She knew she should get out there among the guests and socialize, but her head was starting to hurt, she was dead tired after all her cooking, and she was feeling more and more self-conscious in the white wool dress with scoop neck and gold belt that had drawn Steve’s look of censure earlier. ‘Don’t you think that’s a little…revealing?’ he’d asked gently. ‘Why not wear the black velvet – the one I bought you just last year?’ How could she tell him the black velvet dress felt bunchy and hot, its sleeves too tight, its skirt too long even for her five-foot-eight frame? Still, she would have changed to please him if the doorbell hadn’t rung just then with the arrival of their first guests.
    Deborah smiled across the room at Barbara Levine, her friend and Steve’s associate in the Prosecutor’s office. She’d met Barbara the first year she worked as a secretary in the office. One dreary November Sunday they ran into each other in a video store, both looking for Dr Zhivago . Barbara had already found the movie and was paying the rental fee when Deborah went to the desk, asking if it were available. The salesgirl told her they had only one copy. ‘Oh, I guess I’ll look for something else,’ she said, disappointed, when Barbara suddenly suggested, ‘Why don’t you come home with me and watch it?’ Stunned at such an invitation from the seemingly all-business, hard-as-nails lawyer who had intimidated her from day one in the office, Deborah had demurred, but Barbara insisted. They watched the movie in Barbara’s apartment, eating microwave popcorn (‘the only thing I can cook,’ Barbara confided) and by the end of the movie they were both in tears when the handsome Zhivago fell dead in the street while chasing his oblivious, beloved Lara. Later they had gone to an Italian restaurant together, and from that day on, Deborah had lost her fear of Barbara. They’d become friends, both with a deep love of animals, romantic movies, and