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vividly that Nicholas actually shivered and got goose bumps up his arms.
    They were lying side by side on the narrow couch when Nicholas asked Paige about her mother. She’d mentioned her at the diner, and from what Nicholas could tell, the elusive Mrs. O’Toole drifted across Paige’s consciousness like a shadow from time to time but Paige wasn’t willing to share the details. He knew that the woman had left; he knew that Paige had been five; he knew that Paige didn’t remember her very well. But she had to have feelings about it. At the very least, she had to have an impression.
    â€œWhat was your mother like?” Nicholas asked gently, so close his lips were brushing Paige’s cheek.
    He felt her tense almost instantly. “Supposedly she was like me,” Paige said. “My father said she looked like me.”
    â€œYou mean you look like her,” Nicholas said, correcting.
    â€œNo.” Paige turned and sat up on the end of the couch. “I mean she looked like me. I’m the one that’s still around, right? So I’m the one that you should be comparing her to.”
    Nicholas didn’t argue with that logic, but he sat up and leaned against the opposite end of the couch. He ran his fingers over the smooth black leather. “Did your father ever tell you why she left?”
    Nicholas watched the color drain from Paige’s face. And almost as quickly, a flush of red worked its way up her neck and into her cheeks. Paige stood. “Do you want to marry me or my family?” she said. She stared at Nicholas, who was speechless, for several seconds, and then she smiled so openly that her dimples showed and the honesty of it reached all the way into her eyes. “I’m just tired,” she said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. But I really have to go home.”
    Nicholas helped her into her coat and drove her to Doris’s apartment. He parked at the curb and clenched his hands on the steering wheel while Paige fished in her bag for the key. He was so intent on silently reviewing Paige’s comments about her mother that he almost did not hear her speaking. He had frightened her away by asking her to marry him, and then just when she was warming up to him again, he’d blown it by asking about her mother. She had been so flustered by that one stupid question. Was there something she wasn’t telling him? A Lizzie Borden kind of story? Was her mother crazy, and was she unwilling to mention that just in case Nicholas thought it might be hereditary? Or was Nicholas crazy himself, for trying to convince his conscience that this gaping hole in Paige’s past couldn’t really matter in the long run?
    â€œWell,” Paige said, facing him. “It’s been some night, hasn’t it?” When Nicholas didn’t look at her, she turned her gaze to her lap. “I won’t hold you to it,” she said softly. “I know you didn’t mean it.”
    At that, Nicholas turned and pressed his own spare key into Paige’s palm. “I want you to hold me to it,” he said.
    He pulled Paige into his arms. “When will you be home tomorrow?” she whispered against his neck. He could feel her trust opening like a flower and passing through her fingertips to the places where she touched him. She tilted her head up, expecting his kiss, but he only pressed his lips gently to her forehead.
    Surprised, Paige drew back and looked at Nicholas as if she were studying him for a portrait. Then she smiled. “I’ll think about your question,” she said.

    Paige was waiting for him the next day when he got home from the hospital, and things between them were back to normal. He knew it before he even opened the door, because the smell of butter cookies was seeping over the threshold, into the hall. He also knew that when he’d left that morning, his refrigerator had held little more than a moldy banana loaf and a