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When had Porter moved on? When had he stopped caring about the minutiae of Streamline’s progress?

Once upon a time, their hard work, the fruits of their late twenties and early thirties, their late nights really had been the only thing standing between Streamline and failure. Their labor, their devotion, had been the thing that could make their dreams real.

But that had been a long time ago. Before Sasha.

Before Amy.

It didn’t have to be that way anymore. Porter was proof of it. Porter and Sasha. At some point, without Jeff’s noticing, Porter had left behind the old days. He hadn’t stopped caring about Streamline, he’d only decided that Streamline didn’t need his undivided attention.

He’d understood that the company would march along without his undying and constant vigilance.

“How’s it going?” Sasha asked in the background, and Jeff imagined Porter rolling his eyes or signaling her to hang on or pipe down just a sec so he could finish up with Jeff the crazy loser who couldn’t manage to convince the woman he loved to be with him.
Because he had the staying power of a goddamned chipmunk
.

With a falling sensation as distinct as lead plummeting in his gut, he remembered that
just yesterday
, he’d promised Amy he’d ride that train with her until he convinced her to come home. Only he hadn’t, had he?

God, no wonder she was pissed. Not demanding. Not irrational. She was right. Exactly fucking right.

He was a workaholic cretin who didn’t deserve her. Didn’t remotely deserve wonderful, sexy, creative, expansive,
sweet
Amy.

His Amy. His second chance at
really living.
Not this crazy late-night-airport-inhabiting run-when-they-call crap he’d come to take for granted as life, but the long, slow, leisurely comings and goings he’d briefly experienced on the train with her. A promise of what life could be if you
hung up the fucking phone
.

But it had been hard enough to convince her to give him a second chance. How would he ever talk her into letting him near her, let alone giving him a third chance?

What if she couldn’t forgive him?

His heart contracted agonizingly, the fear of losing her as big and dark as the windows that looked out on the nearly deserted runways. He looked over and saw the other lone businessman rest his head on the back of another, identical black vinyl seat. This life stretched out forever in front of him—this set of dead-end choices.

The phone had drifted away from his ear, and he clutched it back to his head. “Porter?”

“Uh-huh?”

Jeff didn’t want to think about what Sasha was doing over there to give his best friend and business partner that abstracted sound to his voice. “Can you do me a big favor?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you call Rob in the morning and tell him he’s in charge of working this one out for himself?”

Suddenly, he could tell, he had Porter’s undivided attention. “Hell, yeah,” his friend said. “Nothing would give me more pleasure.” He could hear the smile in Porter’s voice.

“And Porter?”

“Yeah?”

“Thought maybe I’d take some of the vacation I have coming.”

“Good man.”

“You can manage without me?”

“Hell, we’ll have divided up your computer equipment by the time you get back.”

Jeff laughed, sharp relief. Took a deep breath for what felt like the first time in years. “And can we set up a meeting when I get back? To talk about bringing in that management team?”

“You serious?”

“Never been more serious in my life.”

A deep intake of breath on the other end of the phone that Jeff sincerely hoped was a result of Porter’s joy at the thought of bringing in reinforcements, and not whatever Sasha was so quietly up to over there.

And then Porter said, “Holy fuckin’ hell, yeah!” and Jeff figured he’d better hang up on that note while there was still enough ambiguity to go around. He had work to do. An early-morning train to catch. Miles to go, and promises to keep.

Amy’s head was full of television static, white and gray snow. Her eyes burned, and her lids were heavy. She hadn’t slept at all, because the noise in her head had kept her awake. It wasn’t voices or recriminations. It was the sound of the train on the rails and the sound of Jeff’s phone ringing.

Now she was on the commuter rail, and she could hear the shush of the train, which made sense, and the phantom trill of Jeff’s phone ringing, which didn’t. She wondered how many nights you had to go without sleeping before you started hallucinating.

“Where’s your friend?”

The guy with the heavy Brooklyn accent who’d harassed her and Jeff knelt up suddenly in the seat in front of her. Great. Just what she needed. A total stranger interrogating her about her relationship with Jeff when all she wanted to do was hide in a corner and cry over what she’d lost and regained and lost again.

“He went home.”

Brooklyn raised both thick black eyebrows. “Did you forgive him?”

Was he for real? “Why are we having this conversation?”

“You owe me,” said Brooklyn guy. “You bring your reality show on the train, you can’t just take it off the air whenever you want. I need to know what happens.”

He was older than she’d guessed, maybe fifty, with a heavy, jowly face that looked Italian in origin, with its first-thing-in-the-morning shadow. He had kind eyes. There was a gentle curiosity on his face, and she felt a pressure in her chest that she understood was her need to talk to someone, anyone, about how much Jeff had hurt her.

“What happens,” she said slowly, “is that the guy is a workaholic, and when some crisis happens at work, he runs off to fix it and the girl remembers why she couldn’t live with him to begin with.”

“Huh. So, like, he just
left
?”

“You know I don’t
really
owe you anything, right?” she asked, more for her own benefit than his. “I don’t
have
to tell you.”

He nodded. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I know.” Yet it was comforting, this total stranger who somehow, mysteriously, had become their—she’d been about to think
godfather
, but she decided that was vaguely discriminatory and settled on
guardian angel
instead.

“So he just left,” Brooklyn repeated.

She nodded.

“And you—just let him go?”

“Well, what the hell else was I supposed to do? This is what he does. He makes promises he can’t keep. He spends most of his time working. He thinks the job is
that important.
”

“You could tell him he’s wrong.”

“I
have
told him—”

She stopped. She thought back to the ringing of the phone, their intimacy cooling rapidly as the familiar sound floated in the air. To the train ride two days ago when she’d first fled from his endless conversation with his admin. To a hundred, maybe a thousand other phone calls. All the times she’d let him put her aside. Let him put work first.

She was well trained. The phone rang, and she melted obligingly into the shadows.
You want to abandon me? Again? Sure! Let me just get myself out of the way here.

She had told him yesterday that she’d asked him a million and one times to work less, that she’d gotten sick of the sound of her own voice, but now that she thought about it, she knew the truth. That voice had been in her head. Rattling around, a shout, a scream. When it had come down to it, she had squelched her complaints and let things go rather than rock the boat.

She hadn’t seen the connection because she hadn’t associated each minor instance of Jeff’s departure, his mini acts of abandonment, with her father’s many goings. But that’s what it was, right? As hard as she had tried not to be her mother, she’d missed the big picture. Every time he left and she gave him permission, every time he tuned her out and she complied, she made it a little easier for him to think he could keep going like this forever.

What would have happened if she’d stopped acquiescing? What would have happened if she’d stopped playing nice? If just once, instead of disappearing into her own head and letting him have the conversation, she’d wrenched the phone out of his hand and hung up the call?

She’d never know now, would she?

Unless—

Unless it was not, in fact, too late.

She looked at her watch as if it would shed some light on the larger issue of whether this revelation had come in time.

She could get off at the next stop, call in sick to work, get a GO Shuttle, and head to the airport. Find him. Tell him. Maybe it wouldn’t change anything, but at least she would know.

The train was approaching White Plains. She stood up, lurching forward into the seat, nearly smacking Brooklyn in the face with her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” he demanded. “Don’t go. I’ll shut up. I promise. I was just trying to help.”

She smiled at him, her stranger on a train, her guardian angel. “You helped.”

“So where are you going?”

She stepped into the aisle.

“Home.”

Chapter Eight

She hung on to Brooklyn’s seat as the train swayed and pulled into the station, and then she heard it again.

Jeff’s phone. Behind her.

What?

“I like happily-ever-after endings, myself,” said Brooklyn to no one in particular. “I like romantic comedies. Not those dark little dramas at the Sunshine Cinemas, where someone has to end up dead to teach everyone a lesson about pride going before a fall.”

Riiiing
.

“Do you hear that?” she whispered.

“What?”

“That sound. The phone ringing.”

Brooklyn was grinning like mad at her. Maybe because she was mad as a hatter herself.

People were climbing onto the train and making their way into her car. She shrank back into her seat. Even over the sound of footsteps and people settling themselves in, the ringing was clear.

It was getting closer, unless she really was hallucinating. Unless she really had lost her mind. She turned slowly.

“Mind if I sit here?”

That was Jeff’s voice, and it was attached to Jeff. Her noodle legs gave out, and she collapsed back into the seat.

Jeff looked exhausted. There were circles under his eyes and a generous scruff along his chin and jaw. And there was something in his face. Contrition and determination and, wow, she had never seen him look that nervous. Not when he’d first approached her in a Peet’s Coffee, cockier than she usually went for. Not when he’d asked her to move in with him, a genuine question but one he hadn’t ever doubted her answer to. Not even when he’d shown up on the train on Tuesday morning, half apology and half certified-Jeff surety.

Now he looked green with anxiety. He looked the way she felt.

He leaned down, and when he spoke in her ear, his voice was rough from whatever combination of fatigue and nerves he was packing. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Is this seat taken?”

She managed to get enough of her muscles and nerves to cooperate that she could slide over and make room for him. Brooklyn had disappeared. She couldn’t see the top of his head. He might not be tactful, but apparently he was discreet.

Jeff sat, bringing his heat with him. Lack of sleep had chilled her to the bone, and she wanted to lay her head on his shoulder and beg him to hold her.

“I came back,” he said.

Noise rushed in her ears, like wind on a ski slope or a train passing through a valley. She had to lean her hot cheek against her cool hand to collect herself. This was what she had wanted, but the reality of it was overwhelming. “Yeah.” It was the best she could manage.

He ran both hands through his hair, standing it on end. “I’ve been a crazy idiot,” he said, a pileup of words. “I’ve done everything wrong. I’ve put the job first and you last and— Look. I know I don’t deserve a third chance. Hell, I probably didn’t deserve a second chance.”

Slowly, dumbly, she was making sense out of the shock of the last few minutes. He had come back. He was here.

“I came back because I need you to give me another chance. When I climbed on this train two days ago, I was going nowhere. In a big fat fucking hurry. And then I sat down next to you and—and all of a sudden, even though I was riding in circles, everything made so much sense.”

He reached out and took her hand, his fingertips painting teasing lines on her palm. Waking her up out of her stupor. “These last few days, riding the train with you, I’ve been alive. I’ve been grateful. I’ve laughed more and cared more, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like I was moving forward, instead of being carried backward, away from some goal I can’t see. And I realized:
This
is my reason for being. This is what I want to do. I want to be with you. Really
be
with you.”

The frozen parts of her were thawing, and the import of his words, not only their literal meaning, was starting to penetrate her core.

“I’m going to take some time off. When I get back, we’re going to hire a management team at Streamline. The bulk of the work, the worst of the every day—it won’t be my problem anymore. There will be slack. I’ll be able to walk away. Ignore the phone.”

She felt a flash of elation and then a suffocating wash of terror, like someone had dumped cold water over her. Would he be able to walk away? Could he ignore the phone? What if she wasn’t enough for him and, having given part of Streamline away, he resented the hell out of her?

“I love you, Amy. I know it isn’t easy for you, but I really, really need you to give me another chance. I don’t know what number we’re on now, maybe it’s way more than three, but whatever it is, I need you to give me one.”

There were tears in her eyes, emotion choking her, as she said, “I don’t want you to give up Streamline. You love that company—”

“No. I love
you.
And I’m not giving it up. I’m pruning it back, bringing it in line. I’m making it what it should be—a job, not the center of my universe. And—” He took a deep breath and squeezed her hand. “I’m asking you to sacrifice too. Because believe me, I know what it’s like to have a job that’s really important to you. I know how much courage it must have taken you to come out here, and I want you to know, I’m not telling you, I’m asking you—like really
asking
—how you’d feel about—”