more children.”
He looked worried again as she cried, “Is that what the doctor said?”
“No,” she said furiously, and blew her nose, “he said ‘Congratulations!’” Simon could only laugh at her as she paced the room frantically. “What about the store? Simon, think of it. And what about the children?”
“It will be good for them,” he sat down peacefully in a chair, looking as though he had conquered the world, “Nicholas will be in college next year, and I think he'll be pleased for us anyway. And it might do Sasha good not to be the baby anymore. In any case, she'll have to adjust to it. And the store will be fine. You can go in for a few hours every day, and you'll have a nurse afterward …” He already had it all planned as Zoya turned on him. She had worked so hard, and Sasha's moods were always so precarious, this was the one thing she didn't need in her life, a baby to upset the balance.
“A few hours? Do you think I can run that place in a few hours? Simon, you're crazy!”
“No, I'm not,” he said with a quiet smile, “I'm crazy about my wife though …” He beamed up at her, looking like a boy again. At forty-three, he was going to be a father. “I'm going to be a daddy!” He looked so pleased that it took the wind obt of her sails, as she sat down miserably on the couch and cried harder.
“Oh Simon … how could this happen?”
“Come here,” he moved closer to her and put an arm around her shoulders, “I'll explain it …”
“Simon, stop that!”
“Why? You can't get pregnant now anyway.” It amused him all the more because she was always so careful, but destiny dealt the cards differently sometimes, and he would not let her change that. She had already hinted darkly that things could be “changed,” and he knew what she meant, but there was no question of it. He was not going to let her risk her life aborting the baby he had always wanted. “Zoya … sweetheart … calm down for a minute and think it out. You can work for as long as you can. You can probably sit in your office at the store every day until the baby comes, as long as you don't run around too much. And afterward, you can go back to work, and nothing will be changed, except that we'll have a beautiful little baby of our own to love for the rest of our lives. Is that so terrible, sweetheart?” It didn't seem it when he explained it that way, and he had been so good to her children that she knew she couldn't deny him his own. She sighed and blew her nose again.
“He'll laugh at me when he grows up, he'll think I'm his grandmother instead of his mother!”
“Not if you look anything like you do now, and why should that change?” She was still beautiful, and looked almost girlish at forty. Only the fact that she had a seventeen-year-old son ever gave her age away at all, and she was so proud of him that she talked about him all the time. But otherwise, no one would have guessed her to be more than in her late twenties, or at the very most thirty. “I love you so much,” Simon reassured her again, and then Zoya's face paled as she thought of Sasha.
“What'll we tell her?”
“The good news,” he smiled gently at his wife, “that we're having a baby.”
“I think she'll be very upset.” But that proved to be the understatement of the century. Neither of them was prepared for the hurricane that hit Park Avenue when Zoya told her about the baby.
“You're what? That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard! What am I going to tell my friends for God's sake? They'll laugh me right out of school, and it'll be all yourfaultl” She raged as Zoya looked on unhappily.
“Darling, it doesn't change how much I love you. Don't you know that?” she said helplessly.
“I don't care! And I don't want to live here with you, if you have a baby!” She had slammed her door and disappeared later that afternoon, after school. It had taken two full days to discover that she was staying with a friend. Zoya and Simon had called the police by then, and she met them in the friend's living room with a look of defiance that met