“A dummy play?”

“It’s called a demi plié,” Abby chimed in.

“Ah, okay,” Michael said. “Is that like Demi Moore?”

The girls giggled, even though Michael was certain they had no idea who Demi Moore was. Abby, on the other hand, did know who Demi Moore was, but there would be no humor found in any of Michael Roman’s terrible jokes this day.

“We do it at the barre,” Emily added, matter-of-factly.

Michael recoiled in horror. He grabbed his chest. “You guys are too young to go to a bar!”

The girls rolled their eyes.

“Unlike their father,” Abby said under her breath.

Michael picked up the newspaper, held it up for cover.

“Come on, girls. Let’s get our dishes in the sink and get ready,” Abby said.

As Abby got the girls dressed for ballet class, Michael slammed a quartet of Advil, finished his coffee, scanned the Daily News. There was a brief article about the trial of Patrick Ghegan, recapping the original story about the murder of Colin Harris, which had made the front page of both the Daily News and its bitter rival, the New York Post. There was even a mention of “tenacious assistant district attorney Michael Roman.” It wasn’t exactly front page and above the fold in the Times, but he’d take it.

A few minutes later Charlotte and Emily walked back into the kitchen. They were both wearing pink leotards and white quilted ski jackets, even though it was nearing fifty degrees outside. As a rule, Abby kept them bundled up until about May 1 every year. She was, after all, the one who nursed the girls through their bouts with sore throats, coughs, colds, and ear infections.

“Let me see,” Michael said.

Charlotte and Emily both spun slowly around, hanging onto the edge of the table for balance, as close to being en pointe as they could get.

“My pretty ballerinas.”

The girls gave Michael a hug and a kiss. Abby did not. It told Michael all he needed to know about the height, depth, and breadth of the dog house in which he was now boarding.

As he watched Abby’s car pull out of the driveway he made a second mental note to get a box of Godiva chocolates in addition to the flowers.

BY TEN-THIRTY HE WAS gaining a semblance of a day, and everything he had to do. He had to be in court at two o’clock, and after that he had to stop by and check on the progress of an office on Newark Street. A group of Queens and Brooklyn lawyer friends were opening a small legal clinic, working strictly pro bono and, as a favor – a favor he now regretted offering – Michael had taken on part of the burden of helping get the place renovated, painted, and ready for business.

He got onto his computer, logged onto the DA’s office secure website. It had been a relatively slow night, it seemed. In addition to a pair of robberies in the 109, and a suspected arson in Forest Hills, there had been one homicide. A woman named Jilliane Suzanne Murphy had been stabbed to death in her apartment. She was a forty-one year old stockbroker, a divorcee, no children. There were no suspects.

New York, Michael thought, closing down the web browser. The city that never sleeps.

MICHAEL WAS JUST ABOUT out the door, bagel in fist, when his cellphone rang. He looked at the LCD screen. It was a private number. It wasn’t Abby, it wasn’t the office, so how important could it be?

The phone rang again, loud and insistent and annoyingly cellular. Take it or leave it, he debated. His head was killing him.

Ah shit. He answered.

“Hello?”

“Michael?”

A familiar voice, although Michael had a hard time placing it. “It is. Who’s this?”

“Michael this is Max Priest.”

The name brought him back. Way back. He had not spoken to Priest in nearly five years. Priest had done some electronic and photographic surveillance work for the DA’s office, had wired more than a dozen confidential informants for Michael and his team.

Back in the day Michael always considered Max Priest to be a true professional – prudent, honest, and as forthright as one can be and still maintain the anonymity needed to do the kind of work he did.

While the two men were friendly, always cordial, they were not what either of them would consider friends. Michael instantly wondered how Priest had gotten his cellphone number. On the other hand, considering Max Priest was an expert on all things electronic, it was no real surprise.

“How is suburban life treating you?” Priest asked.

It was a good question, one to which Michael still did not have an honest answer. “It took a while, but we’ve settled in,” he said. “Suburban life is good. You should try it.”

“Not me,” Priest said. “If I don’t hear a car horn honk every five seconds I can’t sleep.”

They made shop talk for another minute or so, then Michael brought the conversation back.

“So what’s up?”

Michael heard Priest draw a deep breath. It sounded like a prelude to something. Something bad.

Michael had no idea.

Priest chose his words carefully, related them in a calm, reassuring manner. It didn’t help. The subtext of what Priest had to say was something Michael had always feared, but never thought would actually happen.

And, for the third time in his life, the world dropped out from beneath Michael Roman’s feet.

ABBY SAID SHE HAD known the minute they stepped into the restaurant. It wasn’t that she was blessed with any sort of prescience, it was just that Michael Roman – despite being one of the hottest young ADAs in New York, a job all but dependent on playing cards close to the chest – was terrible at hiding anything when it came to affairs of the heart. She saw it in the way he couldn’t seem to finish a complete sentence. She saw it in the way he fawned over her, how the ice cubes rattled slightly in his glass of water, the way his leg seemed to itch every ten seconds or so. She saw it in his eyes.

As soon as they were seated, Abby told him that she knew he was going to propose. And that she had something she needed to say before he popped the question.

Michael had almost looked relieved. Almost.

Abby steeled herself, and told him that she could not have children.

For a moment, Michael said nothing. It was, Abby eventually told him, the longest moment of her life. She had prepared for it, had told herself that if there was a moment’s hesitation on Michael’s part, if there was any indication that he no longer wanted to spend his life with her, she would understand.

“It’s okay,” he said.

It really was.

Two months later they were married.

IT WAS ABBY’S IDEA to try and adopt an Estonian child. Michael could not have been happier. At first, everything seemed to go smoothly. They contacted an agency in South Carolina, the only agency on the east coast that handled Baltic adoptions, and learned that married couples and single men and women over twenty-five years of age could adopt from Estonia. They learned that there were a number of waiting children. They were also told that before an adoption could be approved, the adopting couple needed to go to Estonia and meet the child. This was fine with Abby, and especially with Michael. He had long yearned to visit his parents’ homeland.

But one day, as they got closer to the event, they got the bad news. They learned that the total process, from dossier submission until the time adoptive parents receive the child, averaged six to twelve months. And that waiting children were generally over five years old.

They agonized over the decision, but in the end they agreed that, while children five and over certainly deserved loving homes, they wanted a baby.

The process seemed hopeless, until Max Priest put Michael in touch with a lawyer, who knew a lawyer, a man who could speed up the process, and would know how they could adopt a child under the age of six months. For a price.