Cuddling with Louis on the sofa, Anne soon fell asleep with her head resting on his shoulder. She awoke to find herself lying there with a quilt over her, pulled up to her chin. All was dark except for the light from the lamps, and she realized that it was very late. "Oh!" she exclaimed, sitting up.

"You missed the end of the movie." She saw that Louis was sitting in the recliner beside the sofa, looking at her.

She yawned. "How long was I asleep?"

He glanced at the clock. "A couple of hours. Can I get you anything? Something to eat or drink?"

"Oh, no, I'm fine. Gosh, I guess I'd better be getting home!"

"I guess so. Of course, if you want to stay the night, that would be all right."

"Really?" she grinned.

"Sure. You can have my bed. I'll take the sofa."

"Um, that wasn't exactly what I had in mind." She walked to him and sat in his lap, putting her arms around his neck. "Aren't you attracted to me, Louis?"

"Uh, sure." He grinned.

She ran her hands down the front of his shirt, playing with the buttons. "I'm attracted to you, too." She sighed. "But if you don't like me that way, it's all right."

"Oh, no, that's not true at all! I do like you that way - very much!" He flushed a deep crimson.

"I'm sorry." She stood up and took a few steps away from him. "I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I'll just go now."

Without a word, he took her hand and led her out to her car. "Well, thanks for having me over."

He smiled at last. "Thank you for inviting me to dinner, and tell your parents thanks. Everything was delicious."

As she drove back home, Anne wondered how the movie had ended. Oh well, she told herself. If she wanted to watch it again with Louis, she was sure he wouldn't mind.

As Louis watched Anne drive away, he wondered whether he'd just messed up a really good thing. With Anne sitting on his lap, her arms around his neck, he'd felt desire swell within, but it had been tempered by fear that he wouldn't be good enough. The image of her pretending to be satisfied with him, only to laugh at him later with her friends, filled him with dread.

He smiled fondly as he remembered covering her with the quilt and tucking it under her chin. Fast asleep, she'd looked so vulnerable, so fragile, all he'd wanted to do was to take care of her, to protect her. Yet after she'd awakened, he'd seen another side of her, one that both excited and terrified him.

It turned out to have been an amniotic fluid embolism that had killed Jane Seymour Tudor. A bit of fluid had entered her bloodstream, leading to respiratory failure, shock, and coma. An emergency Cesarean section had saved baby Edward, but Jane had never regained consciousness.

Anna had told Anne the news one morning at work, her eyes wide with shock. "Charles said Henry was so heartbroken he couldn't even make the funeral arrangements by himself. He had to go with him to chose the casket, the clothing, the music - everything!"

"When's the funeral?" Instead of vindictive satisfaction, all Anne could feel was numbness.

"Friday. There are out-of-town relatives."

"And who's taking care of the baby?"

"Jane's sister, Beth."

Anne went through the rest of that day in a daze. As much as she'd hated Jane, she'd never wished anything this bad on her. Pregnancy and childbirth were safer than ever these days, she'd always heard. Complications were so much rarer than they'd been a century ago.

Yet Jane was dead at twenty-five, and Henry was beside himself with grief. Funny, she thought bitterly, as he'd responded to her own miscarriage with, not sorrow, but rage.

For a man, was losing a wife worse than losing a child? Perhaps, if it was a wife he truly loved.

That evening, she called Kitty and told her the news.

"Holy shit!" the blonde squealed. "You mean she's actually dead, as in, no longer among the living?"

"That's exactly what I mean. The funeral's Friday."

"Aw, that's sad. Too bad I can't go. Tom and I are headed for Vegas this weekend, so I'll have to spend Friday getting ready. I can't wait! You've never been to Vegas, have you?"

"Nope." Anne remembered Louis' telling her that was where his ex-wife Marie and her lover Axel lived now - with his little girl Reese.

"You don't know what you're missing!"

"Maybe not. I'm still reeling from the news about Jane. That was such a shock!"

"But you hated her anyway, didn't you?"

"Of course I did, but I never wished her dead!"

"Well, just think about it like this: they both got their just desserts. She's gone, and he lost the woman he left you for."

"But there's also a motherless baby involved."

"Oh, yeah. That part is sad, but they have relatives to help out, don't they?"

"I guess so."

As the conversation turned to other topics, Anne wondered how Louis would react to the news. He called her a couple of nights later to ask if she wanted to go to dinner with him that weekend.

"Anywhere you want," he told her. "Maybe we could walk around the mall afterwards. I would suggest a movie too, but I'm trying to save my money for when Reese gets here in December."

"Oh, that's fine! What about Popeye's?"

A moment of startled silence followed. "Are you serious?"

"Sure. Their red beans and rice is out of this world!"

"Oh!" He laughed. "For a minute there, I was afraid - never mind. But seriously, Anne, I wasn't thinking fast food. You deserve better than that."

She suggested a medium-priced restaurant, and he seemed OK with that. Then she told him she'd just received shocking news. "My ex-husband's wife just died."

"Really? Oh, no!"

"My friend at work, Anna, told me. She's dating Henry's best friend. Jane was pregnant, and she had some complication. I forget what it's called. Anyway, they were able to save the baby, but they couldn't save her."

"That's terrible." His voice was soft. "That must be her obituary I saw earlier in the paper. Just a second." She heard papers rustling in the background. "'Jane Tudor, twenty-five. Is that her?"

"Yep. The funeral's Friday."

"That's awfully young." Louis sighed. "And I thought I had problems!"

"Yeah, me too." Anne thought about Jane's embalmed body lying in her casket at the funeral parlor. It occurred to her that she'd never seen Henry when he was really sad before. She'd seen him happy, excited, bored, enraged - but never sad.

He must seem like a completely different person now, she concluded.