Billy turned off the oven and plopped into his brown overstuffed chair across from the television. He rested his black designer sneakers along the side of his oak cocktail table. Today he made the biggest decision of his life. Thank God, Alexandra gave him a chance to explain. He hadn’t planned on exposing the trouble he had gotten himself into over the years. It was a thing of the past, and that’s where he wanted to keep it. But when Ralphie came knocking on his door, his past had come back to haunt him, once again. With all the banks in New York City, it would figure he picked the one that Ralphie’s daughter worked at. This time, she was married. He remembered when he first borrowed the money, Ralphie wanted him to take out his daughter. If he had done that, Ralphie would have seen it as an investment into his daughter’s future. The trouble was, Billy never liked her. He could never forget Alexandra. She was his first and only love. How many times was he going to pay

The next morning, Alexandra did something she hadn’t done since she was a teen. She sat at her kitchen table, with a mug of coffee and her house and cell phone, sitting on the chocolate brown linen napkin, waiting for it to ring. The night before she hardly slept. Words kept floating through her mind all night long. When she spoke to Billy, she had to have all her thoughts and emotions flowing in the same direction. She hadn’t given Billy a chance to explain the encounter that she had heard. Their relationship was built on trust and love. There was no doubt the love was there, but the trust, she couldn’t get past that. There were so many questions she wanted answers to. Glancing down on the piece of paper towel, which she had folded in half and written on, she looked over the questions she wanted to ask him. She made certain her favorite red pen sat on top of the paper. This was the last time she wanted to go through this. At eight o’clock, her phone rang. Billy’s numbe

When the Bee Gee’s song, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”, played on the radio, Alexandra turned it off. If she would have listen to it, she’d be crying all over again. The past two weeks have been hard on her. She hadn’t spoken to Billy at all. He continued to call her every day, leaving her a message on her cell phone, but she refused to talk to him. There were just too many unanswered questions. Alexandra should have known better than to get herself involved. But it was too late to second guess her decision. She could kick herself in the ass for trusting him. It wasn’t that he lied to her, he just chose to leave out the finer details of his life, the important things, which led her to think about what else he wasn’t revealing. Wandering around the house, she couldn’t relax. Damn it, she missed him. She wanted to believe in him. She wanted him. Her cell phone rang and she ran across the room for the phone, only to be disappointed to see the word unavailable scrolled acro

Yes, their adventure began. Over the course of the next few weeks, Alexandra and Billy searched for possible locations for their business venture. Out on her own, Alexandra found a store front, which stood vacant between a hair salon and dry cleaners. From the outside, it looked like a shoe box, but inside there was over a hundred feet of open area. To the right stood a long mahogany bar and the kitchen was located in the back of the cafe. The highlight of the place, the selling point was the brick oven, in the basement that had been dormant for years. Excited with her find, she raced to Billy’s house, thrilled to see his black BMW sat in the driveway. She wanted to bring him to see the property. She had placed a thousand dollar binder down earlier to hold it. This was a rare find and she would be damned if she’d let it slip through her fingers. Ring…ring….ring Why wasn’t he answering the door? Quickly she tapped his number into her cell phone, not one, not twice but three

Alexandra left the front door unlocked and sat on the floor, staring into the blazing fire waiting for Billy. Last night she barely slept as thoughts of what to say to Billy irked her. A white legal pad sat on her lap. Earlier, she had separated the page into two columns: positive and negative. The list of positive’s outweighed the negative side, with the first thing on the negative side, liar. Beneath liar, listed the usual things that annoy most women; not putting down the toilet bowl seat, eating and leaving his mess on the table, having to be told a half a dozen times to throw out the garbage and falling asleep immediately following making love. Pulling her knees into her chest, she bit her tongue, holding back her tears. No way would she shred a tear in front of Billy. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she was upset. But Dee was right. She needed to give him a chance to explain before she went over the deep end. Not showing an ounce of vulnerability would