Goodbye To All That (47 page)

“Does that make me a bad person, that I like to channel-surf?”

“You’re not a bad person,” she assured him. “Neither of us is bad. We’re just people, that’s all.”

“So. Can I see you again?”

She leaned across the console, planted a quick kiss on his cheek and said, “Call me.” Then she swung out of the car and entered her building.

Inside the vestibule, she watched through the glass door as he started the engine and backed out of the visitor space. She followed his tail lights until they disappeared around the side of the building and all she could see in the glass was her own faint reflection. Turning away, she unlocked the inner door and climbed the stairs.

This is my home
, she realized. If Richard had asked her to come home, she would have had to say she
was
home. This building, this stairway, this corridor. The welcome mat. The metal door. The tiny kitchen. The ugly shag carpeting. The old stereo and her rack of classical music CD’s. The futon. The platform bed on the other side of the bedroom door, with drawers for storage built in underneath it.

This is my home,
she thought.
I’m stuffed, and I’m tired, and I’m happy,
and
I’m home.

(Continue reading for author biography)

Judith Arnold can’t remember a time when she wasn’t making up stories. Her older sister taught her how to read and write by the time she was four years old, and she’s been at it ever since. A detour in college, thanks to a charismatic professor, led her to spend most of her twenties writing plays, which were professionally produced around the United States and in Canada. But she eventually returned to her first love—prose fiction—and sold her first novel,
Silent Beginnings
, shortly before her thirtieth birthday. (She found out she was pregnant with her first son the same week she made her first sale. Both the book and the baby were October releases. She and her husband nicknamed the baby “Noisy Beginnings.”)

Since that first sale, Judith has sold more than eighty-five novels, with more than ten million copies in print worldwide. She’s been a multiple finalist for Romance Writers of America’s RITA ® Award and the winner of RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice Awards for best Harlequin American Romance, best Harlequin Superromance, best Series Romance and best Contemporary Single Title Romance. Publishers Weekly named her novel Love In Bloom’s one of the best books of the year, and her novel Barefoot In the Grass has appeared on recommended reading lists at hospitals and breast cancer support centers.

A native New Yorker, Judith lives near Boston. She considers her sons her two greatest creations, but she’s pretty proud of all her books, too.