Chapter Four
Dressing the Part
Melanie woke to discover that Rick had slipped out of the apartment while she was sleeping. She thanked every god that she could think of for this simple blessing. Today was her day, one of the precious few that were entirely hers. She had been dreading the prospect of extricating Rick from her life if he had proven to be one of the clingy types who expected breakfast. She chalked his early departure up in the positive column of her mental tally.
After throwing on her robe, the morning’s first priority was the coffee pot. She paused to swipe her finger across the laptop’s track pad on the way to the kitchen so that it would be awake when she came back to it. The scent of hazelnut began to fill the apartment as the percolator did its life-giving work. Leavi
