Excerpt of Keys to the Castle by Donna Ball

When you're too old to believe in fairy tales, sometimes
love takes you by surprise

Sara had met Daniel at one of those ultra-exclusive
Manhattan parties for which you had to have, not only an
invitation, but three references
and a body guard to get in. Sting was there, and someone
said Oprah was supposed to show, but she never did. Sara
was there as a guest of a
prospective client who wanted to impress her with his
connections– or, more likely, didn’t want to miss the party
and, since Sara was only in
town for one night, saw no choice but to bring her along.
There must have been two hundred people in attendance.
The party spilled out of the penthouse apartment and onto
the roof top terrace,
which was decorated with thousands of tiny white lights and
exotic orchids that would never survive the cool, windy
spring night. Sara preferred
to remain indoors where the party was slightly less raucous,
and she was glancing at her watch for perhaps the fifth time
in the past half hour
and wondering whether she had been here long enough to
politely take her leave, or whether anyone would notice at
all if she simply slipped out
the door, when a voice spoke behind her. It was male,
faintly but exotically accented,, and gently chiding. “No,
no it’s far too early for you to
leave. If you do, you’ll never be invited to an A-list
party again.”
She forced a polite-professional-party smile to her lips
before she turned to greet the intruder. “I can’t tell you
how unhappy that would make
me.”
She remembered thinking that he wasn’t particularly
handsome. His nose was too sharp, his forehead too high,
his lips a trifle too full. He
wore his dark hair unfashionably long and loose about his
shoulders. He was tall and thin, and wore a white silk
shirt, light enough to see
through, untucked over faded jeans. She thought the
embroidery at the cuff was pretentious. But there was
warmth in his cocoa eyes, and
something that she could only describe as an intense and
brilliant interest, as though everything about the world
fascinated him; as though he
couldn’t get enough of learning about it.
She, on the other hand, was carefully cool and precise
and disinterested. She wore Vera Wang. Her dark hair was
upswept to display her
long neck– which she knew was her best feature– and teardrop
diamond earrings. Her makeup was impeccable. She was
elegant, in control,
and unapproachable, a look that she had mastered, along with
so many other lies, over the years. Yet somehow the look
had not worked with
him.
And although she generally would have, at that point,
politely excused herself and moved away, she was intrigued
enough to add, “How do you
know how long I’ve been here, anyway?”
“Because I’ve watched you since you entered,” he replied,
“forty two minutes ago. I’ve watched you check the time on
five different occasions
and I’ve watched you finish that silly orange drink a little
too fast. So I’ve brought you another. What is it, anyway?”
She lifted an eyebrow, hesitating a moment before setting
aside her empty glass and accepting the full one he offered.
“It’s a mango martini,”
she said.
“Sounds dreadful.”
“It is.”
He laughed. “Then you shall simply stand here and hold
it and pretend to enjoy the hospitality and inventiveness
of our hosts, eh bien?”
“You’re French,” she observed, placing the accent.
“I used to be,” he admitted. “I’ve lived in North
America now for so many years that I have to practice my
accent for ten minutes in the morning
before I can go about in public.”
That made her laugh a little, and the small lines at the
corners of his eyes deepened little as he observed, gently,
“There now. That’s so much
better. You have the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.”
And before she could even react to that, he thrust out
his hand and announced, “I am Daniel Orsay. I am a poet,
and currently the darling of the
avante-guard literary set, or so I’ve been told. Please
don’t apologize that you’ve never heard of me. I’m a very
bad poet.”
She accepted his hand, and he held her fingers, in the
way of Europeans, as she tilted her head at him in skeptical
amusement. “But
charming.”
“Which is precisely how one gets invited to parties such as
this without being either rich or famous.”
He held her hand a little too long, which threatened to
make her flustered. She withdrew her fingers and dropped
her eyes, taking a sip of the
too-sweet martini. “I’m Sara,” she said, looking up at him
again. “Sara Graves. And I’m not rich or famous either,
I’m afraid.”
“Impossible.” He seemed to use French pronunciation
solely to amuse her, his accent exaggerated. “Do you think
we might have stumbled
into the wrong party by mistake? Surely, it is so!” Then,
smoothly lapsing back into easy cocktail chatter, “ What do
you do, Sara?”
“I sell things.” The stupid martini was giving her a
headache, possibly because she was sipping it too fast again.
“What kinds of things?”
“Things that people don’t need and don’t want.”
“You must be very good, then.”
Her lips tightened in acknowledgment. “I am.”
“But not very happy, I think.”
She was annoyed, and wanted to argue, but she didn’t know
what to say. So she took another gulp of her drink and drew
a breath to take her
leave but he forestalled her in the very instant she was
about to speak. Head inclined toward her curiously, eyes
filled with that deep and genuine
interest, he inquired, “Where is it that you sell these
unwanted things to people who don’t need them?”
“Chicago,” she told him, finishing off her drink. “I
work for Martin and Indlebright Marketing in Chicago.” She
flipped a business card from her
tiny vintage evening purse and gave it to him. “Call us
sometime. We’ll make people believe you’re a good poet.”
He said, “Chicago?” He seemed genuinely surprised.
“How can you be happy there? You have the sea in your eyes.”
That took her aback, but she recovered quickly,
plastering another determinedly distant smile on her face.
“It was nice to meet you, Daniel.
Good luck with your poetry. ”
He fingered her business card thoughtfully as she turned
to move through the crowd. “Goodbye, Sara Graves of the sad
smile and the sea-
watching eyes,” he said softly. “I will call you.”
But it wasn’t that casual promise, which she did not
expect to be kept, that caused Daniel Orsay, poet, to linger
in her memory long after she
left the party, after she left Manhattan, after she returned
to Chicago and tried, with grim determination, to step back
into the routine. It was that
he knew. Even before she did, he knew that the life she had
always believed she was meant for was over. And by the time
he tried to call her, it
was too late.