Romance

DEAR ABBY: I have been with my love for more than five years. Our lives have not been easy, but whose has? God decided to bless us with a little one while we were still too young, but we work hard to provide the best for our blessing. Somewhere down the road the romance disappeared. I often wonder if he despises me for getting pregnant or for keeping our son. My love had big plans and still does, but he seems miserable. I know I can't force him to make the effort to change his own life and pursue his dreams.

DEAR ABBY: I am 19 and have a 10-month-old daughter. Her dad and I broke up five months ago because we were fighting a lot, most of it caused by him. I have been dating a new guy, "Ron," for three months. Lately, my baby's dad has been trying to convince me he has changed, and he wants me to take him back. I still have feelings for him, but I'm in love with Ron. I don't want to lose what I have for a shot in the dark, but what if my ex really HAS changed? Plus, the relationship I have with Ron is a long-distance one. As much as I'd love it to work, I don't know how to deal with the distance.

BEAUTY AND THE Baseball Player have called it quits. New York Yankee (booo!) Derek Jeter , 37, and actress Minka Kelly , 31, (best known for playing cheerleader Lyla Garrity on the dearly departed TV show "Friday Night Lights") have broken off their three-year relationship, according to JustJared. "They care about each other and it was amicable," a source told JustJared. "They're still friends. They still really care for each other. " Reps for the stars wouldn't officially confirmed the split, but they are known for keeping their relationship private.

Correction: An obituary Wednesday for singer and songwriter Nickolas Ashford, who died Monday at age 70, incorrectly described his song "Ain't No Mountain High Enough. " The song was a hit for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell before Diana Ross recorded it. Nickolas Ashford, 70, the songwriter and singer who, with his wife, Valerie Simpson, penned hits such as "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and "Let's Go Get Stoned" for Ray Charles while carrying on a successful career as an R&B duo, died of cancer Monday.

Here's a love story that does not end happily ever after. Instead of a castle, the beloved went to the "big house" for a heist they orchestrated during their romance. When the affair began, she was a former bank teller and he was a felon convicted of bank robbery. On Tuesday, Stephanie Jordan, 23, of Deptford, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Camden to three years and four months in prison for her part in the 2010 robbery of a gas station owner. Jordan had worked as a teller at TD Bank at 1450 Clements Bridge Rd. in Deptford until she was fired in September 2009, according to court records.

Her dream is to row in the Olympics. Twice she has come so close - only to be named an alternate. She has invested eight years of her life in this quest. Now she is 30, a high school crew coach working for her ex-boyfriend. Sparks still fly between them, yet the Olympic flame still flickers. What now? Such is the predicament of Abi Brooks, the protagonist in Backwards , an independent film being shot in and around Philadelphia, especially Boathouse Row, the epicenter of the city's rowing culture.

Personal pronouns flew fast and furious at the Mann Center on Friday night, as Death Cab for Cutie and Frightened Rabbit offered their manifold takes on the distance between you and I. Death Cab's Ben Gibbard, the wide-eyed romantic of the evening's two frontmen, spent two hours pushing toward the perfect union, beginning with "I Will Possess Your Heart," which built over the course of several minutes from an insistent whisper to...

And damn, did he have to have such dreamy bedroom eyes? . . . He had the kind of gold-flecked irises that attracted a woman and sucked her right in. He might as well wear a sign around his neck that read: Come and get it, sinful indulgence right here! And boy was she ready to go get it. - From Witch's Fire by Tabitha Shay You've seen the steamy reads - heroes with chiseled chests pressed against gorgeous heroines - sold in grocery checkout lines or already in the hands of your wife or mother, especially as summer gets into full swing.

By Pam Jenoff Doubleday. 288 pp. $24.95 Reviewed by David W. Marston Even though it's teeming with Nazis, this book - unlike most mysteries - lacks a specific bad guy. Instead, it has a clock. A rare, antique "anniversary clock," to be sure, rewound only once every 400 days, but still just a clock, an unlikely device to sustain a book-length mystery. There are plenty of potential bad guys: heroine Charlotte Gold's former lover Brian Warrington, now an elite Wall Street lawyer, who persuades the still-smitten Gold to interrupt her grimy Philadelphia public-defender career to defend accused war criminal Roger Dykmans before the Hague; Warrington's shadowy expatriate brother Jack, who becomes Gold's cocounsel; and even Dykmans himself, now an immensely successful American businessman - and the key to Brian's chances of making partner at his law firm - charged with turning his brother Hans over to the Nazis to save himself.

Alfred Jacob Miller was one of a half-dozen American artists, some foreign-born, who introduced the Western frontier, particularly indigenous cultures, to American art. This happened mainly in the 1830s, when Miller and his contemporaries ventured beyond the Mississippi River into the Great Plains, as far as the Rocky Mountains. The first to go, perhaps the most prolific and best-known Indian painter, was George Catlin, a native of Wilkes-Barre, who traveled up the Missouri River for 2,000 miles with an American Fur Co. expedition in 1832.