Nine months ago, Brinkley and Taubman were heli-skiing on a nearby mountain when the craft suddenly turned sharply during landing and tumbled 200 feet down a slope. Brinkley sustained only bruises and a sprained wrist. Taubman, the most seriously injured of the six people on board, suffered 12 broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung—and considers himself lucky. "No one should have survived that crash," he says. "It`s a miracle we`re alive."

At the time of the accident, Taubman and Brinkley were newly introduced friends. He was a divorce with a son, Wyatt, 8. Brinkley was in the 10th year of what many outsiders thought to be a dream marriage to rock star Billy Joel, 45. As she eventually told Taubman, the reality was different; the marriage, Brinkley said, "pretty much disintegrated the last two years." The reasons were many: Joel wanted to remain on the East Coast, Brinkley longed to move West, closer to her home state of California; she wanted a tight-knit family with Alexa, their only child, he was often on tour. Despite the affection they still felt for each other, she said, the marriage "wasn`t working."