Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(10)

Not New Nick, the midlife crisis stranger, who tossed aside his wife like a used tissue.

“Did you call that guy I told you about?” Trilby asks.

“What guy?”

Trilby tilts her head meaningfully in Sadie’s direction.

Oh. The child psychiatrist. Lauren had asked Trilby for a recommendation, thinking it might be a good idea for Sadie to talk to a professional. Trilby’s own kids are completely well-adjusted, but she’s plugged into the network of moms who rely on child-rearing experts for everything from kiddie yoga to sex education.

“I haven’t called him yet,” Lauren tells Trilby, “but I will.”

“Don’t wait too long. You know everyone around here goes away in August—even doctors.”

“I know.” Making a mental note to call first thing tomorrow, Lauren moves a pile of unopened mail—including a letter from her husband’s divorce attorney—from one end of the counter to another. She’ll get to that later, too. Much later. Ugh.

“Hey, how was lunch with your sister today? Was it good to get out?” Trilby opens one of the glass-paned top cupboards and takes out two wineglasses. She knows her way around Lauren’s kitchen as well as Nick ever did.

“It was pretty good, actually. Sadie hung around with the baby and the nanny while Alyssa and I went out to a sushi place.”

“Grown-up food in the city. Lucky you. I ate two bites of Dylan’s corn dog at the pool snack bar for lunch. And about twelve Popsicles.”

Sounds good to Lauren, who can just imagine what Nick would have to say about corn dogs and Popsicles for lunch. The man who used to order—and hoard—his own personal boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout down the street is now adverse to pretty much anything that’s not natural or organic or whatever his new healthy standards require.

“Did you see anyone interesting?” Lauren asks Trilby.

“At the pool? What do you think?”

“You never know.”

“Right. I suppose our neighbors Bill and Hillary could pop over to do a few laps, or Martha Stewart could show up to work the snack bar.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know it’s not.” Trilby hoists her butt onto the counter as Lauren opens a drawer to look for the wine opener. She casts a cautious glance in Sadie’s direction before saying, “I didn’t see her there.”

Lauren nods, fishing out the corkscrew she and Nick used to use every Friday for an at-home date night when the kids were young. That, too, fell away.

She might be past wishing Nick hadn’t left—she doesn’t want him back now—but that doesn’t stop her from wondering how this happened to them; when, exactly, it all went wrong.

Was it when, out of nowhere, she found herself pregnant a third time? When Nick was struggling not to lose his job as most of his department was laid off in a corporate restructuring? When his father died? When he met Beth?

What a midlife crisis cliché, all of it.

“Beth hasn’t been around the pool for a few days now,” Trilby comments. “Maybe she got a new job.”

Beth had, according to Trilby, been laid off for a few months now—a fact Nick neglected to mention to Lauren and possibly to the kids—not that they’d be likely to tell her. They don’t like to bring up their father’s girlfriend in her presence.

“Or maybe,” Trilby goes on, “she’s away on vacation.”

“I doubt that.”

“Why?”

“Because he”—no names in front of Sadie—“isn’t off until the middle of August. He told me he’s going to Martha’s Vineyard then.”

“With her and her kids?”

“He didn’t say. But I doubt he’s going alone. And he’s not only not taking his own kids, but this means he won’t be around the whole week after they get out of camp.”

“Why then?”

“He said that’s the only week the house was available.”

Trilby shakes her head, catches Lauren’s eye, and mouths the word “bastard.”

Happily remarried now, Trilby went through a bitter divorce of her own a decade ago. She gets what Lauren’s dealing with—most of it, anyway: the isolation and desolation, the other woman lurking in the wings, the anguish of giving up dreams, accepting a new, unwanted lifestyle, dividing up a household.

But Trilby and her first husband didn’t have children together. She escaped the constant heartache on their behalf, the burden of solo parenting, the lonely weekends and holidays without her kids, the custody upheaval—although Lauren realizes she’s yet to experience the worst of that.

Until June when they left for camp, her children were supposed to spend Wednesday nights and every other weekend with Nick. But he was consistently late for weeknight visits, stuck at the office—or so he claimed. And on weekends, Ryan and Lucy were so involved with sports and parties and extracurricular events that those encounters, too, became sporadic. Meanwhile, Lauren wasn’t any more thrilled about sending Sadie off alone for the weekend than, she suspects, Nick was to take her on.

He didn’t press her on any of it. Maybe he will, once the divorce is final. But for the summer, he seems content to pop in to see Sadie just often enough to disrupt the household.