The Summer Swap

Chapter 3

Kristen

Kristen tightened her grip on her phone, glanced over her shoulder to check that Winston and Todd weren’t following her, and slid silently into her old bedroom. It looked the same as it always did, mostly because no one ever slept in it. Kristen herself had only slept in it a handful of times since her marriage, and that had been early in their relationship at Thanksgiving when Theo had a rare night off and had been able to celebrate away from the city. They’d had sex in this very bed, although Kristen hadn’t been able to relax because she was always waiting for Theo to be called back to the hospital. Coitus interruptus. It was a characteristic of their relationship. Drinks with friends, walks along the Charles River, dinner at their special restaurant on Beacon Hill, sex—thanks to the demand of Theo’s job, everything inevitably ended before it was supposed to. Her entire life was a cliff-hanger. It was a wonder they’d managed to have one child, let alone two.

She sometimes joked with her friends that the reason she and Theo were still married when so many of their acquaintances were getting divorced was because they hadn’t spent enough time together to grow tired of each other. Marriage interruptus. They’d built a life that worked for them. Or so everyone thought.

But no one really knew what was going on inside someone else’s marriage, and that was true of hers. No one knew how lonely she was, and she was careful to give no hints. She smiled, she laughed, she played the part of a happily married woman even though most of the time she felt so alone and isolated she might as well have been living on a desert island with only a few palm trees and the odd seashell for company. There were days when she’d wondered if she was clinically depressed, but she knew deep down that she wasn’t.

She was grieving for her father and had no one to share that grief with. Her mother didn’t want to talk. Her children were busy with their lives. Her husband prioritized his patients and didn’t seem aware that underneath her carefully groomed exterior his own wife was seriously injured, too. At her lowest point she’d fleetingly wondered whether stepping in front of a car might be a good way of getting his attention. Maybe then he’d notice that she wasn’t herself. Maybe he’d feel guilty. All this time you’ve had a broken heart, and I didn’t even notice. What sort of a doctor am I?

She felt so alone that a month after her father had died she’d called a grief helpline that she’d found on the internet (she’d withheld her number and given a false name), but the stranger on the other end of the phone had been so overwhelmed by the scale of Kristen’s grief that her only suggestion had been that Kristen should nurture herself and maybe take a soothing bath or treat herself to a new hand cream.

She might as well have suggested using an umbrella in a hurricane.

That was the point where Kristen had realized she was on her own with this. She didn’t blame her children for not noticing how bad she felt because like most mothers she hid her own anguish from them (it wasn’t their job to support their grieving mother), and she didn’t really blame her own mother because they’d never been close. But she did blame Theo. She felt resentful toward Theo and that resentment layered itself on top of other layers of resentment that had built up during their marriage.

Theo had missed the birth of his first child. Theo had been absent when Hannah had been admitted to the hospital with severe croup. Theo had missed parent-teacher conferences, sports days, Kristen’s birthday (twice) and their wedding anniversary (four times).

Kristen had managed to forgive all that. (The man was a surgical genius, after all, with big responsibilities. Also, she’d known who he was when she married him and she refused to be a hypocrite.) She hadn’t been able to forgive his absence when her father had died.

She’d called him from the hospital where her father had been taken. She’d left six messages, each of them more desperate. Theo, I need you.

It had taken him four hours to get back to her. Four hours during which she’d needed his support. His love. Four hours when she’d needed his medical expertise (why couldn’t they save her father?) and a shoulder to cry on. Instead, she’d cried on the doctor who had broken the news of her father’s death to her and her mother. She’d cried on the kind nurse who had arrived with tissues and she’d cried on her mother, although not for long because her mother had been unnervingly composed. By the time Theo arrived, her intense grief had morphed into anger. Her resentment had grown into a huge barrier that separated them. In the days that followed she couldn’t find a way past that barrier.

Losing her dad was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Nothing had prepared her for the depth of her grief. She was an independent woman with her own family, but when her father died, part of her had died, too. The knowledge that he was never coming back, that she would never see him again, sent her into a pit of despair.

Her father had loved her unconditionally. When she’d been with her dad she’d felt important and interesting and truly loved, and she was never going to get that feeling back. She’d gone from feeling alone to feeling crushingly, miserably alone.

And then, at her lowest point, she’d met Jeff. Jeff had listened to her when Theo hadn’t. Jeff had allowed her to pour her heart out. Jeff wasn’t scared of her emotions. Jeff switched off his phone when they were together.

And now Jeff was downstairs.

Heart thudding, she walked into the bathroom and locked the door. She had a list of jobs to do, every one of them urgent, but all she wanted to do was reread the message waiting for her on her phone.

Can’t wait to see you x

Kristen read it twice and then pressed the phone to her chest as if that message were a living thing that she could absorb through her skin straight into her heart. Those words filled the big empty space inside her. They made her feel warm and cared for and connected. It was ridiculous that a simple message could make her happy, and yet it did. It was the kind of happiness that anesthetized you against all the trials of life, and there was no shortage of those, particularly right now when she felt raw and bruised by her mother.

Kristen had spent days planning the party to make it perfect, and yet her mother was behaving as if she was doing Kristen a favor by being there. They’d never had the easiest of relationships, and normally this latest episode would have upset Kristen so much she would have reached the point of screaming at herself in the mirror (an escape outlet with fewer consequences than actually screaming at her mother), but right now she didn’t even care. She’d done what she could to celebrate the birthday and her father. She’d done everything she could to support her mother after Cameron Lapthorne’s death. She’d tried to be thoughtful and caring and now she was done.

You couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped. Her mother could turn up to the event in her nightdress if she wanted to. She could give a speech or not give a speech. She could read from the Kama Sutra. It didn’t matter to Kristen. Everything that had seemed important to her, no longer seemed important because her priorities had changed over the past few weeks.

The only thing that mattered was the message and how it made her feel.

It turned out that the woman on the end of the grief helpline had been right about her needing self-care. But she hadn’t needed a hot bath or hand cream. She’d needed Jeff.

Of all the problems Kristen had encountered in her life, she was completely unprepared for the one she was currently dealing with. She was obsessed with a man who was not her husband.

Even thinking it shocked her. Occasionally she wondered what had happened to her. Had she had a personality change overnight? Fallen asleep and woken up in someone else’s body? Knocked her head in her sleep? Taken something without knowing it?

For twenty-eight years Kristen had been a loyal and devoted wife. She’d raised two children, juggled the demands of the home with the demands of her very busy job (she adored her father but working for him hadn’t been easy), supported her husband even though there were days when they saw so little of each other she could barely remember what he looked like. Even when she was spending yet another night alone in their house, she’d still been proud of him.

But losing her father had changed everything. She’d lost a piece of herself, too.

Did she still love Theo? Under the layers of hurt and resentment, was the feeling she’d had for him alive? Maybe. But right now Theo couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give her what she needed.

She should be feeling guilty, she knew that. But she wasn’t.

Her feelings for Jeff weren’t about satisfying a whim. This was about survival. This was about her.

Thanks to Jeff she felt better than she had in a long time. Thanks to Jeff she no longer felt like killing Theo. Jeff had saved two lives.

She put the phone down and gazed at herself in the mirror. She tucked a strand of her softly styled hair behind her ear and wondered why no one had said anything about her new look. Instead of her usual chic, sharp bob she’d gone for something choppy and textured. Feminine. Her stylist had added streaks of light gold and champagne and the overall look had been so different and dazzling that for a moment she’d had to check it actually was her in the mirror and not someone else.

You look like a different person, her stylist had said, and Kristen had started to panic because although she loved her new look, she was worried she would draw attention to herself and she didn’t want that. She’d walked out of the salon feeling nervous, but still she’d been unable to resist the temptation to move her head from side to side every few minutes just so that she could feel the silken swish of her newly styled hair.

She’d felt jumpy all day, braced for someone to notice but no one had said anything. Theo hadn’t noticed because he rarely noticed details about anyone unless they were bleeding or had a limb hanging off. Hannah had been home from medical school for the evening looking exhausted and far too pale, but she’d been distracted by something and had barely seemed to notice her mother.

Thinking of Hannah dimmed her happiness slightly.

Kristen had been determined that her relationship with her children was going to be different (and by that she meant better!) than the one she had with her own mother. She’d always made sure they knew they could come to her with anything, and that she would listen and never judge (and if she did judge, she would do so silently). She’d wanted them to know that they never needed to feel alone with their problems. That she would always be there for them. She never wanted them to feel the way she’d been feeling for the past year.

She’d waited for Hannah to tell her what was wrong, and when she hadn’t Kristen had probed gently. She’d asked about work, she’d asked about sleep and eating, she’d asked about boyfriends (she’d trodden very carefully there because there was a fine line between being a caring parent and overstepping), and finally she’d asked about Lily. Lily Thomas was Hannah’s closest friend. At that point Hannah had roused herself from her state of gloom and misery sufficiently to snap that she hadn’t heard from her since she’d dropped out of medical school. We haven’t spoken. Given the reaction, Kristen surmised that this was a friendship issue, which was surprising because Hannah and Lily had been inseparable since they were young.

She’d felt the usual anxiety that came from witnessing your child in distress, but she knew there was nothing she could do to help with this. It was between Lily and Hannah.

And at least Hannah’s preoccupation with her own issues meant that she wasn’t paying attention to the changes in her mother.

Todd had dropped by briefly to talk to her about something but had left the moment he’d discovered his sister was there, which had upset Kristen because her children had always been close. Unfortunately Hannah didn’t like Amelie, which was going to make for fun family gatherings in the future.

But right now, her children’s problems weren’t her priority.

She was her priority. At this precise moment she was the most important person in her life (it felt sacrilegious to think that because usually being a parent was all about coming last).

She’d arrived at the Lapthorne mansion earlier in the day and no one had so far seemed to notice that she’d changed her hair and bought a new dress that skimmed her new, slimmer frame (she’d never be a size zero but she wasn’t sure her personality would fit into size zero, so she was fine with that).

She might have been depressed at this apparent confirmation that women over forty were invisible had it not been for the fact that to one person at least, she definitely wasn’t invisible.

She’d read somewhere that to be truly happy a person had to be living a life aligned with their values, but that clearly wasn’t true because she was happier than she’d ever been, and her values were currently being overridden by her impulses. She, Kristen Jennifer Buckingham, who disapproved deeply of people who had affairs, was about to embark on an affair. It hadn’t actually happened yet, although she’d been emotionally unfaithful on multiple occasions in recent weeks.

The night before she’d eaten her dinner alone at home but instead of feeling upset and lonely, she’d thought about Jeff. She thought about Jeff when she was doing the laundry, when she was driving to the office, when she was staring at her computer. She thought about him so frequently she was terrified she was going to start talking in her sleep. Jeff, Jeff, I love you, Jeff. As a precaution, she’d taken to sleeping in one of the spare rooms using the excuse of Theo’s unpredictable hours.

Theo’s job meant that he was often called in to operate on complicated cases, usually at the most inconvenient moments. When they’d met, she’d been drawn to the sheer heroism of what he did. He was a trauma surgeon. He worked eighty hours a week and slept six hours a night. But he saved lives.

As someone whose life had been saved by doctors, Kristen couldn’t think of a more important profession. Without doctors she wouldn’t be here (without doctors she wouldn’t now be in a position to contemplate having an affair with Jeff). But being married to a surgeon had its downsides, and one of those was the unpredictability of her life.

It was the unpredictability of life that had caused a woman to fall down three flights of stairs in her apartment building two months previously. If it hadn’t been for her injuries Theo wouldn’t have been called away from the dinner party they’d been attending, and Kristen wouldn’t have shared a cab home with Jeff Singer, the art editor of a major newspaper, whom she knew vaguely from her work with her father. He had flirted shamelessly with her from the moment Theo had left the room. If Theo hadn’t been called to the hospital that night, Kristen might never have felt the way she was feeling now.

And the way she was feeling was extraordinary, not just because of her age—she was forty-eight and had always assumed she was well past the age to be considered affair material—but because she just wasn’t that type of person.

There had been a moment in her childhood when her parents had separated, and she still remembered the trauma of that. She had no idea of the reason behind her parents’ near split, because that period in their lives had never been spoken of again, but she knew her mother had instigated it and the knowledge had made her protective of her father.

They’d got back together, but Kristen had never felt secure again. She’d vowed that her children would never have reason to doubt her and Theo’s relationship.

They would stick with each other through thick and thin.

And even now she wasn’t contemplating divorce.

She would not disrupt her children’s lives or scar them in any way. (Every time she thought about what divorce had done to her friend Trisha’s kids she shuddered—the amount spent on therapy alone would have bought a house on Beacon Hill.)

She was simply making her own life a little happier, and surely no one would blame her for trying to find some joy in her life.

Despite her loneliness and her confused feelings toward Theo, she knew she probably wouldn’t have let the relationship with Jeff develop into anything had he not pursued her so relentlessly. It had been flattering, at her age, to be irresistible to someone. And it wasn’t just that he was interested in her physically, he was interested in all of her. He encouraged her to talk about everything and anything. He wanted to know every detail of her childhood, particularly her memories of her father. No one else wanted to hear her memories of her father, but Jeff did. He listened attentively and asked endless questions until she’d ended up telling him things she’d never told anyone before, even Theo. And if occasionally she felt a brief shimmer of worry that he knew so much about her, she dismissed it. Trust was all part of intimacy, and true intimacy was a gift.

She read the message again.

I’ve arrived. Can’t wait to see you.

Their messages were usually neutral and safe, in case someone else caught a glimpse.

And what was he doing asking Winston about The Girl on the Shore? He’d already asked her about that painting, and she’d told him it didn’t exist. Presumably he’d been establishing his credentials to avert any suspicion.

Was she in love with Jeff?Maybe. Or maybe not, it was too soon to know. But she did know that he was exactly what she needed right now.

He’d started pushing to spend more time with her, which was flattering. But even if she could conjure up a plausible excuse for an overnight absence, where would they go? The idea of checking into a motel as Mr. and Mrs. Smith and paying cash didn’t appeal. It felt sordid, and Kristen was determined never to be sordid.

But that problem was for later. For now, she had an event to host.

She refreshed her lipstick, took another look at herself in the mirror and then almost jumped out of her skin when her phone rang.

Maybe she wasn’t cut out for this. She hadn’t actually embarked on an affair yet and already she felt alternately giddy and guilty. It was like the impulse you had to eat fast food, even though you knew it was bad for you.

She grabbed her phone and saw Theo’s name on the screen.

Theo never called when he was working and it was unsettling that he was calling now, when she’d been thinking of another man.

“Theo? I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. Have you been operating?”

“We lost the patient.”

“Oh.” Kristen had a momentary image of a patient running undetected around hospital corridors, even though she knew that wasn’t what he meant. “I’m sorry. I hope you’re not blaming yourself. If you couldn’t save the patient, no one could.” She believed that. The fact that Theo had turned out to be a semi-absent husband was in part due to the fact he was fully present in his job.

“His car was hit side on by another car. The driver was looking at his phone.”

She knew how difficult he found this part of his job. When someone died, no matter how severe the injuries, Theo felt a sense of personal failure. He’d told her once that he had to believe he’d succeed, or he wouldn’t have the confidence to try. But she also knew that he had a perfectionist trait that made him single-minded. Hannah shared that trait. It was both admirable and aggravating to those around them.

“Do you want to talk about it?” The question was a formality. She knew he wouldn’t want to talk about it. Theo never talked about it, just as he didn’t want to talk about how lost she felt without her father. Theo didn’t like talking about emotions, his or other people’s. His cure for a bad day was a large gin and tonic and half an hour on the sofa with his headphones and Brahms. “Theo?”

“Maybe.”

Maybe? Kristen couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d announced that he was giving up surgery and joining the church. “All right.” She trod cautiously on unfamiliar territory. “I’m listening.”

She tried not to think about Jeff waiting for her downstairs, or the other guests, or all the things she still had to do.

“Not over the phone. I’m on my way to you. I should be with you in an hour. We’ll talk then.”

On his way? “You’re coming here?” It was hard enough to get Theo to show up somewhere when he’d made a commitment, but in all their years together he’d never surprised her by showing up when he wasn’t expected. He hadn’t shown up when her father died.

“That’s why I’m calling. I know it’s not the perfect time, but I just want to be near you and the kids. If that has to be with a crowd around us, then that’s fine.”

Kristen’s shock (when had Theo ever said I just want to be near you and the kids?) was followed by a rush of panic as another message arrived on her phone.

Drinking champagne in the rose garden.

Jeff was drinking champagne in the rose garden. Jeff was waiting for her.

And her husband was about to leave the hospital and join them.

“I thought you couldn’t make it?” Kristen thought frantically. This was not a situation she’d anticipated. “You don’t have to come. I’ve already told my mother you won’t be here. We understand, Theo. Your work is important. More important than us.”

“That’s not true. And if ever I needed a reminder of that, I’ve had one.” His voice sounded strange. Thickened and distant and difficult to understand.

She kept thinking of Jeff in the rose garden. Her new shiny hair. Her plans.

“Theo, the signal is terrible. Your voice sounds weird. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“The guy who just died—it wasn’t some stranger, Kristen. It was Michael.”

“Michael?” Her mind went blank, possibly because the only name in her head right now was Jeff. She rummaged in her memory for a Michael. “Michael who?”

“Our Michael. Michael Dent.”

And she realized that the reason Theo sounded strange was because he was crying. Theo, who never cried about anything, was crying so hard she couldn’t make out his words. Her strong, emotionless husband was so overwhelmed with emotion that it was virtually pouring down the phone.

“Oh, Theo—” The room reeled, and she leaned her shoulders against the wall. “Not Michael.”

Michael Dent had trained at the same time as Theo. They’d done their surgical residency together. He’d been best man at their wedding and Theo had been best man at his. They’d been close to his wife, Trisha, and had taken several vacations together. Michael and Trisha had two kids a little younger than Todd and Hannah. In the early days, Trisha and Kristen had met for lunch once a month and commiserated on the challenges of being married to a surgeon who was married to his job. Trisha had joked that at least they didn’t have to worry about their husbands having affairs, because they didn’t have time. And then Michael had apparently found the time, because three years ago he’d left Trisha for a woman called Candy who he’d met online, which Trisha felt made things worse because it meant he’d been actively looking. She’d vented her feelings in a long phone call to Kristen. He didn’t have time to take the trash out, but he had time to find himself a new woman.

Michael had lost weight, bought a sports car and married Candy. Kristen and Theo had stopped socializing with them. (Even if Kristen could have made it through a whole backyard barbecue without impaling Candy with a chicken skewer, she would have felt too disloyal to Trisha who had been a mess for the first year.)

It was all very awkward because Theo was still loyal to Michael and the two men worked together, but Kristen had seen how close to the edge Trisha was and was adamant that she wasn’t going to make it worse by enveloping Candy into their social circle. In the end they compromised, and Michael and Theo played golf once a month and grabbed a few drinks together occasionally after work.

Kristen hadn’t seen Michael for ages, and now she would never see him again because Michael had been hit by a car. Michael was dead.

What would Trisha think? Trisha had dropped off the radar lately and Kristen suspected she might be seeing someone. She hoped she was. She deserved happiness.

And so did Kristen, but right now her husband was crying, and her lover-to-be was waiting for her in the rose garden with a glass of champagne in his hand, and life was a complicated, unpredictable mess.

“Theo—”

“I try and detach from cases.” Theo was still crying, great thumping sobs that turned his words into something close to unintelligible. “It’s the way I operate—literally—but this was Michael, and he wasn’t just a surgical challenge he was my friend. And the family member waiting for news wasn’t a stranger, it was his wife.”

Kristen thought, Which wife?

“Candy was there?”

“Trisha. She had Lulu and Richard with her. They were dressed in shorts and T-shirts because they’d been waiting for him to come home so they could have a backyard barbecue. They do it once a month to try and keep things civil.”

Kristen remembered Trisha talking about it. I do it for the kids and it almost kills me.

And the reason it almost killed Trisha was because despite everything that had happened, she still loved Michael and playing happy families had been torture.

“How was Trisha?” If this had happened a few years earlier when Michael had just met Candy, Kristen might have suspected Trisha of being the one who had T-boned the car.

“Distraught. She threw herself at me and said Tell me you saved him, Theo, and I almost told her I had because I so badly wanted it to be true. Instead I had to tell them that there would be no more backyard barbecues, and the whole time I was talking I was wondering how many barbecues Michael had missed over the years because he was working and if he would have got himself to more had he known he had a limited number, and I tried to remember the last time I was present for a whole family meal.”

“Don’t think about that now. It’s not the time.”

“It’s the perfect time.” He was still crying, and Kristen realized that she was crying, too.

She was crying for Michael, who had been a sweet and kind man before he’d decided to leave his wife, and she was crying for Trisha, who had now lost Michael twice, and for their kids, who would go through the rest of their lives without a father present for their key moments. She was crying for Theo, who hadn’t been able to save his friend and maybe she was crying for herself because she was poised on the edge of a new and better life, and she could feel herself being dragged back inside the confines of the old one.

She tried to calm him down.

“It doesn’t matter that you missed a few family meals. You and Michael are both dedicated surgeons. This is who you are, Theo. And your families accept that because we’re proud of what you do.” She realized she’d used the present tense, which was correct for Theo but not for Michael, who was now in the past tense.

One unpredictable event and suddenly you were moved into the past tense. Life was brutal.

“What if I don’t want to be this person anymore, Kristen? What if I don’t want to prioritize strangers over my own family? Michael was on his way to work. If he’d stayed home with his family, he’d be alive now. What if I don’t want to be the guy who misses the barbecue. What if I want to be the guy who is there for his kids?”

What about being the man who is there for his wife?

“They’re not kids anymore. Todd is twenty-eight. He’s about to get married.” She didn’t want to think about that right now. “Hannah is twenty-four. And they’re proud of you.”

She tried to be tactful. It might be a bit harsh to point out that the time to be there for his kids had passed. That this sudden revelation might have had more relevance had it happened a couple of decades ago.

“Maybe what I’m saying is that I just want to spend more time with my family. When I was looking at Michael’s body, do you know what I was wondering?” His voice was still thickened, but steadier. “I was wondering when he last kissed Trisha. When he last made love to Trisha.”

This was surreal. “Er—a while ago, I should imagine. He’s been married to Candy for two years.”

“Yes, Candy. I—I meant Candy. Except—”

“Except what?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. Just something that—no, never mind.”

Was it nothing or was it something? And if it was something then what was that something? And did she want to know?

Theo was all over the place, and it was so unlike him Kristen was alarmed. “You should sit down for a moment, Theo. Do you want me to come and get you?” She hoped he didn’t want her to, but if he said yes she would go because this was Theo, and they had two children together, and he was a good man, and she probably still loved him even though he hadn’t been there for her when her father died. (Why couldn’t she get that out of her head? It was buried there like a splinter.)

“I don’t need you to come and get me. I don’t know what I need. That’s why I’m coming home. The strange thing is we know better than most that life is fleeting and can change in an instant, but still we sometimes forget that. I’m not going to forget it again, Kristen, I promise.”

“Okay.” What did that mean? She didn’t recognize the guy on the phone. This just wasn’t Theo.

“I don’t know when I last told you I love you, but it was probably too long ago. I love you, Kristen. When did I last tell you you’re beautiful?”

“I—” She was about to say yesterday, and then remembered it had been Jeff who had told her that when they’d sneaked a quick meeting in a gallery coffee shop.

“You are beautiful. I thought so this morning when you were standing in the kitchen with the sun shining on your hair. I should have said so, but I was in a hurry to get to work.”

The conversation was becoming more unsettling by the minute.

It had been years since anyone told her she was beautiful, and now she’d been told it two days running by two different men.

“Theo, you need to breathe and calm down.”

“You probably think I don’t notice, but I do. I love your new hair. I love your new dress with the blue swirls that looks like a Monet.”

Theo never noticed what she was wearing. He didn’t notice when she’d done her hair, or when she had a new outfit. She’d accepted that as part of who he was. His mind was usually on higher things.

But now he’d noticed. And his attention could not have come at a worse time.

The irony wasn’t lost on her.

She’d smartened herself up for Jeff, and in doing so had caught Theo’s attention.

Michael was dead and now Theo was coming to the party because the death of his friend had affected him in the way the death of hundreds of strangers hadn’t. The loss of that particular life had made him question how he was living his.

And she understood because wasn’t that exactly what had happened to her? It had taken her father’s death to make her realize that she needed to do something about her unhappiness.

She’d waited all these years for her husband to be more present and now, when she’d finally found a way to fill the void, he decided to show up.

She wanted to scream at the unfairness of it. Images of her and Jeff sneaking a quick kiss in the rose garden were tarnished by another image that included Theo bursting through the blooms to look for her in this new spirit of closeness.

It was much easier to contemplate an affair when your husband wasn’t present in your life. She’d almost convinced herself that Theo wouldn’t even care. He was big on outsourcing—get a nanny, get a gardener, get a cleaner. In her head she was simply outsourcing her loneliness and her sex life. Get a friend and a lover.

All that would have to go on hold for now until Theo reverted to his normal self, which she was sure would happen quickly. Theo was addicted to work.

“You’ve had a horrible shock, Theo.” Her phone buzzed and she checked it quickly, but this time it wasn’t Jeff. It was Amelie’s mother.

Call me! Urgent.

Kristen felt a ripple of irritation. The woman was so rude. And why would Amelie’s mother be calling, and today of all days when Kristen was in the middle of masterminding the most important event she’d ever run?

As well as the party, Kristen already had Jeff to think about, and her mother, and now Theo. There was no way she had time for Amelie’s mother. Whatever it was that was “urgent” was going to have to wait. But the call stirred up another anxiety that she’d been trying to ignore, which was that her son was making a horrible mistake by marrying Amelie, and not only because his mother-in-law would make his life a misery. Todd and Amelie were utterly wrong for each other. She had no idea why Todd had proposed, but as a parent there was only so much you could say or do to steer your child away from disaster. Sometimes you just had to watch the crash happening and prepare yourself to clear up the mess afterward.

Thinking about messes made her realize Theo was still talking.

“I’ll be there soon,” he said. “Bill is going to cover for me. This is an important day for you. It’s a celebration of your parents. I want to be there with you, Todd and Hannah.”

“I haven’t seen Hannah. I don’t think she’s here yet.” She thought of Hannah’s pale face and hollow eyes. She thought about Lily. We haven’t spoken. And she remembered that Todd had said he’d wanted to speak to her. Was that related to the fact that Amelie’s mother was calling? Maybe she was calling about the party. Was she upset that she and her husband hadn’t been invited today? Kristen had finalized the guest list weeks ago, before Todd’s out-of-the-blue proposal. She’d been determined not to make any more last-minute changes.

“I’ll message Hannah,” Theo said. “If she’s still at the hospital I can give her a ride out. Will you call Trisha?”

Kristen’s head started to throb. Maybe Trisha would hate hearing from her because Theo was the one who hadn’t managed to save Michael. Did Trisha blame Theo? Did Trisha even care? Had she looked at Michael’s body and thought, No! I can’t believe you’ve gone, or had she thought, You got what you deserved.

But Theo was right. Whatever her reaction, Kristen needed to call her, and she needed to find Jeff, just in case Theo did show up.

And amidst all the chaos, she had to mastermind the event she’d organized, keep an eye on her mother, find time to talk to Todd, call Amelie’s mother back and give a speech.

It was enough to make you want to run away.