Choosing Yourself at Divorce Supper Club (Divorce Supper Club #3)

Chapter 1

Rachel Morgan woke up three minutes before her alarm, which wasn’t unusual and, if she was being honest, hadn’t been unusual in more than twenty years.

After a certain amount of time spent raising children, the body simply stopped believing it had permission to sleep in.

Somewhere along the way, she’d become permanently convinced that if she relaxed completely, someone would inevitably wake up with a fever, forget a permission slip, need a ride to practice, or discover at seven-thirty in the morning that the poster board required for the science project due that day had somehow never been purchased.

Motherhood had rewired her nervous system in ways she suspected no one adequately warned women about.

Even now, with both children away at college and no one requiring emergency transportation or nutritional guidance before sunrise, she still woke early.

Only now, there was nothing waiting for her.

Which, she’d discovered, was both a gift and a strange kind of grief.

She lay beneath the white duvet and listened to the quiet.

Not because she expected to hear anything, exactly. It was habit more than hope.

The room was washed in soft September light. Through the cracked window came the rhythmic click of a sprinkler somewhere down the street, and farther away, a mockingbird was already performing with the kind of enthusiasm Rachel found admirable in birds and slightly exhausting in people.

No shower running upstairs.

No cabinet doors.

No music leaking beneath a bedroom door.

No voice calling, “Mom, where’s my blue hoodie?”

Just stillness.

Beside her, the other half of the bed remained smooth and untouched.

That part no longer hurt.

Which was perhaps the strangest thing of all.

Eighteen months earlier, when she and Robert had finally acknowledged what neither of them had wanted to say aloud for years, she’d expected devastation. Heartbreak. Anger. Some cinematic grief that would justify the end of a twenty-three-year marriage.

Instead, what had followed was sadness and relief, loneliness and peace, nostalgia and guilt — all mixed together in proportions that shifted daily and often made very little sense.

People wanted stories they understood. They wanted villains and betrayals and clear explanations.

But there had been no affair.

No great betrayal.

No explosive fight.

Just two decent people who had spent years becoming exceptional partners in running a family and increasingly absent partners in everything else.

It was difficult to explain to people who had never lived inside that kind of quiet.

She reached for her phone.

6:12.

No texts.

Which was good.

Good meant Grace was adjusting to sophomore year at Berkeley. Good meant Ethan, now somehow a senior at UCLA, was busy building a life that didn’t revolve around asking his mother whether chicken leftovers were still safe after four days.

Good was what she wanted.

Good was the whole point.

Still, she remained beneath the covers for another minute, staring at the ceiling fan turning lazily overhead.

Nobody prepared mothers for what happened after they succeeded.

By six-thirty, the bed was made, jasmine tea was steeping on the kitchen counter, and Rachel stood barefoot in the early morning sunlight watching steam curl gently from her mug.

She had always loved this room.

Twenty years earlier, she and Robert had stood in the unfinished shell of the house arguing over cabinet hardware and pendant lights, convinced these decisions represented the height of adulthood. Looking back, she found the memory oddly sweet.

They had built a beautiful life together.

That remained true.

The ending hadn’t erased the years that came before it.

Sometimes she thought divorce made people rewrite their own histories, as though admitting something hadn’t lasted meant denying that it had once been good.

But their life had been good.

The house had held birthday parties and stomach viruses and science fair triumphs and disastrous attempts at homeschooling during the pandemic. It had held laughter and ordinary Tuesdays and family dinners and Christmas mornings and twenty-three years of memories that still lived in the walls.

Their marriage hadn’t failed because they hated each other.

If anything, the opposite had been true.

They’d simply become so good at functioning that neither of them had noticed how absent they felt inside their own lives until the absence itself became impossible to ignore.

Carrying her tea outside, Rachel settled into the corner chair beneath the pergola and pulled her sweater more tightly around herself.

September had always been her favorite season in wine country.

Summer felt almost performative, all bright confidence and endless sunshine, while September seemed more comfortable in its own skin.

The hills beyond the neighborhood had begun turning gold. Lavender and rosemary drifted on the cool air, and somewhere beyond the fence, Mrs. Gallagher’s golden retriever was engaged in what sounded like an intensely personal conflict with a stick.

Rachel smiled.

Small joys still counted.

She believed that.

Or perhaps more accurately, she wanted to believe it.

Closing her eyes, she settled into meditation.

Students often imagined these moments were profound.

Sometimes they were.

Other times she mentally reorganized grocery lists or remembered she needed to schedule her mammogram.

This morning, she mostly noticed the spaciousness.

Not loneliness.

Not sadness.

Just space.

And space, she’d discovered, had an irritating tendency to amplify whatever thoughts she’d successfully managed to avoid.

By seven-thirty, she’d showered, dressed in sage leggings and an oversized cream sweater, and assembled a breakfast bowl attractive enough to offend Lydia.

Lydia had once watched Rachel carefully layer fruit into a bowl and sighed.

“I want you to know this level of organization makes me deeply uncomfortable.”

“You ate a Pop-Tart in the car.”

“And I stand by that choice.”

Rachel had laughed so hard she’d nearly spilled coffee.

The memory made her smile now as she sprinkled almonds over the berries.

Thank God for the women.

Because if someone had told her two years earlier that some of the deepest friendships of her life would emerge from divorce and pasta and something Elena had sarcastically christened Divorce Supper Club, she would have assumed they were describing a television show aimed at women over forty.

Her phone buzzed.

Grace.

Rachel smiled immediately.

Rachel: Morning, honey ??

The reply came almost instantly.

Grace: Can you settle an argument?

Rachel: Depends. Is anyone committing crimes?

Grace: Sophie’s insisting avocado belongs on breakfast burritos.

Rachel blinked.

The emergency of the century.

Rachel: Absolutely it belongs. Sophie is correct.

Grace: Traitor.

Rachel: I raised you to appreciate flavor.

Grace: I have class. Love you.

Rachel: Love you too ??

The exchange lasted less than a minute.

Perfectly normal.

Perfectly healthy.

Exactly what Rachel wanted.

Still, after setting down her phone, she found herself staring into her tea a little longer than necessary.

It would’ve been nice if Grace had asked how she was.

The thought appeared so quietly that it almost slipped past unnoticed.

And immediately, guilt arrived behind it.

For heaven’s sake.

Grace was twenty.

She had classes and friends and a life that rightly revolved around things other than checking on her mother every morning.

Besides, mothers weren’t supposed to keep score.

Rachel knew that.

She also knew that knowing something and feeling something were rarely the same experience.

Later, she made her way to her studio, which occupied a renovated craftsman building just off Main Street, and people almost always used the same word when they walked through the doors.

Warm.

Rachel secretly thought it was the nicest compliment anyone could offer a space.

Plants crowded the windowsills. Soft music drifted through the rooms. The scent of eucalyptus lingered gently in the air, and sunlight poured across pale wood floors worn smooth by years of bare feet and quiet conversations.

Eight years earlier, she’d attended her first yoga class because she was exhausted and mildly resentful and desperately needed one hour each week during which no one required anything from her.

At the time, she’d been too burned out to call it a spiritual awakening.

Mostly, she’d wanted silence.

Five years later, she’d completed teacher training.

Three years after that, she’d become co-owner of the studio.

Life was funny that way.

People expected reinvention to arrive dramatically, but sometimes it entered quietly through side doors and Tuesday evenings and things you’d agreed to simply because saying no seemed harder.

By nine-thirty, familiar faces had begun filtering into class.

Retirees. Young mothers. Remote workers. People carrying stress and grief and loneliness and anxiety and exhaustion in bodies that had become repositories for all the things they couldn’t say out loud.

Rachel had become surprisingly good at recognizing invisible burdens.

Most people didn’t come to yoga because life was wonderful.

They came because something hurt.

Sometimes physically.

Usually not.

“Good morning, beautiful people,” she announced, smiling at the room.

“Before we begin, how are we feeling today?”

“Stiff.”

“Tired.”

“Existential,” Martha announced solemnly.

Rachel pointed immediately.

“Thank you for your honesty, Martha.”

Laughter moved through the room, and with it came the familiar sensation Rachel always experienced when she taught.

Relief.

This part of herself she understood.

This part she loved.

For seventy-five minutes she moved through the room, adjusting shoulders, offering encouragement, and reminding people — gently and repeatedly — that their bodies weren’t problems to solve.

“Meet yourself where you are today.”

“Kindness counts.”

“Don’t force anything.”