Chapter 1
My fifty-six-year-old mother sent me this article via text.
I growled at my phone and started to put it down but then thought better of it and added a thumbs-up emoji to the text, even though I had no intention of reading the article. That deed accomplished, I put my phone in the passenger seat beside me and trained my eyes on a town house a block away.
My mother had a lot of nerve trying to establish a normal mother-daughter relationship at this late date, especially on a night when I was on a stakeout of sorts.
My partner in both love and business, Ken, had bet me twenty bucks I couldn’t serve papers on a particularly squirrelly man. I’d taken the bet.
One, my quarry had gone more than a week without frequenting his favorite watering hole.
Two, he wasn’t expecting a woman to serve him papers.
Three, he especially wasn’t expecting a ringer for Kate Beckinsale—plus twenty-five pounds and only if you squinted—to serve him those papers in an Irish pub at ten o’clock on a Monday night.
At least that’s what I hoped.
Just as I was about to give in to boredom and read the article from my mother—or rather, have the phone read it to me so I wouldn’t have to take my eyeballs off the town house—John Dalton emerged from the front door. He looked both ways and tiptoed to his car.
I let him get a good head start because I knew where he was going.
Nothing better than allowing one’s target a false sense of security to help one get a job done.
Dalton’s wife had tipped her hand about sending him divorce papers, and he had been keeping a rather low profile ever since.
Ken had given up, but he detested serving papers and would’ve found just about any excuse to push that job off on me.
While I could serve these papers late, I didn’t want to.
I’d given myself the same deadline the state of Georgia gave to process servers: five days.
In twelve hours, my time would be up.
Would that invalidate the service? No. Would it drag the lawsuit out even more? Probably.
Most importantly for me, I would lose the twenty-dollar bet, and I hated to lose.
He drove past the Marietta Square, then made an abrupt turn.
I kept going but then doubled back to a mostly empty parking lot often used for people who had to go to court. Sure enough, as I walked up the cracked sidewalk toward the old Carnegie Library, I spotted Dalton’s car in the next lot over.
Casually, I took a right and walked toward Finnegan’s Pub.
It didn’t take me long to find him sitting at the bar chatting up the bartender, an older lady with smooth olive skin and short spiky silver hair. He leaned forward to ask her something, and she arched an eyebrow. She had no time for his bullshit.
I liked her.
When the guy to my quarry’s left slid from his stool, I ambled over and took his place. John Dalton looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my cleavage before bouncing back up to my eyes.
“Hi,” I said with just enough smile to encourage him.
“Hi,” he said with a grin.
Oh, Stella. No matter what Ken says, you’ve still got it.
The bartender placed a pint glass in front of him, then asked me, “What’ll you have?”
“Something red, please,” I said, my eyes not leaving Dalton’s.
She walked away muttering, and I reached inside my leather jacket to act as though I were looking for something. I pulled a stack of papers from the inner pocket and asked, “Could you hold this?”
“Sure.” He took what I offered.
“Thanks. Oh, and by the way? You’ve been served.”
His eyes widened, then narrowed before he washed all emotion from his face and said, “Uh, no comprendo inglés.”
“Ha sido notificado.”
At least I hoped that was right. Since I wasn’t required to say anything when I handed over the papers, it was literally close enough for government work.
He sighed. “Fine. You can’t blame a man for trying.”
He put a ten on the bar and then took his papers and his beer and headed to the other side of the bar, muttering all the while.
“I was afraid you were actually interested in that guy,” the bartender said as she placed a glass of wine in front of me.
“Oh, heavens no,” I said. “Just proving to my partner that anything he can do, I can do better.”
She chuckled. “In that case, this glass of Malbec is on the house.”
“Thank you,” I said with a bright smile.
She nodded and moved to the other end of the bar to take an order.
I sipped my wine, all the better because it was free, and thought about how I would collect on my bet with Ken.
I could simply take him for twenty dollars, but I was thinking about calling in a sexual favor because we’d been a little out of sync in recent weeks.
As I sipped, I considered a plan involving a piece of lingerie I’d been saving for a special occasion.
Maybe, to quote the great poet Janet Jackson, “Someday Is Tonight.” The more I thought about it, the more determined I was to reconnect with Ken.
We’d each been doing a lot of work for our PI firm, and one could expect to hit the sexual doldrums from time to time in a long-term relationship—especially if there was a significant age gap—but that was no excuse for letting things get stale.
I pushed away thoughts of my fortieth birthday.
The good thing about being so much younger than your paramour was that if you were turning forty, then he was well ahead of you. Sure, gravity had necessitated push-up bras, but his body was beginning to show signs of wear and tear, too. We were both beyond a search for the Fountain of Youth.
We’d also decided not to have kids and had saved our money judiciously, so we would be able to retire in ten years or so. Then we would finally travel to the South of France, just as Ken had promised me—an entire month, he said.
I was lobbying for a trip to Champagne as well. Surely there were trains that could take you all around France. Maybe Paris or Bordeaux, too. Heck, why not spend a week in the South of France and spend the other three weeks traveling all over Europe?
I daydreamed about the logistics of this new plan for a good long while and looked down to see my glass empty.
I left a fiver as a tip and walked to my car, still working on ways to get things going between us once again.
Buoyed by thoughts of France, I drove out of my way to duck into Kroger only minutes before it closed and grabbed a bottle of champagne.
Ken would be beyond surprised to see me.
He’d been sure I couldn’t serve this particular set of papers, and he knew I would stay in my car all night if I had to. I couldn’t wait to slide into bed with what we used to call “No Reason Champagne” while wearing my new lingerie.
We’d go through our comedic bit for the first time in a long while. He’d say, “What’s that?”
I’d say, “Champagne.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
Then he would smile and kiss me and say, “I love ‘No Reason Champagne.’”
I parked my car just down the street from our bungalow and practically tiptoed into the house, choking back giggles. As I neared the bedroom, I grew bolder.
Why bother with lingerie?
I might ruin the surprise with the creak of my ancient dresser’s drawers, and I definitely didn’t want to turn on the lights.
Instead, I paused in the hall and put down the bottle so I could strip down to nothing.
As I opened the bedroom door, it whined. I froze.
Snoring continued.
Exhaling with relief, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust, but it was beyond dark in our bedroom because Ken couldn’t stand to have the sun hit him full force in the morning.
I held a hand in front of me even though I knew where I was going—stubbing my toe would put an end to all my romantic plans, so better safe than sorry.
I crept to my side of the bed and pulled back the covers, sliding in and immediately hitting a body. Why was Ken on my side of the bed? And why did he smell like vanilla? Most importantly, why did he have boobs?
“Don’t stop now,” a woman’s voice said as I removed my hand, then froze.
Move, Stella. At least get back to the hall, where your clothes are.
But my body didn’t listen.
Ken yawned. “Don’t stop what?”
“What you were doing,” she said.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” he said.
“Yes, you were.”
His hand moved under the covers, finding my hip, then disappearing, then reappearing.
He shot up in bed, then ran to the lights.
“Uh, Stella,” he said as we all blinked to adjust to the light.
Now his girlfriend sat up, flashing her boobs before pulling up the covers. My eyes hadn’t completely adjusted, but she looked disturbingly young.
The lump in my throat made it difficult to form words.
The pounding in my ears made his voice seem far, far away.
Even so, some survival instinct deep, deep within knew I had to play this situation carefully.
I shocked myself by saying, “And to think, I’ve always wanted to have a ménage à trois.
The least you could’ve done was invite me. ”
Bolstered by the words, I slid slowly from the bed, dressed only in what dignity I could muster. Posture straight, steps slow despite the racing of my heart, I sauntered over to Ken and paused. Despite my supposedly advanced age, at least one part of him was happy to see me.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“Stella, this is Eloise. Eloise, Stella.”
“Can’t quite say it’s a pleasure, Eloise.”
Her mouth opened and closed, but nothing other than a squeak emerged.
Now that I was standing in front of him and had adjusted to my new normal, I understood Ken perfectly when he said, rather hopefully, “Ménage à trois, you say?”
I glared at him. “I think we need to have a chat tomorrow.”
Ken sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. As my posture improved, his worsened. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”
Head held high, I walked out of the bedroom and gathered up my clothes from the hall floor.
Only when I was sitting in my car, waiting for tears to come, did I realize I’d also picked up the bottle of champagne. I couldn’t seem to find any tears, but condensation from the warming bottle did the job for me.