"Really?" I asked, darting a look at Ted, who had turned, against all probability, an even darker shade of red.
"Yup. You eat a bowl of oatmeal with banana and a spoonful of peanut butter almost every morning. You have a stack of books beside your bed about two feet high, and more on the night stand. You love mysteries and travel books the most, but you read just about everything. You've always dreamed of owning a bookstore, you adopted a little dog six years ago from the pound, you take baths before bed most nights, and refused to make an offer on two houses because they only had showers." She squinted at me. "And Audrey takes after you. A lot. In fact, I can't believe I didn't make the connection."
"Wait... you know Audrey?"
"Of course," she said.
I swallowed hard, uncomfortable with how much Ted had shared with her. What else did she know about me? And, most importantly, why hadn't Ted consulted me before introducing this new woman to our daughters? I tried to make eye contact with my ex-husband, but he was staring at the ceiling, evidently entranced by the recent paint job. I turned back to Kirsten. "You've met our daughters?" I asked.
"Oh, loads of times," Kirsten said. "We took them to dinner just last week." That must have been while I was clearing the last of the stuff out of our formerly shared house, I thought. I raised my eyebrows at Ted.
My ex-husband cleared his throat, now studying the floorboards. "I, uh, was going to talk to you about it..."
"A bit late now," I pointed out. I was a little hurt; I'd talked with them at least once a week, and neither of them had mentioned that Ted had a girlfriend. Their dad and I had only been officially divorced for eight months; maybe they were trying to shield me from the pain? I didn't know, but I was definitely going to bring it up soon.
"I gave Audrey a book of mine to read a few weeks ago; I can't wait to hear what she thinks of it. Like I said, I know you favor mysteries and travel writing, but I've been introducing her to some more literary work."
I resisted the urge to bean her with an Agatha Christie compendium and pasted on a polite smile. "You seem to know all about me," I said to Kirsten, "but Ted's never even mentioned you to me."
"No?" she asked.
"Not a word," I confirmed. "How did you two meet, anyway?"
Kirsten beamed up at Ted, and a dreamy look crossed her face as she turned back to me. "About six months ago, he came to a reading I did, in Boston."
Six months. When the ink on the divorce decree had barely dried. I turned and stared at Ted. "A book reading?" I asked. My ex-husband hadn't attended a single literary event in the 22 years I'd known him.
He shrugged, a sheepish look on his face. "It looked interesting."
"Oh, he was a great audience member. He'd read the whole book, asked the most interesting questions... and even invited me out for a cocktail afterwards. We hit it off immediately, and we've been inseparable ever since. We've been to Greece and Italy, and we're planning a month-long tour of Eastern Europe in the spring."
I stared at the stranger to whom I'd been married for two decades. Attending author events in his spare time? A month-long tour of Europe? Inseparable? Ted had been a workaholic as long as I'd known him. Getting him home to dinner before eight had taken either an act of God or a promise of chicken and dumplings and possibly apple pie, his absolute favorite dinner. I could barely get him to take a weekend off to visit Snug Harbor, much less spend a month across the Atlantic. And now he was accompanying this woman to weekend readings and spending all his spare time with her?
And why was she telling me all this, anyway?
"I've got a few more things to take care of," I informed the happy couple, forcing a pleasant expression and trying not to look as upset as I was. "Help yourselves to snacks; I'll be back in a few minutes."
Without waiting for an answer, I turned and fled up the stairs to my apartment, where I sank down in the welter of boxes and burst into tears.
I allowed myself a good five-minute breakdown before telling myself it was time to pull it together. I was sitting between two boxes marked "mystery books," wiping my eyes and giving myself a pep talk, when there was a knock on the apartment door. It couldn't be Ted... er, Theodore... could it?
"Max?"
I was relieved to recognize Bethany's voice. "Come in," I said, doing a last tear-swipe.
"It's almost time to open the front..." She rounded a stack of boxes and spotted me, and broke off mid-sentence. "What happened?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Your face is all... blotchy."
"It's nothing," I said, clambering to my feet. My face always got mottled when I cried. Hopefully a good splash of cold water would make it less apparent.
"Balderdash," she said. "Something's wrong. Did the paper not run the announcement about the opening? Did you hear something bad from the bank?"
"No," I said. "Nothing like that."
"What, then?"
"You know the man with the author?"
"Theodore?" she asked. "He seems very nice; I just met him."
I took a deep breath. "I always knew him as Ted. He's my ex-husband."
"He's your... what?" Bethany blinked. "K. T. Anderson's boyfriend is your ex-husband? But didn't you just divorce, like a few months ago?"
"Eight."
"Still, that's, like, practically yesterday. What is he doing here? That's so thoughtless!"
"He
