“That chicken casserole used to be your favorite,” Rochelle said. “You insisted I make it for your birthday dinner every year.”
“I was a kid,” Grace said. “I grew up and my tastes changed. Refined, if you will.”
Rochelle rolled her eyes and built the sandwich. She placed it on a plate, deftly cut it in half on the diagonal, and handed it to Grace.
“Thanks,” Grace said. She took the sandwich and moved back to her barstool, chewing slowly.
Rochelle wiped the bread crumbs from the cutting board. “This split-up could get pretty messy, pretty fast, you know. Ben is involved in every aspect of your business. You can walk away from him, but can you walk away from everything you’ve built up in the business? Not to mention the house?”
Grace shrugged to indicate she had no answers, and kept chewing.
“Counseling?” Rochelle offered. Grace shook her head violently and took another bite of her sandwich, and then a sip of her iced tea.
“All right,” her mother said, glancing meaningfully at the neon Budweiser sign that hung over the mirrored bar back. “It’s after eleven now. My lunch trade is gonna start trickling in here pretty soon.”
“I can take a hint,” Grace said, finishing off the last of her sandwich. She pushed the empty plate aside and stood. “I’m gonna go upstairs to my old room and try to get some work done. I’m doing a giveaway of this hideous Tuscan pottery on Monday, and I’ve got to write that blog post and figure out what I’m writing about tomorrow.”
She picked up her laptop case. “You’ve got Wi-Fi, right?”
Rochelle wrinkled her brow. “I guess. They hooked up some kind of Internet doohickey when I changed cable providers back in the spring.”
“Password?”
“Who knows?”
“Never mind, I’ll figure it out myself,” Grace said. She headed for the stairway that led to the family’s upstairs living area, and then stopped and poked her head around the doorway. “If Ben calls here looking for me, you haven’t seen me and don’t know where I am.”
“Gotcha,” Rochelle said. “I hope he does call. I’ll give the son of a bitch an earful.”
“Thanks,” Grace said, offering a wan smile. “It’s good to know you’ve got my back.”
“I do,” Rochelle assured her. “I’m your wingman, right?”
* * *
Grace pushed the bedroom door open with her hip. She’d decorated the room herself, at the age of fourteen, and not one single thing had changed in all these years.
She’d been in her Laura Ashley phase then. She’d longed for the pink and white striped wallpaper she’d seen in a House Beautiful layout, but with no money to spend, she’d laboriously taped and painted pink stripes over the cheap knotty pine-paneled walls that her mother had previously slathered with white paint. Grace found a crappy $9.99 faux-mahogany four-poster bed at the Salvation Army and painted it white, then stenciled a sappy design of green vines, pink daisies, and blue ribbons across the headboard.
Grace kicked at the worn and stained beige wall-to-wall carpet on the floor. She’d begged and pleaded with her father to let her rip up that carpet—the same stuff that covered every surface in their apartment, but Butch had been adamant. “Do you know how much money I spent on this stuff?”
She settled onto the faded pink chintz bedspread and opened her laptop, clicking onto the logo for Gracenotes. She reread the post she’d written the previous evening, which seemed like something from a previous life. There were already forty-seven comments posted. Had any of her readers seen the news about the flamboyant scene at her house? She decided against reading the comments. Maybe later.
Instead, she concentrated on writing Monday’s post, going ahead with the topic she’d already settled on a week ago: how and where to find great deals on discounted designer home fabrics. Soon she was typing away, copying and pasting images of favorite fabrics and room settings, copying Web site links, losing herself in the process of creation.
When she looked up from her work, she realized that two hours had passed. Her cell phone, lying on the nightstand, had not rung, and no beeps had signaled an incoming text message. She’d halfway expected Ben to call, either downcast and contrite, or furious and full of threats. The silence seemed ominous. No matter. She glared at the phone, daring it to ring. She would not call him. Not ever. Let the swine call and beg her to come crawling back.
Grace went back to her work. She checked for typos, misspellings, links that didn’t work, pictures that were improperly sized. Finally satisfied with her work, she pulled up the Gracenotes blog page, and clicked on the sign-in and password buttons.
A red highlighted italicized sentence flashed on the screen.
Invalid password. Try again?
She frowned and winced as she retyped the password. GracenBen4ever.
Invalid password. Check for misspellings?
Not possible. She typed the word again, with the same results.
Reset password?
She checked her e-mail, waiting for the message to alert her that her new password had been sent. But when she opened the e-mail, she stared down at the message in disbelief.
New password may not be reset. Invalid user name. Please contact technical support if you believe this message has been sent in error.
She fumed and dialed the number provided, waiting on hold for ten minutes. Finally, a young man who identified himself as Hans came on the line.
“Hello,” she said briskly. “My name is Grace Stanton, and I write a blog called Gracenotes. I’ve just spent half an hour trying to get access to my dashboard so I can write a new post, but I keep getting error messages, and, finally, I got a message telling me that I can’t set a new password, because I have
