Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

The rails on both sides of the page were filled with tiny, one-inch squares advertising everything from New Unbelievable Anti-Aging Serum! to bank credit cards to cruise ship vacations to Pet Meds by Mail!

“Horrible,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Heinous.” She counted three dozen ads on the home page. Ben must have been having a field day, she decided, maximizing and monetizing to his greedy heart’s content.

She read the previous day’s post. It was titled “How to Buy Furniture.”

“Hmm. Scintillating,” Grace said. As she read, she felt sick. The entire blog was really a thinly veiled advertorial for Room in a Box, a wholesale furniture company with franchise operations all over central Florida. The same furniture company whose banner ad now took up the entire top of the home page.

Room in a Box’s marketing people had been pestering Grace for more than a year to write about their furniture. They’d even had the nerve to ship a faux-leather recliner chair to the house—as an inducement/bribery for Grace to write testimonials about their product line.

“No way,” Grace had said, as Ben cut the cardboard crate away from the chair—which actually came with a remote control allowing it to recline, vibrate, and even play music. “Pack that thing up and tell UPS to come back and get it. I don’t even want it to stay here overnight.”

Ben knew it was useless to argue with her. Obviously he’d waited until he no longer had to argue with her. Grace was gone, and with her had gone any hint of editorial standards.

She couldn’t read any more of this drivel. She closed out the blog, opened a file, and began to type, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

By four that afternoon, she’d registered a new domain name for herself, TrueGrace. Maybe not the most original name, she admitted, but it would serve its purpose, hopefully letting her readers know this blog was the real thing.

This time around, she promised herself, the blog would be all hers. And for her first post, she decided to go public with what had happened in her life and to her old world.

No more prettying things up, Grace decided. She was still writing, deleting, revising, when she looked down at her watch and realized it was nearly 7:00 P.M. She hit the SAVE button, closed her laptop, and reluctantly went downstairs.

Rochelle was behind the bar, pouring a beer for an older woman Grace didn’t recognize. She looked up in time to see Grace heading for the Sandbox’s front door.

“Where are you headed?” Rochelle called.

Grace grimaced. “To my so-called therapy group.”

“Looking like that?”

Grace looked down at herself. She was wearing a faded lime-green Sandbox T-shirt, white shorts, and flip-flops, the same outfit she’d changed into after her morning run. Her hair was knotted in a limp ponytail and she wore no makeup.

“The judge said I had to go,” she said, her chin jutting out defiantly. “He didn’t say I had to dress to impress.”

Rochelle handed the beer to her customer and hurried around the bar to her daughter’s side. “Honey, you don’t want to go in there with an attitude,” she said, her voice low. “Maybe these sessions will actually be helpful. Maybe you should keep an open mind. Or at least do something about your hair.”

Grace sighed. She reached into the glass display case where they kept the Sandbox-branded merchandise, the koozies, tees, bumper stickers, and key chains. She grabbed a baseball cap with the Sandbox logo embroidered on the bill, jammed it on her head, and looped her ponytail through the opening in the back of the hatband.

“Better?” She didn’t wait to hear Rochelle’s answer.

11

Grace had to check the street address on the therapist’s door to make sure she’d arrived at the right place. This was a shrink’s office? It was a drab one-story stucco storefront occupying the end slot in a strip shopping center that also boasted a Vietnamese nail salon, a hearing aid salesroom, a business called the Diaper Depot, and a tattoo parlor. The dusty plate glass window was boldly lettered in gilt-edged black letters; PAULA TALBOTT-SINCLAIR, L.S.W. FAMILY AND MARITAL COACHING, DIVORCE DIVERSION, EMOTIONAL HEALING.

“Emotional healing,” she muttered to herself, taking a last sip of lukewarm coffee before getting out of her car. “Right. Like that’s going to happen.” There were four other cars in the otherwise empty parking lot. One of them, a shiny black VW bug, boasted a yellow smiley-face bumper sticker with the motto “Change Happens.” Had to be the therapist’s car, she decided, hating her on the spot.

Paula Talbott-Sinclair’s reception area wasn’t much more impressive than her storefront. Worn and faded brown indoor-outdoor carpet, a low-slung olive-green pleather sofa, and a couple of armless chairs. There was a receptionist’s desk, with a computer terminal and telephone, but no sign of a receptionist. Only a clipboard with a hand-lettered sign on the desktop: DIVORCE RECOVERY GROUP MEMBERS, PLEASE SIGN IN HERE. There were three other names on the sign-in sheet, all women, Grace noted.

The door on the wall opposite the front door was slightly ajar, and Grace heard the low hum of voices. She wrote her name on the sign-in sheet, hesitating a moment, before jotting down Grace Davenport.

“Hello?” she said softly, approaching the door. A woman popped her head out. Grace guessed she must be in her midforties. Her heart-shaped face was framed with a cascade of sandy-blond curls, and she had startlingly blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She was dressed in a figure-hugging sleeveless black tank top and tight black yoga pants, with a gauzy black shawl draped around her bony shoulders. And she was barefoot.

“Oh hi,” she said brightly, looking Grace up and down. She grasped both of Grace’s hands in hers and squeezed. “I’m Dr. Talbott-Sinclair, although in group, we all just use first names. So I’m Paula. And you must be Grace Stanton?”

“Actually, it’s Davenport,” Grace said. “If you don’t mind.”

“I see,” Paula said, pursing her lips. “Well, that’s something we’re going to want to