To not be whoever it is I’ve become. Eleven years of marriage and two children and a nice big, expensive house. It looks great on paper, but it’s damn empty on the inside.

As Kai’s body fills mine, I wish I knew how Daniel and I fell out of love, and I want to know how to keep love if I ever fall in love again.

Kai eventually leaves to go home and shower. He’s promised to return at seven-thirty to take me to dinner. When he leaves I don’t rush into the shower but sink back onto the rumpled sheets of the bed and just lie there, staring at the ceiling, my hands behind my head.

I feel so different.

Happy and yet sad all at the same time. Happy to be here right now. Sad that in the morning I go home.

But home’s where I belong. Home is… home. Yet somehow the word home right now puts a knot in my stomach and a viselike grip around my throat.

I finally force myself to move. After showering, I do my hair and makeup. Forty, huh?

I lean toward the bathroom mirror and inspect my face.

Hazel eyes, okay skin, decent features, great hair. I love my hair, even if I have to touch up the color every three or four weeks. I’ve kept my hair past my shoulders, and it’s thick, the color somewhere between auburn and chestnut. I’m not a natural redhead. I was a boring, nondescript brunette until I tried this shade ten years ago, and I won’t go back. In summer I highlight it a little, lighten it up with gold strands, but red gives me confidence. Makes me feel bold. Brave.

But the face staring back at me doesn’t look particularly brave tonight. It looks uncertain—excited as well as a little afraid. There’s something about one’s birthday that makes you want to be claimed. Kept. Cherished.

For the past two years, I’ve felt anything but cherished. Yet somehow in forty-eight hours Kai’s mended something in me, closed a little of the gap where my heart had felt torn.

Divorce tears your heart and your life. Tears it right in two. The before and the after. Daniel and I were together nearly fifteen years when you add the dating years onto the married years. I met him when I was twenty-five, when we were both living and working overseas. I was in Paris. He was in London. I worked with a fashion designer, and he worked for the U.K. office of Microsoft. We thought we were so urban, sophisticated, and cool.