Not what she wanted me to be. Not what they demanded I be.

I glanced in the mirror but immediately looked away and walked out, through the bedroom, down the hall, the steps. I turned right into the large, open kitchen that looked down to the sunken living room, across to the cozy landing, all with views to the frothy sea. Calmly, I tore open boxes until I found them.

My dishes. Stoneware that was very pretty but cost forty dollars a plate.

My mother had picked it. She did it in a way that seemed she was encouraging me to pick it. But in reality, she picked it.

Suddenly, I had the nearly overwhelming urge to scoot the entire box out to the deck and, piece by piece, throw it into the sea.

I didn’t.

That would be a waste and those dishes could be put to good use.

I was starting anew. I didn’t need to do it being wasteful.

I was going to do something else with those plates.

I was going to do something else with all my stuff.

I was going to make it worth something. Something real.

Because that was what I was going to be. I was going to stop being what I was, the Felicia Hathaway mini-me all grown up.

I was going to be me.

I had absolutely no idea what that me would turn out to be.

I just knew whoever she was, for the first time in her life, she’d be real.

Chapter One

They’d See

By that weekend, the weekend the kids would normally fly out to California to spend a day and a half with me, they were instead coming to their new home.

I’d been in Magdalene for three days.

In that time, thankfully, I had not seen Mickey.

In that time, I’d also been through every box, mostly repacking things and lugging them to walls, stacking them up.

I had a plan.

But first, I had to start reparation work with my children.

I could say that due to my activities since Conrad and I separated—when joint custody turned to every other weekend, which then turned to the judge awarding Conrad custody of the children as he moved across the country, allowing me one weekend a month—along the way the visitations with my kids had deteriorated.

In the beginning I had cause. It was just. My neurosurgeon husband had cheated on me with a nurse at his hospital, a woman fifteen years younger than me. He then left our family in order to divorce me so they could be married.

Conrad and I signed our divorce papers on a Wednesday.

Conrad and Martine had a massive beach wedding that next Saturday, where my son was his father’s best man and my daughter was a junior bridesmaid.

Then, as the months passed into years, the extremity of my antics increasing, my cause was no longer just.

No, and not only because the extremity of my antics was extreme, but because I’d done what no mother should do.