Invoices, Joy told herself. While you wait for Geoff Billings to call you back you need to think about invoices. You don’t think about Anthony. Who did she think she was, starting up a relationship with a recently separated stranger? After work she had to walk Pickles and check in with Bridezilla’s mother and stop by the grocery store for orange juice and call Holly back and figure out dinner for Maggie. Joy wasn’t free, not at all. She ignored the text.

But his eyes. His back muscles. The way he brushed her hair out of her eyes . . . his thumbs.

No. It was a one-night stand, that was all. That was fine. She was entitled to that. It was summer! She was an adult! She’d been tipsy!

Joy’s “office” wasn’t so much an office as it was a small section of the shop’s kitchen that she’d claimed for herself. No walls separated her desk and filing cabinets from the baking area, where right now Olivia Rossi was walking two of the newly hired college kids through how to fill the pies. When summer really ramped up, Joy would need the extra bodies. “It might seem easy, but it’s not,” Olivia was saying. Olivia was the only person Joy knew who actually looked good in a hairnet. “For one thing, it’s really easy to get tired. And it’s no joke making sure you scoop the same amount into every pie.” Joy smiled. Olivia was only sixteen, but she’d worked for Joy the previous summer and she was preternaturally diligent. Who said the younger generation had no work ethic?

Maggie was handling the counter, though she’d already told Joy that with her new nannying job she might not be available as much as she’d planned on. Joy didn’t correct her, though she knew she’d been hired as a mother’s helper, not a nanny. Lu had told her as much, when she’d introduced herself to Joy. “I’ll be there with her almost all the time,” she’d said. “I’m just looking for an extra set of hands so I can get some things done around the house.”

Joy tried hard not to resent women like Lu, who spent their days at the beach with their children while their husbands ferried back and forth to work.

These were the same women who spent ten or more dollars a day at Joy Bombs, so in fact she had to be careful about how much to resent them. It was just that sometimes Joy watched these women herding their children around and showing off their toned shoulders and, sometimes, having the gall to complain about it. That made her want to scream.

“I’m so excited about my job,” Maggie had said right after Lu and Joy had met. “Lu is so nice. And the boys are super-adorable. Her husband is gone all the time at the hospital. She’s alone so much! She really needs help.”

I’ve been alone for a decade, thought Joy. I really needed help. Joy had been one hundred percent on her own since the day Dustin walked out. Her family, close-knit as long as you were within a ten-mile radius, had released her like a kid letting go of the string on a helium balloon—they were sad at first, but once she was out of sight they sort of forgot about her. Sometimes Joy had to remind herself that that’s why she was strong. Every solitary challenge she’d surmounted had added to her strength, muscle fiber by hard-won muscle fiber, until she was rock-solid.