The next attempt to get me out of bed was made by my ex-husband. He walked into the bedroom, as though we still shared one, and pulled at the blinds. They snapped back up into their tubular homes, letting light charge into the space. He might as well have thrown a glass of cold water on me. He’s never been one for gentle tactics. At one point, when I still considered myself a writer, he’d been my editor as well as my husband, but that fact had never protected me from his brutally harsh editing style or, for that matter, his equally harsh husbanding style.

“What the hell, Leo?” I said, grabbing at the sheets to pull them over my head.

“June. You need to get up.” I felt his weight land on the end of the bed. He’s always careful not to get too close if he doesn’t have to. I think it’s because he still has the urge to wrap his hands around my neck and squeeze until the breath leaves me.

“You can’t tell me what to do anymore, Leo. Remember we’re divorced?”

He sighed with impatience, and I assumed that the girls had put him up to it. “May would want you to get up. She wouldn’t want you wasting away like this. Or neglecting the girls.”

Using the two most precious things in the world to me was a low blow. I swung my leg out in a vicious kick, but the tangle of sheets trapped it before it connected with his body.

He reached out and patted my foot as though thanking it for not hurting him. “Also, I got the paperwork for May’s will from Jim.”

Jim is our lawyer—mine, Leo’s, and May’s. He’d also been a family friend when Leo and I still made a family—a touch incestuous, but we got a decent discount. He shouldn’t have given those papers to Leo, but it wasn’t the first time he hadn’t stuck to proper lawyer protocol.

“He said you weren’t answering your phone or returning his messages.”

“I’m in mourning,” I mumbled through my wall of sheet.

“June.” I hate the way he says my name, as though he can barely bring himself to utter it. “It’s been a month. You’ve got to get back to the living. The healing can only happen when you start moving forward. Putting one foot in front of the other.”

“Thanks, Deepak Chopra. Now leave the papers on my dresser and please get out.”

He stayed sitting at the end of the bed. I felt him shifting, most likely running his hands through his thick blond hair, admiring himself in the mirror across from the bed. He was a good-looking man, even in his forties, and he knew it. Always had.