She looked in the mirror and sighed. At one time, she’d had awesome boobs. The kind of boobs that other women wanted and surgeons worked hard to create. But one morning when she was thirty-eight, she’d gone into the bathroom and found that they’d fallen and couldn’t get up. It was the beginning of the end—that dreaded day when gravity came to visit and refused to leave.

She grabbed them with both hands and lifted them back into place, then shifted them from side to side, trying to remember what they looked like in sweaters before Gravity Day had come calling.

What the hell.

“I order you to stay perky like you were in my twenties,” she said out loud then climbed into the shower.

Maybe she could lift boobs. And maybe if she was really specific about what she wanted, the magic would understand. Despite a bitch of a day, the puffiness and dark circles under Halcyon’s eyes had disappeared altogether by that evening. She’d made Marina rub every square inch of her face and scalp before she left and had threatened to demand a foot rub since she hadn’t had time for a pedicure that week. Marina had politely declined. She loved her sister but massaging someone’s sweaty feet was one of those lines she wasn’t interested in crossing. Her professional interest was solely on the other end of the body.

She looked down at her feet and frowned. They could use a pedicure. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had one, but that was typical. Pre-Crotchapocalypse, Marina had been so busy with everyone and everything else that she had stopped making time for herself. And no one had even seemed to notice. Or care. She supposed that’s what happened to most women with families, but from her new perspective, she could see the imbalance.

But really, who was to blame? Not Avery. Her daughter was self-involved, but most teens were and besides, she’d been trained to believe that Mom took care of everything, mainly because Mom always had. Harold could share some of the blame but then, his mother had been one of the old-school, non-career women who canned vegetables, made homemade bread, and stitched her own hideous place mats. Harold had been raised to believe the mom took care of everything as well.

So that left her, and that was a hard pill to swallow. Why hadn’t she ever advocated for herself? Why had she let her family take her for granted? And they did take her for granted. Because in all the years of giving and doing and sacrificing, not once could she remember anyone telling her thank you. Once, recently, she’d complained about the weight of her responsibilities to Harold and how no one seemed to appreciate them. He’d made some nasty comment about her wanting credit for things she was supposed to do.

If he were standing in front of her right now, she’d kick him right in that rash.