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won’t love living under a bridge. Get it together, Frankie. It’s time for you to suck it up, princess.”
    Maxine marched out of the bathroom with Kiki, followed by her aunt, who’d refused to meet her eyes.
    A long, deep breath later, thankful for the silence and the chance to sit on the edge of the bathtub, Frankie almost collapsed in a boneless heap.
    The effort it’d taken to get from one room to the other, coupled with the sensory overload of Maxine’s chatter after four months of very few wordy exchanges with her Aunt Gail, and she was wrecked.
    Frankie dropped the bar of soap and towel to the floor with jellylike arms, letting her head rest against the salmon pink tiled wall, and attempted to make her mind go blank. She’d gotten incredibly good at it since she’d come to Gail’s. There shouldn’t be any problem summoning up some more numb.
    Yet, she couldn’t stop wondering.
    Suck it up, princess?
    What kind of new age crap was that?
    “I don’t hear water running, Frankie,” Maxine warned from behind the door. “I’ll put you in that shower myself. You’ve got ten minutes. Make that twenty—you’ll need to wash that greasy hair twice—and then I’m coming in.”
    Frankie rose on unsteady legs, gripping the towel rack. She didn’t doubt Maxine would do exactly as she stated. She also didn’t doubt she had neither the strength nor the kind of oomph it would take to stop her.
    Coffee wouldn’t kill her. A shower wouldn’t either.
    It was the sucking-princess thing that worried her.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    There are two sides to every divorce: yours and shithead’s.
    —AUTHOR UNKNOWN
     
     
     
     
    “Well, look at you. Bright as a shiny new penny,” her aunt crowed from a corner of her tiny kitchen. “Sit, honey, and I’ll pour you some coffee.”
    The very idea made her stomach turn. Yet Frankie found herself dragging a dinette chair out and dropping into it, scooping a bewildered, silent Kiki up to sit in her lap. Her jeans gaped at her waist, pushing at the bottom of her thin T-shirt, and she wasn’t even self-conscious enough to care. It was all she had in her to drag a brush through her wet hair and locate a pair of underwear.
    Maxine sat to her left, texting on her iPhone with the neon green cover. When she looked up, it was with a smile of encouragement. “Admit it. You feel better.”
    “I feel cleaner. That’s all I’m willing to cop to.”
    Gail snorted. “You sure smell better,” she teased, plunking down a yellowish brown ceramic mug filled with steaming coffee. The cup brought a familiar ache to Frankie’s chest, making her heart constrict. Her mother once had cups just like those.
    Cupping the mug with her icy hands, she sniffed the liquid out of habit. A bad one. One Mitch had instilled in her. He used to say if she could smell the chicory, then she’d made an acceptable enough brew.
    Gail nudged her arm with a grunt before dropping a plate of Danish in the center of the table and sitting to Frankie’s right. “Not like the highfalutin stuff you’re used to. I’d bet my pressure socks on that. It’s just plain old Chock Full o’Nuts.”
    Frankie shook her head. “I’m sorry, Aunt Gail. That wasn’t why I smelled it. It’s an old . . . Just a habit.” She bit her lip before swallowing a gulp of the steaming liquid that burned her tongue and made her stomach roil.
    “A Mitch habit,” Maxine, all-knowing, all-seeing, said.
    Her eyes rolled upward. Yes. Mitch, Mitch, Mitch.
    Maxine sipped her coffee before saying, “It’s time to break all those old habits, Frankie. If you’ll just let me help, I promise you’ll be asking yourself, ‘Who the hell is Mitch Bennett?’ before long.”
    Frankie looked down into her coffee, unable to meet Maxine’s eyes. Just hearing his name spoken out loud was like a small stab wound to her gut. This forgetting who the hell Mitch was could be done much more effectively under some covers. Asleep. “What is it exactly that