“What the fuck is a posset?” 

My beloved husband was being entirely too loud for 7:30 in the morning, and completely unhelpful in the way men can often be. I brushed a stray flake of croissant from his lips and typed into the Google search bar: 

definition of posset

“Uncle Google,” I said, clicking on the first link, “will provide.”

Alex snorted, resting his dark head on my shoulder to get a better look. His hand drifted to my breast, but I swatted it away.

“Focus,” I chided him, and cleared my throat. “Posset; noun. A hot drink made of milk curdled as with ale or wine, usually spiced and sweetened.”

Alex gagged lightly and a fine mist of his spittle spattered the screen of my laptop. “Atrocious,” he said, lifting a corner of my favorite duvet to wipe away the spatter. “Are you sure she said ‘posset’?”

“Atrocious, but period-correct.” I flicked over to another open tab. “Here’s the evite with our pot luck assignments. See? I’m under beverages, with Jenn and Bathsheba.” 

“Ye-es,” he said with a sniff. “But why do they get to make ones called ‘Taming of the Shrewdriver’ and ‘Lear Royale’? Also, you know someone named ‘Bathsheba’?”

It was early on a Sunday morning, and like most Sunday mornings, we were burrowing beneath the duvet and trying to forget that there was a world beyond the four walls of our bedroom. Sunday was a time for reading the papers (well, doomscrolling news websites) to each other and setting the fucked-up world to rights, for phone calls home and buckets of coffee. Soon Al would be pestering me for sex and chilaquiles, hopefully in that order. I know my husband, and even more importantly, I know what gives him gas.

On this particular Sunday morning, however, I was thinking about curdled milk and Shakespeare. Or more specifically Sara’s upcoming literary salon, her first since the judge had stamped his name in black ink on her divorce decree last December. She’d told me shucking off her husband’s last name was like stepping out of an ill-fitting uniform she’d been forced to wear for a dozen years. Now she was just Sara Cosgrove again. I liked her better that way. You might too, if you knew her ex as well as I did.

I was also thinking about coffee, and the lack of it in my mug. “Probably because I’m a better cook than Jenn,” I said, unpeeling the duvet and unhooking my husband’s arm from where it rested across my waist, trying to trap me in the bed’s warmth. When he tried to reel me back in, I wriggled out of his grip like a slippery fish through a young angler’s hand. “Hey, have you seen my slippers?”

“Nope.” Alex sat up in bed and stretched one arm high, higher. “Are you making more coffee?”

I made a non-committal grunt. On my way to the kitchen, I shrugged back into the thick terrycloth robe I’d been in half an hour before to fuss over the coffee grinder. Over two years into our marriage, I’d long since abandoned the whisper-fine silk dressing gown I used to favor. I’d stand in front of Al at bedtime, and slowly slip one bare shoulder out from beneath the gossamer cloth, then another. I’d bring my fingers to my mouth with a little “oops!” and he’d laugh, a dark chuckle, and soon enough we’d be naked and all over each other like the barely post-adolescent idiots we still were inside. 

Now I wore one of his pit-stained white t-shirts to bed and preferred sexless slippers from UGG. Funny how a pandemic can take all the mystery out of silly little things like marriages. 

“Bring the whole carafe back, will you, sweetest?” he called from the bedroom. “And another of those croissants. Two, actually. And the jam.”

I grunted again, and flicked the kettle on. While I measured out six perfect coffee spoons of Sumatra Mandheling into a clean French press, my mind swirled with ideas for Sara’s salon. Not the first I’d been invited to, but the first I felt brave enough to attend, so I wanted to impress. My posset needed to be on point, and if that meant booze-laced curdled milk, so be it.

I’d become something of the heroine of the hour for planting the seed in Sara’s mind from which the mighty oak of her divorce hath grown. Well, a heroine. Numero uno top bitch in Sara’s story was herself, of course. I hadn’t done anything that spectacular, not really. Just privately showed her that she could get out, if someone held up a lantern and took her hand. That a small, flickering flame of hope just needs a puff of oxygen to turn it into an inferno. Burn it all down. All I’d done is help her and the girls run out of the burning house of the Brookeses’ marriage and into a new apartment with only Sara’s name on the lease. 

It wasn’t cheap, all this help, but since it involved carving a big ol’ figurative “FUCK YOU” into Josh Brookes’ heart, I’d have opened my wrists and bled cash all over his immaculate mid-century modern house if I needed. In the end, it cost less than a new Honda Civic. Money can do these things, you know. Fix people’s lives, that is. Money is the ultimate tool, a real Swiss Army knife that can be molded and rolled out and stuffed in pockets to fix nearly any occasion. Sometimes you might even use it to help people out who aren’t yourself.

With the kettle slowly revving on the counter, I scrolled through the evite again. Thick black script unfurled across a faux-parchment background. At the very top, Bill Shakespeare himself near-winked at me from his famous portrait — you know the one, all bulbous globe of a bald head and weedy facial hair, like the head of a gruesome flower blooming from a starched linen ruff.

“Now is the winter of our discontent? I think not! Time to make the upcoming hour overflow with joy, and let pleasure drown the brim. Join me for the relaunch of my bimonthly literary salon with a celebration of all things Shakespearean. We’ll be acting out scenes from some of his most famous works, competing for prizes in a trivia quiz (trust me, I’ve made it hard!) and enjoying the chance to be around each other again. This time, with 100% less narcissistic, emotionally abusive husband!

“Please bring your wit, wisdom, love of the Bard, and the themed pot luck dish I’ve assigned you to my new home at 17664 Van Duyn Boulevard #205, near the corner with Amestoy. Fancy dress as always appreciated, but never required. Your presence is my much-appreciated gift — as Shakespeare himself said, ingratitude is monstrous.

“All things are ready, if our mind be so. Let’s raise a glass — of wine, of specialty cocktails, of posset — to the death of Brookes’ Books and its rebirth as The Circle. And to quote the Bard once more: Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast. So welcome! Let’s make this one very merry indeed.”

I should have disliked her more for a try-hard email like that, but I couldn’t. Nor could I muster sufficient envy over that slim volume of dreamy pastoral poems she’d published before she married my ex-boyfriend Josh, and the small clutch of accolades it had earned her. Or yearn for her exquisite taste in vintage handbags and antique silver hairpins. She had a brush dipped in the bright gloss of optimism to stroke over everything, even her nasty, occasionally public divorce. (Even more than his regular appearance on bestseller lists, she told me her ex knew he’d truly made it as a writer when lurid snippets of their marital discord made it to the Daily Mail’s US edition.)

I couldn’t dislike her, even with my posset marching orders. The kettle declared itself boiled with a brisk click, and I filled the glass carafe. The dark, sweet scent of coffee seeped from the press’s spout, rising through steam from the thick stratum of grounds waiting to be shoved down in four minutes time. 

Four minutes to consult Uncle Google a few more times:

easy posset recipe

is posset a drink or a dessert

posset recipe drink not dessert

but I was getting nowhere. I did learn that a posset had been sort of a medicinal drink in Shakespeare’s time, like a dairy-laced hot toddy doled out to invalids and fussy children who would not sleep. That some considered it witchcraft, an aphrodisiac, a hangover cure, or liquid Viagra for limp-dicked guys in Elizabethan hose. 

Yuck. Al was right — I had drawn the joker in the potluck pack. After all I’d done for Sara, I expected more. With a grunt, I shoved the plunger in the pot hard enough for my palm to sting. Why can’t I be trusted with making the Puck’s Fizz? 

“MEL!” Alex boomed from the other room, jolting me from my navelgazing so sharply that I stuck my elbow into an open box of what remained of the croissants. “Everything all right in there?”

“Fine, fine, on my way.” I slid the squished pastries onto a plate and balanced it beside the coffee carafe on the tea tray. The hallway echoed with the rattle of fresh teaspoons against the jam jar as I made my way back to bed. “This is haute cuisine, you know.”

Reaching for the tray, Alex flashed me a crooked grin; I wasn’t quite sure if it was more for me or the coffee. “I love it when you speak French,” he cooed before his smile tilted down on one side. “What happened to the croissants?”

“Industrial accident.” 

Al lifted one of the flattened pastries to the light and, after a perfunctory inspection, shoved it between his lips. “Can’t even taste the oil spill, excellent clean up,” he said through a mouthful. 

“I try.”

The grin was back. “Now, whilst you were busy flying to Colombia to buy beans —”

“Indonesia,” I corrected, slipping back under the soft cloud of the duvet. “Sumatra is in Indonesia.”

“Fine. During your sojourn in Indoneeesia, I came up a solution for your posset predicament.” He tweaked my nose, and I thought not for the first time that he was terribly lucky that I love him as hard as I do. “Why are you making that face?”

“I’m making a face?” (I was making a face.) “Just, yuck. Posset is curdled. I take a strong position on not drinking chunky beverages.”

“I’ve seen you drink kombucha. On more than one occasion.”

I opened my mouth to protest but he had a point to go along with the full-throttle smirk he was sporting.

“As I was saying,” he said, bestowing another tweak on my much-abused nose, “I had a little thought whilst you were swimming to French Polynesia.”

“Indonesia.” My hand shot to my nose, anticipating another tweak.

Alex’s fingers looked like they were itching for a third pinch of my poor nose, but he settled for pushing a lock of hair behind my ear. “I thought I might write you a recipe for posset. Maybe even cook it up for you. Make myself useful in my inimitable way.”

Now, my husband is the sort of man who will happily live off of microwave ready meals, Chinese takeout of dubious provenance, and cans of beef chili, affectionately known chez nous as “bachelor chow, for hungry bachelors.” He claims he once burnt water and has been known to declare that passing me a tea towel counts as cooking. Once, he and I did an Instagram Live together where I tried — and failed — to teach him how to make tacos. We got nearly twenty viewers at one point, and some of them we weren’t even related to. 

So you might understand why I snorted sharply when I considered what a recipe from his brainbox might entail, let alone its execution. Alex’s grin sagged, which only made me laugh harder.

“I’m being completely serious,” he huffed, once my giggles subsided. “I have a very modern solution for your very Elizabethan problem. Presuming the Princess Melissa doesn’t yet have a recipe for non-chunky posset.”

I do love my husband, especially when he gets like this, long nose out of joint, and I couldn’t resist pressing a peck on his cheek. “That’s the Empress Melissa to you. And no, I do not.”

Not for want of trying. Well, at least trying for four minutes while the Sumatra brewed. Every set of instructions involved a massive number of egg yolks, lashings of Madeira wine (barf), and enough cinnamon and nutmeg to choke Santa Claus and all his reindeer.

“Excellent. One posset recipe for modern ancients, coming up. Now,” he said, looking up from his phone, that winning grin plastered back in place, “what do you know about ChatGPT?”

***

Jenn was right: Sara’s salons were fun. Or at least this one was. The poky two-bed in North Hills I’d helped her choose was transformed into a late Renaissance extravaganza. From the chipped crown molding five faux tapestries unfurled along the long wall of the living room, each printed with a different scene of falconers out for a day in the French woods. Their mock-faded colors so resembled the real thing I had to run a hand along one to make sure she hadn’t raided a Hollywood set for greater authenticity. Even though it was an unseasonably warm February day for Los Angeles, a large fire spit and cracked through a fake log in the gas fireplace. Along another wall, she’d hung a large poster of a woman in medieval garb, complete with wimple, stretching forward her bloodied hands for inspection. In large Gothic script, a banner above entreated us to “Pin the Soap on Lady Macbeth’s Damn Spot!”

“God, this is too cute. I kind of hate her,” Jenn murmured. “Sara, I mean. Not Lady Macbeth. What a badass.” 

“Sara or Lady Macbeth?” I tested, tugging at my frilly ruff. I’d decided in for a penny, in for the entire Bank of England, and was in full Elizabethan drag and deeply regretting it. Thick swirls of cream and gold wound round my stiff red brocade dress. The thing weighed about as much as a small sack of potatoes, and apparently it had been worn by some extra in The Other Boleyn Girl, according to the costume shop I’d hired it from. (A likely story.) Even though I’d skipped the wide-hipped panniers that were supposed to be worn beneath its folds, it had taken Alex ten minutes to lace me into the thing. 

Jenn raised one black eyebrow over the rim of her martini glass. “Both.”

“Ar least Sara never plotted to kill someone.”

Jenn slugged back the last of her Much a Woo-Woo About Nothing cocktail. “Maybe she should have. I can think of a very suitable candidate. Sara would have made a great black widow.”

“Jenn!”

She was right though. Everyone would have been better off if Joshua K. Brookes had shuffled off his mortal coil before the divorce. Sure, the two young daughters he shared with Sara might have mourned for a while, but as the sole beneficiaries of his literary estate they’d have thick stacks of cash to wipe away the tears for decades. And maybe his army of female fans — the so-called Brookes Babes —would have plunged into despair for years, so sad. But at least Sara would have been spared the post-breakup delight of getting dragged by them daily on Twitter for being a “grasping WHORE who never deserved being the wife of America’s greatest author, @RealJoshKBrookes. #joshkbrookes #brookesbabesarmy #marrymejosh” 

And for me? I had dwelled deep in fantasias of his demise for twenty years. His passing didn’t need to be lurid in its details, no being baked in a pie, no decapitation, no exit, pursued by a bear. I’d be perfectly satisfied if he just forget to wake up one morning and every morning after that. His longed-for dirt nap would be such stuff that my dreams are made on. (Please forgive me. I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare in order to cream everyone in the trivia contest.)

Jenn shrugged in her cropped cardigan and wiggled her empty glass. I envied her good sense in eschewing period garb and opting for jeans. “I’m getting another one of these bad boys before Caitlin and Bathsheba drink the entire bar. Want anything?”

From the kitchen, Caitlin’s raspy, unmistakable voice carried: “SHEBA! MORE WINE!” 

“Anything.” I gently prodded Jenn towards the alcohol Armageddon in the kitchen. “Just… make it quick. And no posset. Al made it.”

“Wait, you let him make it?” 

“Turns out I vomit in my mouth a little when I think too much about curds.” (This was completely true.) “But Al says it tastes fantastic.”

Jenn stared at me for a moment, leaning into the silence that hung between us. “Alex likes kipper fillets,” she said, before stalking off in search of a less terrifying drink for us both.

I had to give it to Sara — the salon was precisely as described by Caitlin: silly and clever, with its tongue firmly in its cheek. I inspected a small card asking “To Eat or Not to Eat?” balanced on the edge of a three-tiered sweet tray, and opted for one of the delicate cherry tarts. While the soft butter pastry melted on my tongue, I hummed along to a period-appropriate instrumental version of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” played on a virginal floating from the sound system. Earlier in the afternoon, I’d very much enjoyed how Cardi B’s “W.A.P.” sounded when played on the lute.

“Ready for the quiz?” 

I whipped around, nearly knocking a large tray of Caitlin’s “If Nachos Be the Food of Love, Eat On” from Sara’s hands with the swirl of my skirts. “Shit, I’m sorry. Let me take those.”

She looked, as she usually did, perfect. Even with that ridiculous fake goatee stuck on her chin to make her look more like Shakespeare, she oozed soft glamour. Her hair was as glossy as a Christmas chestnut, and draped in loose waves over a plain linen collar. No makeup — like she even needed it — except a wash of pink over her freckled cheeks. Sensible as ever, she’d opted for a black velvet jacket and matching doublet slashed in gold satin over a pair of tights. Much less prone to toppling trays of Elizabethanish nachos than the enormous scarlet dress that was wearing me, rather than the other way around.

“I’m fine,” she said, moving a stack of paper napkins out of the way for the nachos. “Promise me you’re having a good time.”

“I am,” I said, and I meant it.

Sara’s shoulders dropped, and when she smiled, the past year of her divorce hell flooded from her face. “I never thought you’d make it.”

“Neither did I.” 

“Have you seen the girls? They were so happy Josh let them be here.”

How could any of us have missed them? Violet and Claudia Brookes, aged ten and eight, were the little Princes in the Tower, innocents sentenced to a grisly doom at the hand of their villainous uncle, the hunchbacked Richard III. The moment I stepped through the front door with a vat of ChatGPosseT, Claudia ambushed me to tell me all about how she was Duke Richard of York, and how she was now a ghost because her bad uncle killed her. I told her that sounded uncomfortable.

“Not really,” she’d said very cheerfully. “I think maybe at first it was uncomfortable, but now I feel pretty good. Do you wanna watch Mythbusters Jr. with me?” (I did not.)

“There’s Violet.” Sara pointed to her older girl on the other side of the room. “Doesn’t she look just like him? It’s so weird sometimes, having his clone walking around the place.”

Violet, sitting cross-legged on a wing-backed chair in a pair of black velvet shorts and a plain black tee, did not look happy to be here. Hunched over her iPhone, she was a study in “why did I agree to this?” as she tapped manically on the screen. Occasionally, she sighed dramatically enough to be heard over the noise of the room and played with the end of her dark brown ponytail. She did look just like Josh, from the hair to the snub nose to the body that was all legs. And especially the glare she turned on me when she caught me staring. If that child could send photon beams through her eyeballs, I would have suffered radiation burns.

“I think she looks just like you,” I lied. Sara smiled again.

I was about to suggest a theme for the next salon, when the front door crashed open with a heavy thunk, bouncing off a mannequin dressed up to look like Cleopatra, complete with asp. In the frame, a dark-haired man panted, as if he’d run up six flights of stairs in a thick wool boilersuit, not taken the elevator up one floor in a T-shirt and cargo shorts. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his knuckles were white where he clutched his keys. His dark-rimmed glasses tilted slightly askew on his snub nose and his long legs bore the tanned trace of a recent tropical escapade far away from LA. 

“Daddy!” Violet squealed, and bolted across the room into his arms. 

This was Joshua K. Brookes, America’s literary wunderkind, two-time nominee for the National Book Award. Commandant of the Brookes Babes Army, Sara’s ex-husband and the first man who utterly, completely broke me. Much like Violet, he did not look happy to be there.

Someone had turned off the harpsichord-heavy rendition of “Rolling in the Deep” and the only sound in the room came from the crackling licks of flame over the fake log in the fireplace. Even Caitlin and Sheba, who to their mutual delight had both arrived dressed as Anne Boleyn (complete with a line of fake blood traced across their necks), pressed pause on drinking dry the liquor cabinet and stood silent in the living room.  

Violet clung to her father’s side, preening in apparent delight at having successfully summoned her preferred parent in her hour of intense boredom. Josh stroked his mini-me’s hair absently while the heave of his shoulders ebbed away. 

“I’m taking the girls home,” he snapped. “It’s not your weekend anyway.”

Sara stood up straight in her ballet flats and stepped forward. Her hair caught the fire’s glow. “We agreed they would come to this one.”

Josh pushed his glasses up his nose. “When we agreed, I didn’t know you were throwing a goddamn kegger,” he spat. “Violet sent me a video of what was going on in the kitchen. You said it was only going to be — and I quote — ‘a few period-appropriate beverages.’ Where’s Claudia? CLAUDIA!”

Sara took another step forward, her arms crossed beneath her chest. She looked cooler than the cocktail Jenn had just brought me from the den of iniquity formerly known as the kitchen. 

“Drink up,” Jenn whispered in my ear. She clinked her glass edge to mine. “I think we need this.”

I certainly did. I hadn’t been in the same room as Josh since I was a teenager, and the distortions of fear and misplaced, remembered desire swelled in my gut. Familiar, pinching waves of anxiety rushed along my arms and spine, pooling and spreading until I was squeezed in the tight grip of a chilly fire. 

“Claudia is in her bedroom, and she’s fine. As you can see” — Sara swept her right arm in a semi-circle — “this isn’t exactly Sodom or Gomorrah.”

“Daddy, I want to go to my real home,” Violet simpered. “Can we watch another Alfred Hitchcock movie together?”

Jesus wept, that was definitely Josh’s precocious child. I had to choke back a giggle.

Josh jerked his head away from Sara, who had set her jaw so firmly I worried she might grind her slightly crooked teeth into oblivion. He scanned the room, and did a double take, pausing on the only other woman who had ever made him look a fool.

Me.

“You,” Josh breathed. 

The grand timepiece of my world stopped mid-tick; my vision flipped and doubled and pinched and splayed, like some cheap funhouse mirror. He was here and I was here and it was nothing like I thought it would be, and everything I expected, all at once. He was here, as beautiful as he’d always been, as cruel as he’d always been. And I was small again, so small, like a tiny dollhouse doll, ready to be snatched between his fingers and moved from room to room, whether I wanted to or not. Let’s play house, Melissa. 

Josh dropped Violet’s hand to rub his forehead, and the tight, black look he’d turned on Sara loosened into a rueful, boyish smile. “Wow. Just, wow. How many years has it been? Twenty?”

I nodded slowly, watching Caitlin slip back into the kitchen for another drink. You could follow her, I thought as Josh began to cut the distance between us. Just blank him. Blank him. Walk into the kitchen. Get a big ol’ Shrewdriver. He is nothing to you now. Nothing.

Too late. The ten feet between us became six became two and then one. I could not move, my legs immobile as if trapped in the amber of our past. 

This was the moment I’d explored in therapy again and again — what if we crossed paths? What rock would be overturned, what worms would writhe beneath it? How would he be? How would I be? When shall we two meet again? In thunder, lightning or in pain? 

I had dissected this imagined moment over and over, dug into its guts, but reality was far more fascinating. Gather round, students. Here is a specimen of dead love pinned down on a wax-coated pan, sliced open and waiting for exploration of its inner workings. Here is the spleen. Here are the lungs. Here is the heart. Here is the heart.

“Melissa.” A shy, snaky smile. “I can’t believe it.” 

He reached for the traitorous hand I held out for him, but before we touched, Cait’s arm thrust in between us, severing the black magic brewing there.

“Josharino!” Cait crowed. A 99 Cent Store tiara was askew on her dark blonde hair, and her hot pink lipstick was smeared in the corners of her mouth. Throwing one velvet-draped arm around Josh’s broad shoulders, she steered him away, a red Solo cup in her other hand. “Long time, buddy.”

Josh looked over his shoulder at me but slouched in defeat, which is usually the best tactic when Caitlin Moynihan is involved. 

“You look like you need a drink, dude. Have some posset,” Cait pressed the cup into his hand. “From Mel’s kitchen, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, but —” I started, but it was too late. Josh gave the cup a tentative sniff (“smells like a chocolate orange!”) before tipping back a large gulp of Alex’s homebrew ChatGPosseT. 

Have you ever watched a car crash? From start to finish, I mean, from the moment disaster could be averted until somebody’s up on the curb with half a bumper hanging off their Nissan. Doesn’t need to be a big pile up. You see it before it even happens, like you’re writing the scene as it’s unfurling across your view. There’s a certain inevitability about it and yet it’s thrilling all the same. You want to suck in every detail, even though you already know them. You’re grossed out by your voyeurism as much as you want to wallow in it all. 

That’s how I felt as I watched Josh choke down a mouthful of posset. His Adam’s apple bobbed, his dark blue eyes widened, and he smiled weakly at us all. “Interesting flav-”

I saw it all in my mind’s eye before it unscrolled in reality. I saw it all before his knees buckled, and he had to reach for the sofa to steady himself. Before his face and neck flashed scarlet, and before a plume of dark, thick posset spewed from his lips onto a stack of notepaper pads Sara had left out for the trivia quiz. A stream of coffee-colored liquid, studded with the occasional kernel of what resembled popcorn, dripped from the edge of the pads onto the laminate flooring.

“We’re gonna need paper towels,” Jenn sighed. 

“Milk,” Josh whimpered. “I need milk.” He clutched at his t-shirt, which was now damp with sweat. He looked very much like a tomato. A handsome, sweaty tomato, but a tomato all the same.

I had only one thought. 

Hey honey, I typed out on my phone’s screen. What did ChatGPT tell you went into a posset?

Even though Josh wasn’t exactly the most popular guy in Sara’s set these days, the other guests fussed about him like a team of nannies cosseting a pampered child. Soon he was propped up on the sofa, sipping oat milk through a straw, and letting Caitlin apply a cold compress to his forehead. Every so often a soft mew of pain putted upwards from his lips. I loved every minute of it. Well, except the bit where Sara mopped up his vomit. I could have skipped that.

My phone pinged at last with Alex’s reply. I asked it to make me a Shakespearean posset with a modern twist. 

“For the love of God, Violet, doesn’t your mother have any Maalox?” Josh groaned from the overstuffed sofa. He leaned back, resting his head on a cushion printed with the motto, “Live, Laugh, Love — Just Like Romeo and Juliet.” 

The phone pinged once more. So there was cream and wine and um cinnamon and spicey things and lots of eggs and sugar. Oh and I added chocolate and orange — strictly per the instructions, all right? But the modern twist was —

“I have been poisoned,” Josh bleated as Claudia jumped up and down at the end of the sofa, singing at the top of her lungs about how Daddy barfed. “You harpies poisoned me.”

— cayenne pepper. Tbsp means tablespoon, right? Because ChatGPT said to put six in there. Do people like it?

Have I told you I love my husband? Because I really, really do.

***

Hello, world! I am still alive, still working away at my novel (~75k words at the moment) about the Great Lainey Pike, getting ready to leave Santa Monica and move back to the big, bad San Fernando Valley, just like I said I never would. Alex and I are still good — wait, no. No, we are great. As we hurtle towards our third — third! — wedding anniversary in six months time, each day that follows upon the last is a new day in which we love each other more.

There is nothing more to want.