The Divorcee Said Yes!. Sandra Marton

to see the awful changes that came along, as you stood at top of the yawning chasm that was middle age. The numbers that began to creep upward on your bathroom scale. The flesh that began to creep downward. The wrinkles that Janet Pendleton didn’t have. The sags Chase’s cute little secretary hadn’t had, either.

      “...make him normal. That’s not what happened with Dawn and Nick, is it?”

      Annie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

      “Reality, that’s what. I was telling you that I just heard about this guy, married a girl even though he knew he was a switch hitter, hoping that having a wife would make him normal—”

      Annie choked over her tea. “Good grief,” she said, when she could speak, “you are such a pathetic mate stereotype, Chase Cooper! No, Nicholas is not, as you so delicately put it, a ‘switch hitter.”’

      “You’re sure?”

      “Yes.”

      “Yeah, well, it might not hurt to ask.”

      “Nick and Dawn have been living together, the past three months. And Dawn hasn’t so much as hinted at any problem in bed. Quite the contrary.” Annie blushed. “I dropped in a couple of times—not in the morning, or late at night, you understand—and I could pretty much tell, from the time it took them to get to the door and the way they looked, that things were perfectly fine in that department.” She looked down at her tea. “I don’t drop by without calling first, anymore.”

      “What do you mean, they’ve been living together?”

      “Just what I said. Didn’t Dawn tell you? They took an apartment, in Cannondale.”

      “Dammit, Annie, how could you permit our daughter to do that?”

      “To do what? Move in with the man she was going to marry?”

      “Didn’t you tell her no?”

      “She’s eighteen, Chase. Legally of age. Old enough to make her own choices.”

      “So?”

      “What do you mean, ‘so’?”

      “You could have told her it was wrong.”

      “Love is never wrong.”

      “Love,” Chase said, and shook his head. “Sex, is more like it.”

      “I asked her to take her time and think it through, to be sure she was doing the right thing. She said she’d done that, and that she was.”

      “Sex,” Chase said again.

      Annie sighed. “Sex, love...they go together.”

      “Yeah, well, they could have had the one and still waited for the other, until after the wedding.” Chase glowered into his tea. “But I suppose that’s too old-fashioned.”

      “It was, for us.”

      Chase looked up sharply. Color swept into his face. “What we did, or didn’t do, has nothing to do with this situation.”