Page 14 of The Summer Swap

But losing her father had changed everything. She’d lost a piece of herself, too.

Did she still love Theo? Under the layers of hurt and resentment, was the feeling she’d had for him alive? Maybe. But right now Theo couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give her what she needed.

She should be feeling guilty, she knew that. But she wasn’t.

Her feelings for Jeff weren’t about satisfying a whim. This was about survival. This was about her.

Thanks to Jeff she felt better than she had in a long time. Thanks to Jeff she no longer felt like killing Theo. Jeff had saved two lives.

She put the phone down and gazed at herself in the mirror. She tucked a strand of her softly styled hair behind her ear and wondered why no one had said anything about her new look. Instead of her usual chic, sharp bob she’d gone for something choppy and textured. Feminine. Her stylist had added streaks of light gold and champagne and the overall look had been so different and dazzling that for a moment she’d had to check it actually was her in the mirror and not someone else.

You look like a different person, her stylist had said, and Kristen had started to panic because although she loved her new look, she was worried she would draw attention to herself and she didn’t want that. She’d walked out of the salon feeling nervous, but still she’d been unable to resist the temptation to move her head from side to side every few minutes just so that she could feel the silken swish of her newly styled hair.

She’d felt jumpy all day, braced for someone to notice but no one had said anything. Theo hadn’t noticed because he rarely noticed details about anyone unless they were bleeding or had a limb hanging off. Hannah had been home from medical school for the evening looking exhausted and far too pale, but she’d been distracted by something and had barely seemed to notice her mother.

Thinking of Hannah dimmed her happiness slightly.

Kristen had been determined that her relationship with her children was going to be different (and by that she meant better!) than the one she had with her own mother. She’d always made sure they knew they could come to her with anything, and that she would listen and never judge (and if she did judge, she would do so silently). She’d wanted them to know that they never needed to feel alone with their problems. That she would always be there for them. She never wanted them to feel the way she’d been feeling for the past year.

She’d waited for Hannah to tell her what was wrong, and when she hadn’t Kristen had probed gently. She’d asked about work, she’d asked about sleep and eating, she’d asked about boyfriends (she’d trodden very carefully there because there was a fine line between being a caring parent and overstepping), and finally she’d asked about Lily. Lily Thomas was Hannah’s closest friend. At that point Hannah had roused herself from her state of gloom and misery sufficiently to snap that she hadn’t heard from her since she’d dropped out of medical school. We haven’t spoken. Given the reaction, Kristen surmised that this was a friendship issue, which was surprising because Hannah and Lily had been inseparable since they were young.

She’d felt the usual anxiety that came from witnessing your child in distress, but she knew there was nothing she could do to help with this. It was between Lily and Hannah.

And at least Hannah’s preoccupation with her own issues meant that she wasn’t paying attention to the changes in her mother.

Todd had dropped by briefly to talk to her about something but had left the moment he’d discovered his sister was there, which had upset Kristen because her children had always been close. Unfortunately Hannah didn’t like Amelie, which was going to make for fun family gatherings in the future.

But right now, her children’s problems weren’t her priority.

She was her priority. At this precise moment she was the most important person in her life (it felt sacrilegious to think that because usually being a parent was all about coming last).

She’d arrived at the Lapthorne mansion earlier in the day and no one had so far seemed to notice that she’d changed her hair and bought a new dress that skimmed her new, slimmer frame (she’d never be a size zero but she wasn’t sure her personality would fit into size zero, so she was fine with that).

She might have been depressed at this apparent confirmation that women over forty were invisible had it not been for the fact that to one person at least, she definitely wasn’t invisible.

She’d read somewhere that to be truly happy a person had to be living a life aligned with their values, but that clearly wasn’t true because she was happier than she’d ever been, and her values were currently being overridden by her impulses. She, Kristen Jennifer Buckingham, who disapproved deeply of people who had affairs, was about to embark on an affair. It hadn’t actually happened yet, although she’d been emotionally unfaithful on multiple occasions in recent weeks.

The night before she’d eaten her dinner alone at home but instead of feeling upset and lonely, she’d thought about Jeff. She thought about Jeff when she was doing the laundry, when she was driving to the office, when she was staring at her computer. She thought about him so frequently she was terrified she was going to start talking in her sleep. Jeff, Jeff, I love you, Jeff. As a precaution, she’d taken to sleeping in one of the spare rooms using the excuse of Theo’s unpredictable hours.

Theo’s job meant that he was often called in to operate on complicated cases, usually at the most inconvenient moments. When they’d met, she’d been drawn to the sheer heroism of what he did. He was a trauma surgeon. He worked eighty hours a week and slept six hours a night. But he saved lives.

As someone whose life had been saved by doctors, Kristen couldn’t think of a more important profession. Without doctors she wouldn’t be here (without doctors she wouldn’t now be in a position to contemplate having an affair with Jeff). But being married to a surgeon had its downsides, and one of those was the unpredictability of her life.

It was the unpredictability of life that had caused a woman to fall down three flights of stairs in her apartment building two months previously. If it hadn’t been for her injuries Theo wouldn’t have been called away from the dinner party they’d been attending, and Kristen wouldn’t have shared a cab home with Jeff Singer, the art editor of a major newspaper, whom she knew vaguely from her work with her father. He had flirted shamelessly with her from the moment Theo had left the room. If Theo hadn’t been called to the hospital that night, Kristen might never have felt the way she was feeling now.

And the way she was feeling was extraordinary, not just because of her age—she was forty-eight and had always assumed she was well past the age to be considered affair material—but because she just wasn’t that type of person.

There had been a moment in her childhood when her parents had separated, and she still remembered the trauma of that. She had no idea of the reason behind her parents’ near split, because that period in their lives had never been spoken of again, but she knew her mother had instigated it and the knowledge had made her protective of her father.

They’d got back together, but Kristen had never felt secure again. She’d vowed that her children would never have reason to doubt her and Theo’s relationship.

They would stick with each other through thick and thin.

And even now she wasn’t contemplating divorce.

She would not disrupt her children’s lives or scar them in any way. (Every time she thought about what divorce had done to her friend Trisha’s kids she shuddered—the amount spent on therapy alone would have bought a house on Beacon Hill.)

She was simply making her own life a little happier, and surely no one would blame her for trying to find some joy in her life.

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