At the Stroke of Midnight (Naughty Princess Club 1)

I decide against arguing with her on this Asia silliness. I’m hoping it’s a phase, just like this whole black-clothing thing. It will pass. We’ve both been under a lot of stress lately, and I know that has to be the main reason she’s been trying my patience so much. You have to pick your battles with teenagers. Unfortunately, it seems like recently, everything between us ends in a disagreement. At least she hasn’t touched her beautiful, long blond hair. Even though I always wear mine pulled back in a low bun at the nape of my neck and she lets hers hang in a stringy mess around her shoulders and down her back, it’s the one and only thing we seem to have in common these days.

“I insist on wearing black because it’s the color of my soul,” she deadpans. “Are we finished here?”

She doesn’t even give me time to answer before she’s turning her back on me and stomping up the stairs to the second floor. As soon as I hear her bedroom door slam closed, my arms drop to my sides and my shoulders droop.

I wish I could say I don’t know what happened to my sweet, loving little girl. Or that I have no idea when the exact moment was that she turned into a sullen teenager who always looks like she’s going to a funeral. But I know the exact moment down to the second. Six months, fourteen days and three hours ago. It was the moment my world came crashing down around me and I had to work extra hard to keep up the façade of having a perfect life with a perfect family in a perfect house on a perfect street aptly named Fairytale Lane.

“This is just a tiny bump in the road, Cynthia. You’ve overcome worse and you’ll get through this as well,” I whisper, giving myself a pep talk as I turn and head back toward the kitchen with my head held high to start making the frosting for the cupcakes. I pause to reach out and straighten a crystal vase of flowers on the small side table in the foyer next to the kitchen doorway. “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” That’s what my mother-in-law always used to tell me, and now, after so many years of hearing her voice in my head with every decision I make, it’s impossible to remove it.

Any day now, Brian will come home, and the last six months will have just been a horrible nightmare. I will no longer have to worry about how I’m going to pay the bills, or how I’m going to keep pretending that everything is fine without losing my sanity, or spend another sleepless night wondering how I got to this point. I’ve managed to fool people this long by telling them Brian has been extremely busy traveling for work, instead of telling them the mortifying truth. I can do it a little bit longer. Things can’t possibly get any worse. I have reached rock bottom and there’s nowhere to go but up.

Taking a step back and smiling at the bouquet of blue hibiscus flowers I picked this morning, which are now in the middle of the table instead of off-center, I then take a few steps toward the kitchen when the doorbell rings.

Smoothing my palms against the side of my head to make sure I don’t have a hair out of place, I walk to the door and open it with a smile on my face. The smile threatens to falter when I see who is standing on my front stoop.

“Yo,” the stunning, redhead divorcee who moved onto Fairytale Lane seven months ago greets me with a nod of her head.

I still have no idea how her application was approved to move onto this street. It was processed when I was busy chairing a gala at the local zoo and I’m still not happy the homeowner’s association let it go through without my final say.

“Pardon me?” I reply, my smile still firmly in place even though I want to slam the door in her face.

A lady never slams the door on a guest. Even if that guest is well-endowed and wearing a tight tank top showing off entirely too much of those endowments and, as rumor has it, only moved onto Fairytale Lane to snag herself a new husband to pay for a new . . . endowment lift and injections to her already plump red lips.

“I said yo. It’s a greeting. Sort of like hello, or what’s up, asshole. But that last one is just for friends, and we’re not friends, so I figured yo was the safest bet,” she says with a shrug.

“Can I help you with something?” I ask, wanting to end this conversation quickly, before any of the neighbors see this . . . person on my doorstep.