Life After Wife : Small Town Romance (Balsam Ridge Book 1) Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Amber Kelly

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design: Sommer Stein, Perfect Pear Creative Covers

  Cover Image: Regina Wamba

  Editor: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com

  Proofreader: Judy Zweifel, Judy’s Proofreading

  Formatter: Champagne Book Design

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Preview of Cross My Heart Duet

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Other Books

  About the Author

  To Erin and Jena.

  You two have shown us all how beautiful life after wife can be. Here’s to the next thirty years of friendship.

  Taeli

  Seventeen Years Ago

  I start snatching my clothes from the closet, flinging them inside the suitcase on my bed, when a soft knock sounds on my bedroom door.

  “Taeli, sweetheart, can I come in?” Daddy asks.

  I swipe at the tears on my cheeks and walk over to unlock and open the door.

  His eyes land on the suitcase, and he sighs.

  “You’re really leaving?” he asks.

  I nod. “Damon is on his way to pick me up. We’re flying to Chicago in the morning.”

  “I wish you’d wait until the end of the summer.”

  “Why? So Mom can spend the next thirty days telling me what a disappointment I am?”

  “She didn’t mean any of that. She’s just angry,” he says.

  “It sure sounded like she meant it. I’m sorry I’m not the perfect daughter, but this is my life.”

  “Your mother doesn’t want to see you throw away the opportunities you’ve been given or see your talents go to waste. We’re not saying to break up with the boy. We’re just asking you to wait. Give it another year and see how you feel then.”

  “I don’t want to wait a year. He was accepted into Northwestern, and I’m going with him.”

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asks.

  “I love him, Daddy.”

  He sits down on the foot of my bed and pats the spot beside him.

  I sit and lay my head on his shoulder.

  “Love, huh? I know better than to argue with a woman in love. I guess that settles it.”

  “It does for me. He makes me happy. Why can’t Mom be happy for me?”

  “You and your mother are more alike than you realize, kiddo. You’re both lead by your heart. That’s why you two butt heads so often.”

  “Alike? More like complete opposites,” I disagree.

  He chuckles.

  “You’re both hard-headed as well.”

  I shrug.

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Promise me one thing, Taeli. Someday, you’re gonna want to come home, but your pride is going to get in the way, and you’re gonna think it’s too late. When that happens, you come home anyway because it’ll never be too late.”

  “I promise.”

  Taeli

  Present Day

  I glance into the rearview mirror to see that my twelve-year-old son is still laser-focused on the tablet in his hand. He has had his earbuds in and a game in progress since we crossed the Illinois state line, headed for my home state of Tennessee. That’s approximately eight hours and nearly five hundred seventy miles without one word from him other than to ask for a bathroom break and a Gatorade.

  I know that picking up our lives and moving to my hometown of Balsam Ridge wasn’t exactly on his agenda for the summer. He planned to attend a soccer camp with his best friends to hone his skills for next year’s middle school tryouts. He wanted to swim at the community pool with our neighbors. He expected it to be a normal school break, like all the ones that had come before.

  Yeah, well, so did I, kid.

  I was supposed to head up the neighborhood’s Fourth of July planning committee. I intended to start tennis lessons at the club to improve my serve. I wanted to have mimosa brunches with friends and to take a family vacation to Cabo.

  Never in my wildest dreams did I fathom returning to the small mountain town where I had grown up, but when the twenty-four-year-old medical assistant to your husband of sixteen years knocks on your door one rainy Thursday afternoon to inform you that she is pregnant with his child, you tend to do unfathomable things.

  Damon is an internal medicine physician in private practice in Chicago. We met at the University of Tennessee during my freshman year. He was a senior and had been accepted into the medical school program at Northwestern. After a brief but passionate courtship, I fell madly in love and decided to drop out of school, leaving my full-ride athletic scholarship behind and following him to Chicago. We married the following spring. He went on to medical school, and I went to work as an office administrator for a machine tool manufacturing firm. I also worked nights to support us, making collection calls for a cellular company, while Damon spent his time, including nights and weekends, studying and doing his clinical rotations.

  We were busy humans, ships passing in the night but bumping into one another enough to create another tiny human and drag him into the chaotic fray.

  Caleb was born between Damon’s graduation from medical school and his first year of residency. It wasn’t easy—juggling my two jobs, the residency, and parenthood—but we made it work. It was a delicate balance that got a little easier once Damon finished his residency, and with the financial backing of his parents and a substantial business loan, we opened Lowder Family Medicine in Naperville.

  I brought my office manager skills to the family business, and Damon was the talent. Caleb was four years old when the practice opened, and he spent many hours entertaining himself under the desk on my office floor while I worked.

  By the time Caleb started third grade and had a dozen commitments, including baseball and soccer practices and games, the business was out of the red, and we decided to hire an administrative manage
r so that I could be a stay-at-home mom. My reward for all the years of sacrifice.

  It was glorious. I had worked so hard, for so long so that Damon could open his own practice, and all that work was finally paying off. We built our dream home in our dream neighborhood. I made mom friends through PTA and at the community pool. We joined the local country club, and I became a lady who lunched with other ladies while our husbands were at work and our kids were at school. My job became keeping a magazine spread–worthy home, being a social director for an eight-year-old, playing tennis, practicing yoga, going to Botox parties, and keeping myself in top physical shape for my husband. I was damn good at it too.

  At the time, when Caleb started middle school, we had a seamless routine, living in our happy suburban bubble. At least, I thought so. I was living with blinders on. I stopped going to the office for noonday kisses and to say hello to the staff. I stopped paying attention to who was hired and fired. I no longer questioned Damon’s extra-long hours at the office and when he stopped taking half-days off on Fridays. I wasn’t alarmed at the number of after-hours emergencies that had to be handled in the middle of the night. I got comfortable and became numb to it all.

  I was living in a beautiful house of cards until that twenty-four-year-old with her cheap hair extensions and enhanced figure kicked it over one hot, humid May afternoon, and it all came tumbling down.

  Damon didn’t even try to deny it. I called his cell while she was still standing at my front door and screamed the allegations at him. He politely asked if we could discuss the “issue” when he got home.

  The issue? Really?

  Ivy, the homewrecker, was as composed and confident as could be when she blew my bubble apart. She was non-apologetic as she professed her love for my husband and explained her intention to keep his love child.

  Love.

  As if either of them knew what that word meant.

  I shut the door in the tramp’s face, went upstairs, and packed a bag for me and a bag for Caleb. I picked him up from school. I checked us into a deluxe suite at The Peninsula Chicago, using Damon’s black card, and I turned off my cell phone.

  It took him two days to track us down and another two days to talk me into returning home. His mother was there to watch Caleb while we discussed things, but I was fairly sure he’d called her to be a referee or a witness should I stab him in the neck.

  I tried to stay calm. I kept telling myself that Damon loved me and it all had to be a misunderstanding. Ivy was probably some tart who was looking for a windfall. A simple paternity test would clear up this entire matter.

  By the time my mother-in-law had rounded Caleb up in her car to take him for pizza, I was as cool as a cucumber. Damon poured us a glass of wine, and we sat down in the living room on the exquisite Ambella sofa that I had special-ordered in Venetian ivory, which had just been delivered the week before. I’d planned and invited all our friends to a dinner party the following weekend to show off the new statement piece of furniture. That was before my husband’s playmate visited me.

  “I’m glad you came back.”

  “Tell me it isn’t true. That you didn’t throw away sixteen years of marriage for a romp with your assistant. Tell me she made it all up and you’ll fire her and we can go on with our lives.”

  “I, um …”

  “Oh my God, Damon. You didn’t!”

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was an accident.”

  I carefully set my wineglass down on the coaster and slapped him as hard as I could across his cheek.

  “You cheating asshole,” I screeched.

  He grabbed my hand before I reared back again.

  “Stop it. You’re being ridiculous.”

  “I’m being ridiculous? How do you accidentally sleep with another woman? Did you trip in the office after an emergency call, fall on top of her, and your penis slipped out of your scrubs and into her vagina?”

  “Of course not. I messed up. I made a mistake.”

  “A mistake. Oh, silly me. A mistake. That’s no big deal. Except for the oopsie you left behind in her uterus.”

  He sighed, and his head fell into his hands. “She said she was protected.”

  “And you believed her? You’re a doctor, for fuck’s sake. How many times have you told a young man to make sure he protects himself?”

  “I know. It was stupid. But you do stupid things when you’re in love.”

  “Love?!”

  He brought his eyes to mine.

  “I thought it was an accident, a mistake?”

  “It was. I didn’t mean to fall for someone else.”

  I stood and started walking back toward the kitchen island. All of a sudden, I was dizzy, and I felt like I might throw up. I was angry at his indiscretion. I expected him to deny it or cry and beg for forgiveness—not profess his love for another woman.

  He stood and reached for me, and I swatted at his hands.

  Pain slid down my spine as reality sunk in.

  “Get out!” I cried.

  “Taeli.”

  “I said, get out!” I screamed.

  “We have to talk about this.”

  “No. I don’t feel like talking. I want you to leave.”

  He raised his hands in surrender. “That’s fine. I’ll go. For now.”

  A horn blows from the car behind me and shakes me from my memory. I give him a curt wave and gun it through the traffic light that apparently turned green while I was reminiscing.

  “Mom!”

  Caleb’s irritated voice comes from the backseat, and I look in the mirror to see him scowling at me.

  “Sorry, buddy.”

  “Are we close?” he asks.

  I nod toward the sign up ahead that reads, Welcome to Balsam Ridge. One thousand two hundred fifty-seven smiling faces and one old grump.

  His eyes skim the road sign.

  “Is there really an old grump?” he asks.

  “Oh, yeah, and you’ll know when you meet him,” I answer, hoping to get a smile or a grin or even a grunt from him.

  He just rolls his eyes and looks back down at his monitor.

  Needless to say, I’m not winning any Mom of the Year prizes anytime soon. My kid hates me. Not his father. Me.

  I don’t blame him. I’m the one who ripped him from his home and everyone he knew and fled to the hills once word got out about Damon and Ivy.

  You see, in Naperville, it’s all about who you know and what you have. Girlfriends might have your back at brunch when you complain about your husband, but it’s a different story when shit really and truly hits the fan. And Dr. Damon Lowder is more important to remain friends with than his cheated-on and dumped wife. Shunned. That’s me. Poor, pitiful, shunned Taeli. I had to escape. Damon can have our ex–dream home, our ex-friends, and our ex-life. To hell with them all.

  So, here we are, ten miles from my mother’s house. The home where my brother, Gene, and I grew up. The place I couldn’t wait to leave in the rearview mirror the second I graduated high school.

  Fuck me.

  The sun starts its descent behind the mountain as we turn onto the gravel road that winds up to the old farmhouse.

  The road is narrow, the climb is steep, and there’s not a streetlight or guardrail in sight.

  I throw the Volvo XC90 into four-wheel drive, and rocks ricochet off the tires and ping against the undercarriage.

  Caleb removes his earbuds and tosses his tablet across the seat.

  “What’s wrong, buddy?” I ask.

  “There’s no reception,” he says as he looks out the window and his eyes go wide.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” I ask as he takes in the view.

  “We’re going to fall down the mountain,” he says with a tremor in his voice.

  “No, we aren’t. Your momma can drive these mountain roads with her eyes closed. This is my old stomping ground. I learned how to drive a stick on this very gravel.”

  “A stick?”

  “Yep, a manual stick s
hift truck with no automatic steering. It was a beast. My daddy made me stop and start every half-mile straight up the mountain. I wore the clutch out on that old truck, but by the time I had to go take my driver’s test, I could drive it as well as he could,” I say with pride.

  “Good job,” he says, sarcastically raising his thumbs in the air.

  This sweet child of mine.

  We finally make it to the top at fifty-two hundred feet and turn into the open gate. I park in front of the house.

  It looks the same as it did the day I left. A two-story robin’s-egg-blue Colonial farmhouse with white trim. A wide-columned front porch with a large bay window from the dining room that overlooks the yard. Gone is the shingled roof from my childhood, and in its place is soft gray tin.

  I take a deep breath as I turn off the ignition.

  I haven’t been back here since my father’s funeral five years ago. I half-expected the place to be a dilapidated ruin, not the postcard picture–worthy scene before me.

  “You ready, buddy?” I ask as I glance back at Caleb.

  “I guess,” he mumbles as he gathers his things.

  We exit the vehicle as my mother, Leona Tilson, appears on the front porch, her face alight.

  She is a sight in her long green kaftan. Her silver hair is held back from her face with a headband. I can hear her booming voice before a word leaves her mouth as she stretches out her arms.

  Here goes nothing.

  Taeli

  “My babies,” she calls.

  Caleb runs up the steps ahead of me, still clutching his tablet, and Mom envelops him in a tight hug and holds on until he is squirming.

  “I can’t breathe, Granna,” he mumbles against her bosom.

  She laughs and releases him. Then, she puts her fists on her hips and looks him up and down.

  “I swear you have grown twice your size since I saw you last. You’re going to be a giant. Have you been eating magic beans?” she asks.

  He giggles.

  “What?”

  “The giant doesn’t eat the magic beans, Mom. Jack plants them, so he can climb the giant beanstalk,” I interrupt.