Page 1 of The Ex Next Door (Charming, Texas #8)

A my Holloway pulled up to the rental on Bluebird Lane and viewed the home where she and her children would be living now.

Well, it was white with blue trim, so it had that going for it.

There was a small porch just outside the front step and the landlord had placed colorful potted flowers along the rails and an old-fashioned bench swing in one corner. Not bad.

Bonus, it was all she could afford. Huge plus.

“Isn’t it super cute?” she said, inserting artificial pep in her voice.

“Are we really going to live here ?” This was from her little girl, Naomi.

She hated to think of her twins, Naomi and David, as spoiled because they were good kids. But the home they’d grown up in was twice the size. Unfortunately, the concept of divorce was foreign to them. All they understood was that Daddy would no longer be living with them.

“We’re going to have such fun here, just the three of us!” Amy sang out.

“I don’t understand why Daddy can’t live here, too,” David said. “We should all live here.”

“Maybe Grandma can spend the night and we’ll have a slumber party! Won’t that be fun?” Amy said.

The twins exchanged an excited look.

“Grandma never spent the night before . Yay!” Naomi said.

Finally, a happy note. Amy found changing the subject was the only way to get past this eternal question: Why can’t Daddy live here, too?

Because your father decided he was tired of being married.

Imagine that. He worked fifty hours a week and traveled all over the country for his job as an IT cybersecurity expert, but he was tired of his family .

Amy would never say that to the children, of course.

After Rob asked for a separation, to seek direction, she’d read all the books on handling life after a divorce she could get her hands on.

She’d consulted Valerie Kinsella, their third-grade teacher, and also spoken to the school guidance counselor.

The tried-and-true still worked: Your daddy and I still love each other but we can’t live together anymore. We’ll always be a family. This has nothing to do with you. It’s between me and Daddy. Grown-up stuff. Right.

David and Naomi hopped out of the back seat of her economy sedan and ran toward the house.

Curiosity, Amy assumed, got the best of them.

Or maybe her reframing this whole thing as a type of adventure had helped.

At least they wanted to see the place. Her mother had found it, scoping it out ahead of time as a neighborhood in which the kids could still be close to their school.

The key stuck in the door, and Amy had to jiggle it a few times before it turned.

She made a note of that to add to the walk-through comments she’d made when she signed the final lease a few days ago.

One year. After that, she’d see. Maybe she’d have to relocate to a different part of Texas, though if she moved too far, that would be an issue for Rob, who’d moved to Houston thirty minutes away.

Also, she didn’t want to leave her mother— the only emotional support she had now.

Her small circle of friends, mostly the parents of Naomi’s and David’s friends, had started to distance themselves.

The few times she was around them, she didn’t appreciate their pitiful looks.

She was working hard to be happy, scraping herself off the floor every morning for the sake of her children.

“It’s so big!” Naomi skipped inside the vacant house, holding the book she’d been reading in the car.

Wait until we put all our furniture inside.

It wouldn’t look roomy anymore. The single-family home was one large great room connected to a small kitchen. A short hallway led down to the three bedrooms and one bathroom in the back of the house.

“I’m going to pick my new room!” David ran off.

“Me, too!” Naomi followed him down the hall.

Two minutes later, she was hanging her head out of the smallest room.

It was just like Naomi to give her brother the bigger room.

Had she taught her that, somehow? Had Amy taught her by example to make herself smaller for someone she loved?

She adored her brother but that didn’t mean letting him have first choice all the time.

This was such a huge change in her children’s lives and Amy wished she could have convinced Rob to attend marriage counseling. At least to try for the sake of their kids. Yet, his mind had been made up.

“Mommy, my door squeaks,” Naomi said.

“We’ll get Lou to fix that in a jiffy. The hinges just need to be oiled.”

“Also, can we paint my room yellow?”

Anything to make you happy here, my princess.

“We’ll have to ask our landlord but if she says it’s okay, then yes, of course!”

“Yay!” Naomi clapped her hands, looking so joyous that Amy wanted to cry.

She had such good-natured children. But she hadn’t been able to give them the one thing they really wanted: parents who loved each other.

The moving truck pulled up outside and Amy ran to meet it. Driven by her mother’s boyfriend, Lou, it contained Amy’s life for the past ten years. Furniture, pots and pans, her wedding china and silver, clothes and toys. All her memories in boxes.

Her mother pulled up soon after, parking on the street.

Moonbeam Miller, child of hippies, was back to the crunchy-granola girl of her youth.

Mom turned her back on her parents’ nomadic ways and named her only daughter a very safe name.

You couldn’t get much more conservative of a name than Amy.

But Mom had changed after her husband an absolute pillar of everything traditional, had the nerve to die of cancer.

It was like she cut loose from some kind of imaginary tether.

She now seemed to embrace her flowery past, and in her sixties, she’d gone into business with Lou, buying a garden center in town they called Back to the Fuchsia.

She walked up to Amy, embraced her in a huge hug and pulled out a wand of what appeared to be dead branches from her beaded purse.

“What’s that?” Amy scrunched up her nose.

“It’s sage. Normally, you burn it to ward off any negative energy, but we don’t want to smoke out the children . I consulted with Willow at the gem store, and she said it will be okay to just wave it around.”

“Wave it…around?”

“Yes, up in the air like this.” She lifted it above her like a torch, looking like a middle-aged Statue of Liberty wearing bangles and braids.

“Mom, I don’t know about this.”

Her mother had raised Amy in the most traditional of ways, but now often expressed her dismay that Amy couldn’t open her eyes and mind.

A fortune teller Mom had consulted recently told her that Rob and Amy had been doomed from the beginning.

An easy guess when you already knew the outcome.

She forecast that Amy was going to meet someone new very soon.

And also, that she should watch her high blood pressure.

Amy happened to be a few pounds overweight for most of her married life, but her blood pressure had been fine before the divorce.

“It can’t hurt. And after the year you’ve had, I think you need all the help you can get.”

Amy couldn’t argue there.

Naomi and David ran to greet their grandma the moment she walked in the door and then followed her around, watching in fascination.

Outside, Lou opened the back of the moving truck and waved Amy over.

“I’m sorry I can’t help much, darlin’. You know, my back.” He put a hand low on his back, where he’d been hurt years before in a roofing accident. “Falling two stories was no picnic.”

“That’s okay, Lou. I’ve got this.” Amy pulled out a box and hefted it into the house.

“Young people. Enjoy your youth, Amy. It goes by fast.” Lou followed her up the lawn she shared with her next-door neighbor, carrying Naomi’s rainbow unicorn backpack.

“Yes it did.” Amy snorted when she set the box down. “Like a blink.”

“Aw, c’mon now. You’re still a young whippersnapper,” Lou cackled. “Where’s David? Is he hiding again?”

“David doesn’t hide anymore,” Amy said. “He learned his lesson.”

It was something he’d done as a toddler and preschooler, scaring anyone babysitting him.

“I’ll help you, Lou!” David appeared, flexed his bicep and ran outside to the truck. “I can lift a lot of pounds.”

“Sure you can, little buddy.” Lou patted his head as David flew by him.

A few more boxes came in easily, Amy, Mom, David and Naomi lifting the heavier ones together.

“We can do this,” Naomi said, baffled at being able to lift the boxes.

“Don’t look so surprised. We can do a lot of things you don’t know about as a team,” Amy said. “Just wait and see.”

The problem came when they were hauling in a particularly heavy box. Mom and Lou stood by directing since the box was so tall they couldn’t see ahead of them. Amy pushed from one end and both David and Naomi pulled from the other.

“I shouldn’t have packed this one so full,” Amy said, winded.

She really needed to work out more.

“You’re doing fine,” her mother said. “You’re got this! Just a few more feet.”

Amy pushed and got a few more inches. The kids were of no help whatsoever, not that she blamed them. They wanted to pretend they were helping.

“All right, I can’t stand it anymore,” said a deep voice Amy couldn’t see from her angle with the box blocking. “I’ve been watching, and I know you can do it yourself, but for the love of God, please let me help. I beg you.”

Then he stepped into her line of vision.

Declan Sheridan.

He looked as he always did, a bit like a Greek god if you mixed him up with a Major League Baseball player. Tall, built, tan, blond. Golden. Hotter than a flapjack fresh off the grill.

Surely her mother hadn’t called him . Amy could take a lot of humiliation, but this was too much to bear. Almost the very last person she wanted to see her in this predicament.

Her high school ex-boyfriend.

“What are you doing here?” Amy pushed a stray hair from her sweaty face.

“What do you mean?” He hooked a finger, pointing to the house next door with an Astros flag waving in the breeze. “I live next door.”