The Husband Recipe Read Free Page A

hope; she was prepared to find next to nothing. It didn’t hurt to try, she supposed. Surprisingly, he came up first on the list. She knew without doubt that it was him because there was a picture.
Baseball. Huh. She’d never been a fan, otherwise she might’ve recognized his name. Apparently Cole Donovan had been a big deal a few years back, a star third baseman on track to break some sort of home-run record for the season. She had to scan down a few links to find out why he’d quit in the middle of the season, with that record and a promising career on the line.
Lauren’s heart dropped as she read the archived article. His wife had indeed died. Mary Donovan had dropped dead in the grocery store, victim of a heart defect she’d been born with but had never been aware of. A chill ran down Lauren’s arms. Here one moment; gone the next. It was the sort of thing no one could possibly be prepared for. There was no one to blame, no drunk driver or misdiagnosis or missed treatment. Just…poof. The young mother of three had been twenty-nine at the time; so had Cole. They’d been high-school sweethearts.
Cole had walked away from baseball after his wife died, giving up a lucrative career for his family. He could’ve pawned the kids off on relatives, she supposed, or hired a nanny and kept playing, but no. He’d left a promising career to take care of his children, to be a full-time parent.
Lauren felt about an inch tall. She felt like the wicked witch, maybe the Grinch. Perhaps an ogre. All green monsters, she noted. She’d never looked good in certain yellowy shades of green, and she certainly wouldn’t look good if she were green. Wicked witches were never a nice teal or sea foam. No, they were pea-soup green. Not her color at all.
She’d gone storming over there with that muddy baseball and her indignation, when that family had been through enough heartache for a lifetime. She checked the dates; it had been five years since Mary Donovan had died. The little one—Justin—must’ve been a baby at the time.
And she’d lost it over a broken window and a little noise. Talk about putting things in perspective!
She left her office a little sorry she’d looked Cole Donovan up online. There were some things that were better left unknown, unspoken, undone. But once those things were out of the box, it was simply too late to stuff them back in.
Lauren’s mother and grandmother had trained her well. As she went into the kitchen and took the leftover lasagna from the refrigerator, she decided to make her new neighbors a nice meal as a peace offering. Lasagna and peach cobbler. Not the vegetable lasagna she preferred, but a nice, hearty lasagna with lots of beef. It was possible the children next door didn’t get enough protein. Most kids didn’t, since they were usually drawn to junk food. At least, that’s what everything she saw and read led her to believe. There were no children in her everyday life, no nieces or nephews, no little ones she saw regularly. Several of her friends had young children, but though she heard details of their lives, that didn’t mean Lauren saw them more than once or twice a year. Girlfriend lunches and the occasional margarita were not exactly child-friendly gatherings.
Whether the Donovan children got enough protein or not, everyone liked lasagna, and her grandmother’s peach cobbler was to die for. That should suffice as a “sorry I made an ass out of myself” offering.
While the vegetable lasagna was warming in the microwave, Lauren poured herself a glass of iced tea. She straightened the other single-serving-size containers of lasagna on the second shelf of the fridge. Like the cabinets in her kitchen, everything in the refrigerator had a place. The fridge and everything inside it was sparkling clean, and the bottled water was lined up neatly between the skim milk and the pitcher of tea she’d made last night.
Her entire house was like the fridge. Everything had a place; disorder was