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she’d needed rather than resented. “I don’t know. Maybe I changed . . .”
    Maxine nibbled on a Danish with pretty white teeth. “It’s neither here nor there. All of those things can be worked out later in our group sessions. For right now, you have a job interview. So go get your pretty on, and we’ll go.” She turned her attention back to her coffee, nonchalantly stirring it with the spoon, as though she hadn’t just set off a grenade.
    Frankie’s mouth fell open. A job interview? With whom? Who would hire her to do anything but maybe babysit their cave? “I’m not ready—to—I”—she sucked in an anxious breath—“I can’t . . .”
    “No, you can, and you will.” Maxine gave her the mom look, brushing crumbs from her hands onto the yellow paper napkins Gail provided. “You have to. You’ve been in bed for six months. Do you have any idea how much time you have to make up for? So no more lollygagging. Go put on something that says ‘hire me,’ and hurry. We have to meet Nikos at five at the diner.”
    The diner. The. Diner. Unmoving, Frankie said, “The diner.”
    “That’s right. The diner,” Maxine confirmed, her eyes sharp with amusement. “Are you going to give me grief because it’s not a five-star restaurant and insult all the hard work it took to nab you this interview?”
    Gail grinned, holding out her hands to Kiki. “Good then, it’s a date. I’ll babysit. Come see your Auntie Gail,” she cooed to a stoic Kiki.
    White-knuckled, Frankie’s legs shook, and she wasn’t even standing yet. There was absolutely no way in friggin’ hell she could go on an interview, let alone work in a diner. Or anywhere.

     
    Well, so much for protests. There was something to be said for the brand of vitamins Maxine was taking. She’d pried Frankie’s fingers from the molding around the door with the strength of a sumo wrestler.
    Leaning against Maxine’s passenger door, Frankie huddled deeper into her sweater, reluctant and petulant. It was the heaviest piece of outerwear she still owned, but it wasn’t cutting it against the sharp November air. Her teeth chattered and her body shook.
    “You’re cold because you haven’t been eating, Frankie.” Maxine’s observation came as she yielded into traffic.
    “Thank you, FDA,” she muttered.
    Maxine’s tongue clucked in disapproval, but her grip on the steering wheel was relaxed. “If you could put as much effort into preparing for this interview as you did into clinging to the doorway at your aunt’s, you’d be golden.”
    “How am I supposed to prepare for something I wasn’t aware of until fifteen minutes ago?” Oh, she sounded so peevish.
    “Someone had to throw you into the deep end. It wasn’t going to be Gail. She’s too soft, and she loves you too much to upset you. I, on the other hand, have no compunctions about dragging you from your cave, and I don’t care if it upsets your precarious balance or your beloved pity party.”
    She might not have felt a whole lot in the past six months, but today, right this second, she hated Maxine Whatserface for forcing her to do something she didn’t want to do. “So who are you? The patron saint of divorced, depressed ex-trophy wives? And how did I get the label ex-trophy wife anyway?”
    Maxine pulled into the parking lot of a place called Greek Meets Eat Diner, touting a huge banner that read, “Home of the World’s Best Meatloaf,” and laughed. “You’re snarky. I like that, and no, but I already told you, I know where you are. I know how hard it is to even consider surviving, let alone summon up the will to want to when you’ve been dumped in such a public way. I know what it’s like to have nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I started an employment agency for women just like you and me. Which leads me to the definition of an ex-trophy wife. Typically we’re pretty young things who marry a much older, rich man who likes to display his eye candy in the way of nubile. When