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than…a stale marriage.
    Damn this weather. Where else but in Rain City, Oregon, did you have to use your headlights in the daytime, ensuring that one day you’d be upset or in a hurry and you’d dash out of the car, forgetting to turn off the lights?
    This was all Derek’s fault. Every trouble in the world could be traced to smiling, sexy, talented, charming, renowned Derek Charles Holloway. If not for him, she never would have moved out here to the rainiest spot on the planet. If not for him, she’d be fine right now, just fine.
    But Derek took up a lot of space in a woman’s world. He was larger than life in every department: athletic prowess, looks, spending habits. Oh, and his appetite for women. Let’s not forget that, Crystal thought. He was definitely larger than life in that department.
    It was because of all his appetites, his greed, his carelessness in matters of the heart that she found herself sitting in a dead car with the rain beating down, crying her eyes out.
    I’ll hate you forever, Derek Charles Holloway, she thought, digging around in her purse for a Kleenex. She came across everything but a tissue: her prescription slip (yet another errand she needed to run before picking up the kids), an ancient Binky dusted with bottom-of-the-purse lint (Ashley had surrendered her Binky six months ago), a couple of stray ball markers and tees with Derek’s initials on them (Was her purse really that old?), a tiny three-pack of Virginia Slims samples given out at a tournament (Yes. It really was that old.), a pack of matches from Bandon Dunes Golf Course. And she still hadn’t found a Kleenex.
    By now the windows of the car were so steamed up, passersby might think there was some hanky-panky going on. Ha. Hanky-panky was a thing of the past for Crystal. Hanky-panky was what got her here in the first place. And the second. And the third.
    God, what happened to my life? she wondered. Derek. Derek Holloway happened.
    She’d been a student at the University of Portland, with everything going for her. She was a freaking beauty queen, for Pete’s sake. She had stood upon the mountaintop as Miss Oregon U.S.A. of 1989, heavily favored to win the national title. Then along came Derek. Three months later, she’d cheerfully handed her crown over to her first runner-up, a dull-witted, laser-toothed blonde from Clackamas County.
    Crystal had been so stupid in love that she hadn’t even cried, giving up her crown. She was pregnant—on purpose, though Derek never knew that—and about to marry a man who, by the age of twenty-two, had already been on the cover of Sports Illustrated three times. Really, what was there to cry about?
    She snorted into the wet sleeve of her microfiber raincoat, making up for lost time. Her sleeve made a lousy Kleenex, so she simply gave up crying.
    “Enough is enough,” she said. And again: “Get a grip.” Somehow she managed to compose herself. She sat for a moment in the pall of silence. It was a dead car, for Lord’s sake, not a cancer diagnosis. She had weathered childbirth, heartbreak, infidelity, divorce, single parenthood, financial ruin, and the world hadn’t come to an end. Surely a dead battery was not going to finish her off.
    Will it matter in five years? Her therapist’s favorite question popped into Crystal’s mind. For once, the answer was no. No, this stupid dead car she was forced to drive because her stupid attorney hadn’t milked enough spousal maintenance out of Derek would be nothing more than a bitter memory five years from now. She glanced at the crumpled pink receipt from the medical lab test on the console. Snatching it up, she stuffed it under the visor. Now, that was something that would matter in five years. It would matter forever.
    She wished it wasn’t raining. If the sun was out, she’d abandon this piece-of-shit car, stride with her pageant runway walk over to Rain Shadow Lexus and slide right into the cushy leather interior of a brand-new car, one