After Bedtime - Sloane Avery

Greg said she wasn't passionate. He said it to the woman he left her for.

Lauren found the texts on his iPad. Every word. The clinical little autopsy of their marriage, written to make the other woman feel better about what she'd done.

So Lauren did what any reasonable woman would do.

She stopped being reasonable.

Her best friend - the one her husband spent fifteen years calling a trainwreck, the one who stopped getting invited to things because Greg made it clear she wasn't welcome - shows up with a bottle of tequila and a black dress and a voice that says I knew you before he made you small. And for the first time in years, Lauren lets someone see her. Then she lets the rest of the world see her too.

What follows is not a breakdown. It's a remembering.

Night by night. Man by man. Room by room. Lauren peels back fifteen years of being dimmed - turned down so slowly she thought the darkness was just how things looked - and finds the woman who was underneath the whole time. Loud. Wanting. Unashamed.

But mornings still come. There are lunches to pack and homework to check and a ten-year-old son who's gone quiet in ways that keep her up at night and an eight-year-old daughter who draws pictures of her family and gives her mother no mouth.

The world will tell her to choose. The nights or the mornings. The mother or the woman. The packed lunches or the locked door.

She's both. She's always been both. The only person who needed her to be one thing at a time was the man who left.

And the man who finally deserves her? He's the one who sees both. Who makes her daughter laugh about fractions. Who shows up to her son's soccer game - not because she asked. Who stays awake after and wants to know what she's thinking.

He's also the last person on earth her ex-husband would want in her bed.

After Bedtime is sharp, tender, and unapologetically adult - a novel about divorce, desire, motherhood, friendship, and the lie that a woman has to be one thing at a time. This novel contains explicit sexual content.

For the woman reading this after everyone else is asleep - this one's yours.