After Bedtime

At forty-one, Lauren's marriage ends the way these things do—with a younger woman at a coffee shop, a husband who claims they "grew apart," and a private text she was never supposed to see calling her boring in bed. She is left with two kids, a mortgage, a dent in the couch, and the slow suspicion that the woman she used to be has been gone for years.

Then her college best friend shows up with a bottle of tequila and a refusal to let her stay buried, and After Bedtime becomes the story of a woman learning to live in two worlds at once—the school lunches and soccer games and bedtime stories by day, the dark rooftops and strangers' hands and the electric shock of being wanted again by night. It's about the friend who pulls her back into her own skin, the men who teach her what her husband spent fifteen years making her forget, and the quiet, careful work of being a mother through all of it.

But somewhere between the Ybor City bathrooms and the quiet mornings, Lauren stops running and starts choosing—and the choice she makes, and the one her ex-husband never sees coming, will rewrite every story he ever told about her. After Bedtime is for every woman who's been told she's too much, not enough, or both at the same time—and for anyone who's ever wondered what it costs, and what it's worth, to come all the way back.