“Humiliating but true,” Brenna said as she slipped on her pumps and grabbed her suit jacket. “Twenty-seven years old and living at home.”

Actually she’d moved back the previous spring when her jerk of a husband-a newly licensed cardiologist without a speck of gratitude or decency-had left her for a younger woman who happened to be a former cheerleader. He was poised to marry the bimbo the instant the computer print was dry on the divorce decree.

Brenna had no desire to have her soon-to-be ex back in her life, but she wouldn’t mind a little justice. Her current favorite fantasy was some kind of genital infection that left him unable to enjoy the wedding night. Ever.

All revenge aside, one of these days she was going to take the time to find a place of her own. For now, it was nice to be where a houseful of people loved her.

She made her way up the rear steps and into the kitchen. As usual, the entire female contingent of the family collected there. Her two grandmothers held court over the food, with Grammy M stirring something on the stove and Grandma Tessa chopping vegetables. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, a box of wedding-invitation samples open in front of her. Katie, Brenna’s older sister, and Francesca, Brenna’s fraternal twin, stood in front of their mother.

Their defiant posture made them look like five-year-olds who had just been caught spray-painting the dog.

“What?” Brenna asked as she draped her suit jacket over her arm. “I was gone two hours. What happened?”

“Nothin’ terrible,” Grammy M-aka Mary-Margaret O’Shea-said from her place at the stove. “Francesca has the most wonderful news.”