My Dead Wife's Ex Will Do Paperback

Fifteen years of avoidance. One week in paradise. A secret that refuses to stay buried.

Jason Perez has spent fifteen years being the perfect widower.

He raised his stepdaughter. He directs music at his Catholic parish. He honors his wife's memory by living a life above reproach. And he absolutely, categorically does not think about the one reckless, grief-stricken night he spent in Victor Hendricks's arms. The night of Leah’s funeral.

Fine. He thinks about it constantly. But he's handled it like any reasonable person would: by avoiding Victor entirely for a decade and a half.

Now their daughter Kelsey is getting married at a lush Costa Rican resort, and Jason's avoidance strategy has officially expired. Seven days. One tropical paradise. Two men with a very inconvenient history and an even more inconvenient attraction.

Victor—fitness guru, yoga instructor to the Hollywood elite, a man whose patience rivals a freaking saint—has carried a torch for Jason since that night. He's done waiting for permission.

Between waterfall hikes and rehearsal dinners, old guilt wars with new desire. Stolen glances become stolen moments. And Jason has to face what he's been running from: wanting Victor might cost him his job, his church community, and the carefully constructed life that's kept him safe.

But Victor might be worth burning it all down.

“You’re not going to act all weird with him, are you?” My daughter’s voice drifts over the curtain enclosing the dressing area and rises above the tailor’s murmured instructions to turn this way, please; lift your arm a little; yes, now lower it.

“What do you mean ‘act all weird’? With who?” I’m standing on a riser while the tailor fits me for the suit I’m supposed to wear to my daughter’s wedding next month and if there’s anyone I’m likely to act all weird with, it’s this woman squatting at my knees who currently has her hands all over parts of my body that even I don’t touch this much.

“With Daddy,” Kelsey says, and I swear I can hear her rolling her eyes at me. I roll mine back, even though she can’t see me, and the tailor tosses a sympathetic smile up at me.

“I am not going to act all weird with Victor.”

“‘Cause you do, you know. Ever since Mom died, you act like you can barely stand him, and the last thing I need at my wedding is my two dads being the way you always are around each other.”

Kelsey delights in referring to Victor and me as her two dads. Which, fine. Technically, we are. Victor Hendricks is Kelsey’s biological father. I married Kelsey’s mother when Kelsey was not quite four years old. I wanted to adopt her, but Victor refused to give up his parental rights. After Leah died fifteen years ago, Victor and I shared custody of Kelsey.

I’m the man who raised her, for the most part. I tucked her in at night, taught her to read, how to hit a softball, helped her memorize her multiplication tables.

Victor taught her how to apply makeup, accessorize, and stand up to bullies. And how to sass her primary custodial father, something she still does on the regular. 

Not that Kelsey has needed custodial parents for some time now. She’s twenty-seven and about to marry a woman she’s been dating for three years. But her wedding is one place I’ll definitely have to share her with Victor.

When she was a girl, Kelsey had an uncanny knack for sussing out which of her friends or teachers would be most shocked by the notion of two men co-parenting.

Never mind that Victor and I are not—and have never been—a couple. Or that I’m not gay.

“It wouldn’t kill your daddy to be a little less weird around me,” I mutter under my breath.

The tailor’s eyes flick upwards, but she drops them quickly back to her work. She’s probably been privy to any number of family squabbles, scandals, or breakdowns while taking measurements and pinning hems.

Not that there’s any scandal going on here.

Or family squabbles.

Unless you count what happened between Victor and me the night after Leah’s funeral.

Which I don’t.

One night. A moment of weakness when we were both grieving. Something that shouldn’t have happened but did, like things sometimes just happen, even when they shouldn’t.

Kelsey doesn’t—will never—know about that.

“How are the wedding plans coming along?” I ask. The subject of Victor and how I interact with him is not a sore one, exactly, but it’s also not one I have any intention of discussing with our daughter.

“Ugh,” she groans.“Adrienne wants to cancel the entire thing and elope. She’s opposed to what she calls ‘the wedding industrial complex’ and she thinks we’re spending too much money on only one day in our whole life together.”

I exchange a smile with the tailor at the air quotes I can hear in Kelsey’s voice. I love Kelsey’s fiancée almost as much as Kelsey does. She’s an attorney at a big law firm and the most no-nonsense person I’ve ever met. Of course she thinks they shouldn’t spend a lot of money on a wedding.

On the other hand, Kelsey has been dreaming about her wedding since she was a little girl, parading her Barbies down a flower-strewn aisle in the upstairs hallway of the Brooklyn brownstone Leah’s trust fund bought shortly before we married. Mother of Mercy, what a chore it was to vacuum up all those wilted flower petals.

“Are you going to do that?”

Kelsey sighs loud enough that the curtain sways a bit in the resulting breeze. “I,” she starts dramatically, “have compromised on freaking everything. But I want an aisle to walk down. And a pretty dress to wear. And a bouquet of flowers to carry. And a handful of friends and family there to see us make our vows and celebrate with us. Is that too much to ask?”

“Of course not, honey.” If I’m honest, I want those things for Kelsey, too. I want to see my little girl all dressed up, exchanging vows to love, honor, and cherish the person she already loves so much, just like her mother and I did. “Is Adrienne really opposed to everything?”

Kelsey snorts, a truly unladylike sound, and I relax a little bit. “No. She’s just being a pill. She’s been overwhelmed at work lately, trying to wrap things up so she can take the time off. It was her idea to have it in Costa Rica in the first place, which is the main reason it’s costing so much.”

Instead of a church wedding in New York City, Kelsey and Adrienne have chosen to have their wedding at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. Seven days of daily yoga sessions, local cuisine, spa treatments, and eco-tourism excursions, with their vow exchange on day five so we all have a day or two to recover before heading back to New York.

It sounds to me like a week of far too many things to do, but then again, it’s a wedding. A wedding is not a vacation; it’s a fuckton of work for everyone, especially the couple. And their fathers.

“I did buy a new dress but Adrienne’s wearing a suit she already owns.” Why I can’t wear a suit I already own is beyond me, but Kelsey has decided that her dads simply must wear matching suits in a particular shade of blue that looks more like a tropical bird’s plumage than any menswear I’ve ever owned.

“Plus, Daddy got us a great deal at the retreat, so it’s really not that much more than a regular vacation would cost.”

Victor’s had a rather varied career but he’s been a well-known yoga and fitness instructor for about a decade now and leads yoga retreats all over the US, Mexico, and South America. Of course he got Kelsey and her fiancée a deal on the retreat package. He’ll probably teach most of the yoga sessions during it.

“How’s Barnaby?” Kelsey asks. “Is he looking forward to his trip to the spa?”

“You know he’s not.” My retired greyhound has a complicated relationship with Kiki’s Pet Spa. On the one hand, I’m pretty sure he’d rather I engage an in-home pet sitter so he didn’t have to walk all the way to Kiki’s and all the way back home when I pick him up. On the other hand, he absolutely loves the owner, Elsa, who lets him drool all over her and sleep in the big bed she has set up in the back of the kennel.

“He’s fine, though,” I continue. “He loves that crinkly sloth you bought him.” I adopted Barnaby a year or so after Kelsey left for college but she considers him as much her dog as mine anyway.

The tailor steps back and surveys her work, then gives a satisfied nod. “I’ll have it ready to pick up on Tuesday,” she says. I step down from the riser and she gathers her pins and tape measure before ducking around the curtain so I can change back into my regular clothes.

Kelsey is quiet on the other side of the curtain, probably absorbed in her phone. Speaking of phones, mine buzzes and I pull it from my jacket pocket. There’s a text from Peter Okafor, an opera singer I’ve known since grad school, and first tenor in the Saint Sebastian Six, the vocal ensemble we co-founded a dozen years ago when we were both looking for new professional challenges.

Still think we should open with the Byrd. Think about it.

I put the phone back in my pocket. We’re not opening with the Byrd for our spring concert. We’re opening with Tallis and closing with Gesualdo and Peter knows this because we’ve had this argument three times already, and he’s wrong, and he’ll come around. He always does.

I sweep the curtain aside and Kelsey looks up from her phone. “Well?”

“It’ll do,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “It’s gorgeous and you know it, Dad.”