In the car lot of life, Amanda Sheridan decided, she was a Volvo station wagon with about eighty thousand miles on it.

People said a woman should look at how a man treated his mother when deciding whether to marry him, but Amanda now knew, from painful personal experience, that a man's car-buying habits were a much better indicator.

In her family men bought good quality cars and drove them until they stopped running; they racked up the miles and bragged about their odometer readings. And in most cases, their marriages lasted just as long.

In Rob's family, which Amanda had been a part of for almost twenty years, the men traded up. Every year they chose a new car and passed the year-old vehicle down to their wives. Occasionally a car might last a little longer if there was a teenager in the family; but as a rule, if you were a Sheridan, when your car's ashtray got dirty it was time to trade that sucker in.

Which went a long way toward explaining why Rob was test-driving a BMW Z4 convertible named Tiffany while Amanda, whose bench seats were sagging, appeared headed for the used car lot.

Amanda scooped Wyatt's baseball socks out of the clean-clothes basket and tossed them on his bed then stashed a fresh stack of towels in the kids' linen closet. Pithy car metaphors notwithstanding, Amanda had no idea how she was supposed to get Rob, who appeared to be in the throes of a monumental midlife crisis at the age of forty-two, to come to his senses, and even less idea of how she'd go on alone if she failed.

It was now almost two and a half months since that morning in mid-December when her husband admitted to lubricating another woman's carburetor; two long months since he'd moved out ...