One True Love by Barbara Freethy

won’t hold us responsible.”
    No, she wouldn’t hold them responsible. They weren’t crazy. She was.
    Out of her mind to even be considering a workout session with the Incredible Hulk.
    Rocco disappeared through the double doors, but before they closed, Maggie heard him call out to someone.
    “Serena, baby,” he said. “Work it now. Work it hard.”
    Serena. Maggie stretched her neck to catch a glimpse of Serena, but the doors slid shut, and she was left with Lara, Hans and a clipboard full of release forms. But Serena Hollingsworth was inside those double doors, and Maggie couldn’t give up now. She was too close to finding out exactly what she needed to know.
    “Nick, I don’t want to know what you’ve done with the house. I don’t want to see it.” Lisa crossed her arms in front of her as Nick pulled the car away from the baseball diamond and headed toward the beach.
    They’d dropped off Mary Bea at her birthday party and Roxy at the movies, and for the next two hours they would be completely on their own. Lisa wanted to return to Maggie’s house, but she knew that wasn’t Nick’s intent. She couldn’t stand the thought of seeing their house again. In fact, she felt almost panicked at the thought. Why the hell hadn’t Nick moved in all these years?
    “Did you see Dylan make that catch?” Nick asked as he maneuvered his way through the afternoon traffic. “The kid is incredibly athletic.”
    “He does seem very good at baseball. Must be the Maddux in him. I don’t remember Keith being a great athlete.” Lisa paused. “I’m serious, Nick, I don’t want to go to the house.”
    “It’s not the house. It’s our house.”
    “We’re divorced. I signed the house over to you years ago.
    “”Semantics
    Lisa sighed. “Okay, bottom line—what’s it going to take to get you to drive me back to Maggie’s house?”
    “A miracle.” He flashed her a cocky grin. “Think you’re due?”
    “As a matter of fact, yes.” Lisa sat stoically in her seat as the scenery grew more familiar. She remembered the Frosty Freeze where she and Nick had shared an ice cream. She remembered the library, the bookstore, the car wash, the deli, all the little stores and malls she’d frequented. She remembered the wide four-lane boulevards, the glorious palm trees, the blue-blue sky, the color of which Nick always said he saw in her eyes.
    She looked at each street sign, each storefront with a bittersweet sense of longing. These streets were not the streets of just her marriage, but of her childhood as well, her youth. She remembered “cruising” the boulevard. She remembered going to the pizza parlor after the football game, eight people piled in a Volkswagen bug. She smiled at the memory, almost surprised that she still had good memories, after all the bad that had come later.
    Nick turned off the main boulevard and drove through a middle-class suburban area, where the houses were older, the lawns a bit faded, a neighborhood where children’s bikes and skateboards were parked precariously on the sidewalks and lawns, where people still watered their grass on a Saturday afternoon and washed their cars with good old-fashioned elbow grease.
    Finally, Nick pulled into the driveway of a small frame house with a big front porch and a large oak tree that made the house seem smaller than Lisa remembered. Otherwise, it looked exactly the way she’d left it. The porch swing still hung from two rusty chains that creaked with the breeze. She couldn’t count the times she’d sat in the swing, sometimes to escape the southern California heat, sometimes to listen to Nick play the Spanish guitar, sometimes to watch the birds build their nests in the sturdy branches of the trees.
    They had rented the house at first. When one of the elderly owners had died, the remaining spouse had offered it to them for a steal.
    They’d felt like the luckiest couple on the face of the earth. They were married. They had a home. They were