Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner

in public in my PJs.” She made a face. “If that’s true, my partner will kill me. Janie’s stylish, ” she said. “She finds me very frustrating.”
    I examined the pants, with their elastic waist and baggy fit, wondering if I should have requested Segal instead of Klein. “They look like regular pants to me.” In fact, the pants looked way too casual for the office, better suited to a picnic or a trip to the beach. There was no official dress code at Kohler’s, but all the women wore skirts and dresses. You could wear pants if theywere part of a suit and if you paired them with heels and the right accessories, and, even then, you couldn’t wear them very often before people would start to talk.
    But maybe Kate Klein was working undercover, at a preschool or someplace like that. She smelled sweet in a familiar, evocative way, and there was a dab of something golden-brown on the hem of her shirt.
    “Applesauce,” she said when she noticed my stare, pouring us both glasses of water from a pitcher filled with ice and sliced lemons that sat on a table against her wall, next to potted African violets. “Kids,” she said, pointing toward all those framed photographs. I saw a pair of identical twin boys and an older girl with hair the same color as Kate’s, maybe as young as ten or as old as fourteen. It was hard for me to guess. I didn’t spend much time around children.
    Kate sat down on a chenille-covered couch thick with throw pillows, with a blanket hanging over the back. “So, Ms. Croft. Tell me what I can do for you.”
    “My father,” I began. On the subway ride over I’d thought about how to most concisely express my problem. “He’s recently remarried.”
    Kate Klein produced a legal pad and a ballpoint pen. Her expression was focused; her posture suggested that, in spite of her casual clothes and her comfortable couch, she was listening hard. “And you’d like us to look into his new wife. Is there anything particular that concerns you?”
    “Well, her name, for starters. India.” I heard the scorn in my voice.
    Kate lifted her eyebrows. “Maybe her parents were Gone With the Wind fans?”
    I sipped my water and thought of my father’s bride standing at the sink at the house in Bridgehampton, washing dishes like she did it all the time, and how everything about her was fake. Afew weeks ago, under the guise of looking up horoscopes on the Internet, I’d asked India the year of her birth and detected—or thought I had—a brief flutter of hesitation before she came up with a date.
    Kate leaned forward with her elbows on her folded knees. “You don’t think your father might have done his own check? From what I’ve seen of him, he strikes me as a pretty savvy guy.”
    “In business, maybe. But this . . . my mom left him, which was difficult.” I felt the familiar mixture of sorrow at my mother’s departure and fury at her for leaving rise up inside me like acid indigestion, along with shame for having to say any of this out loud.
    “Do they have a prenup?” Kate’s head was bent, and she was writing on her legal pad.
    “Yes,” I said. I’d asked my father, and he’d looked at me with an uncharacteristically sharp expression. Why do you ask? he’d said.
    Just curious, I’d told him. Later, when he and India had gone out to dinner, I’d found the document in my father’s safe, behind a Rothko lithograph in his home office—the code, I knew, was Trey’s birthday, then Tommy’s, then mine. According to the document, in the event of a separation India would receive a million dollars for every year she was married to my father for the first five years, then two million a year up to ten years, then three million a year. If she had a baby, she’d leave the marriage with thirty million dollars, and child support up to thirty thousand dollars a month, plus school tuition at mutually agreed-upon institutions until the baby turned eighteen. That was what worried me most, even though I