Pat Gaudette

After Sunny’s middle-aged husband ends their marriage by running off with an old high school sweetheart, Sunny wonders if there’s anyone from her past who would have the same effect on her. Author Pamela Redmond Satran’s book The Man I Should Have Married begins with a divorce and ends with a marriage. The middle of the book tells how it all happened.

From the front:

Oh God. I brushed my hair back from my face, gave thanks that I’d worn the figure-hugging T-shirt, licked my lips. The attraction I’d felt for him when I first met him, when I first started working at the bar, had dissipated in the face of his many high-drama romances and our developing friendship.

But then I slept with him, and all those years of friendship went out the window. I thought of him now only as an ex-lover, as a fantasy who’d fueled hundreds of orgasms in the time since I’d last seen him. Oh God. I pressed my nose to the blackened window, and there, drawing a Guinness from the ancient brass tap, was my fantasy.

I could just walk away, leaving him none the wiser. I could go home, work on creating my future.

Or I could go through that door. Say hello. Have a beer. Revisit my past.

The Man I Should Have Married is a romantic, wistful, lovely little book. It’s a good book for reading on a quiet winter night. And when you finish reading, you’ll have warm fuzzy feelings.