Free Getting Over Mr. Right by Chrissie Manby

for the night.
    Now that Michael was offline, I clicked on his friends list and looked at all the faces there, searching the thumbnail pictures for more clues. Michael had not yet updated his relationship status. About thirty of the seventy-four people Michael had friended were women. Any one of them could be his new girlfriend. I had to go through that list in a systematic way.
    There were quite a few I could discount immediately. No matter how evil I thought Michael was, it was unlikely he was having an affair with his teenage cousin. Likewise his sister-in-law. I knew also that he thought his office manager was a cast-iron cow. He’d told me he’d only added her to his list because he was too afraid not to.
    By the time the light of dawn was beginning to filter through the window, I had narrowed the suspects down to three. Twowere women I didn’t recognize at all. Michael had added them both to his list in the past month. The third was the woman I had seen him talking to at the Christmas party. The interior designer with the Grand Canyon cleavage and the cotton-candy hair. Her name was Giselle Kleinbeck.

Unfortunately, by the time morning rolled around Michael had still not responded to me/Kevin as to whether he would be taking a plus-one to the baby’s barbecue. That barbecue haunted me. Why hadn’t I heard about it before? As soon as it was decent, I called Helen and tried to engage her in a conversation that might lead to an invitation for me, too. I don’t know what I thought I would do if she did ask me along, but it seemed like a good idea to have the option. I wanted to see Michael again. There was no other event on the horizon to which I could casually rock up and bump into him.
    “So,” I said, “now that you’re through the first sticky month, you must want to celebrate. Are you having Alex christened?”
    “Oh, no,” said Helen. “Kevin doesn’t believe in that sort of thing.”
    “But you must want to do something to mark such a momentous occasion as the birth of your first child. How about some sort of secular naming ceremony? Or just a party?”
    “Honestly.” Helen sighed. “Right now a party is the last thing on my mind. We’re just too exhausted with all the three AM feeds and the constant nappy changing. I had no idea …”
    “So you’re not even going to do something really simple?” I pushed. “Like a barbecue?”
    Helen drew breath. I thought that she was about to cave but instead she said, “I’ve got to go. It’s time for the baby’s feed. I’m trying to establish some kind of routine.”
    She put the phone down before I could say good-bye.
    Foiled by Helen, I sent Michael another message via Facebook, as Kevin, explaining that it was important to know numbers for the barbecue because there were sausages to be ordered. Still nothing.
    I couldn’t just sit there and wait. I had accessed the limited profiles of the three women I suspected of stealing my man. I had Googled their names and found out a surprising and frightening amount of information about all three.
    It turned out to be fairly easy to discount two more of the women. I quickly found photographs of one’s very recent wedding online. I know that being married didn’t entirely rule her out of the running, but the fact that she had married another woman suggested to me that Michael would not float her boat even with his nascent six-pack and new penchant for handmade shoes. The other woman resided in São Paulo. If Michael had been having a relationship with her, I had no idea how and when. Michael had been morbidly afraid of flying anywhere near South America since the outbreak of swine flu. In fact he was rather girlie about flying at all. No, I decided, if Miss São Paulo was his new girlfriend, she was not likely to last.
    That left me with one more candidate. The interior designer.
    I went half blind looking at that tiny photograph, trying to work out if she was more attractive than I was. It was hard to