by Amy Olle
“What realities?” Shea demanded.
“I overheard Amber Jessop asking you out again the other night. Maybe you should take her up on the offer.” One corner of Noah’s mouth lifted in a half smile. “And let Isobel see you doing it.”
Pride filled Luke’s expression. “Aren’t you the devious bastard?”
“Amber Jessop?” Shea spat the woman’s name. “Now you’re just fucking with me, right?”
Noah’s bark of laughter carried across the marina. “Okay, maybe not her. But how about any of the other half-dozen women on this island clamoring for your attention?”
“I’m not interested in any other women.”
“I’m not suggesting you start up anything serious.”
“That’s good, because I’m married.”
Noah dropped his chin and fixed Shea with a look. “For how much longer?”
A nasty curse erupted from Shea.
Noah pressed his advantage. “All I’m saying is would it be the worst thing in the world if Isobel thought—mistakenly, of course—that you were ready to move on, too? Maybe she’d even be a little jealous.”
“There it is.” Luke raised his beer. “Makeup sex.”
Shea struggled to focus on just one of Noah’s faces. “You’re twisted.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment.”
“Do you want your wife back or not?”
Shea drank a mouthful of bitter beer rather than repeat himself. “You said I had two choices. What’s the other option?”
With the speed of a flipped switch, Noah grew suddenly serious. “Fight for her.”
An eerie quiet fell over the marina. The light in Noah’s dark eyes took on a lethal glint and lifted the hairs on the back of Shea’s neck.
“It’s a life-or-death battle, as you well know.” Emotion rode the edge of his words. “There are no rules. No gentlemen’s agreement. No mercy. Fight, and don’t stop fighting until the last breath has left your body.”
A nauseating concoction of alcohol and fear swirled in Shea’s gut. Hopelessness dragged at him. “I’ve been fighting all my life.”
“This time is different.”
“This time, you have us.”
Shea had no idea what his brothers meant, but hours later, as the sweet relief of unconsciousness tried to claim him, one last cogent thought floated through his mind.
Noah was right. If he was going to get his wife back, he couldn’t keep doing what he’d always done and hope for a different outcome. He had to try something else. Something he’d never done before.
No more playing by the rules. He had to do something totally unexpected. Something she would not anticipate him doing and would therefore struggle to defend against.
He had to stop fighting.
What he wanted to do was storm over to the house and demand to know why and when she’d stopped loving him. He wanted to make her say the words out loud and straight to his face, because maybe then his hemorrhaging heart would accept it was the end for them.
Which was the reason why he couldn’t go anywhere near her. Not yet.
He’d wait until he was stronger, and sober, and if he was right, he wouldn’t have to go to her at all.
She’d come to him.
Chapter Six
After three days of crushing doubt and nauseating dread, a faint thread of annoyance wound through Isobel.
Hand on her hip, she contemplated Noah standing on her front porch. “What are you doing here? Where’s Shea?”
“He had something come up—”
“Unca Noah!” A thunder of footsteps erupted as Connor charged through the living room and launched himself into his uncle’s arms.
Crouching, Noah scooped him up. “Hey, little man. Where’s your sister?”
“Here I am!” Maisie, dressed in the pink poufy princess dress Isobel made for her, wrapped her arms around Noah’s legs.
“Princess Maisie.” Noah bent at the waist. “You look beautiful.”
Maisie ducked her chin to hide her wide smile and twirled on the hardwood in her stockinged feet.
She studied him through narrowed eyes. Before she married Shea, Isobel and Noah had become friends, and afterward, they’d grown closer. He had even lived with them for a time, as had all of Shea’s brothers. But that closeness offered her little insight into his sudden appearance now.
Connor and Maisie, competing for their uncle’s attention, engulfed him in a flurry of excited chatter while he collected their bags and herded them out the door. Soon after they’d left, Finn went out with some friends and the house fell eerily quiet.
Flitting as they did from one new adventure to another, Connor and Maisie never allowed Isobel time to be sad or depressed, or really to think much at all about her crumbling marriage. Without them to keep her mind busy, her thoughts traveled a dark path.
After filing those papers, she’d expected Shea to call her, or hunt her down at the store, or charge over to the house and demand to know why she’d done it. He would confront her. Challenge her. Refuse to let her go. He would fight because that was what he did, always. He fought.
But he didn’t come, and he didn’t fight.
The knots in her stomach wrenched with painful twists and twinges.
She worked all day Saturday and came home to an empty house. For dinner, she made Finn’s favorite pasta dish, but he failed to show and instead sent her a text to let her know he was hanging out at the beach with his friends.
Alone in the big empty house Shea had built, she put the pasta in the refrigerator and set to work scrubbing the kitchen clean, but halfway through her task, she stopped abruptly. What was the point? No one cared if the kitchen was neat or filthy. Until Shea brought the kids home on Sunday, likely no one would even notice.
Down the hall, she changed into her pajamas and crawled into bed with her cell phone. It’d been a week since she’d had dinner with Cooper, and she held out hope he might call her soon with news about her loan application.
But when she checked her messages, there were none. Doubt crept in to further deflate her mood. It was Shea’s fault, she thought with a sullen scowl. Had the fiasco that was her business meeting with Cooper ruined her chances of getting the loan? That night at the restaurant, he’d put up a fight, but a week later, he couldn’t be bothered?
Though she didn’t understand why she’d done so at the time, she was right to hide her loan application from him. He couldn’t be trusted.
Besides, his opinions about her plans were irrelevant. The fact was Shea didn’t have a part to play in her plan for the future.
Purposeless and heavy-hearted, she flopped onto the bed and yanked the quilt up over her head. The bedsheets had lost Shea’s smell months ago and sudden tears prickled behind her eyes.
The next morning, she didn’t climb out of bed with the first light as usual. The hours slipped by while she drifted in and out of sleep, and the day passed without her ever crawling out from beneath the covers. It was something she hadn’t done since those horrible months after her mom had died.
When the time approached to meet Shea at the pub to pick up Connor and Maisie, as she’d done every Sunday evening for nearly two years, she abandoned the safety of her warm cocoon and sought the refuge of a hot shower.
The water’s invigorating spray restored some of her fight and after she dried off, she spent a little extra time on her hair and her makeup. Then she pulled on her blue jeans with the butt-lifting technology and the new top she’d bought at the store, which showed a little more cleavage than she normally revealed. She was about to walk out the door when a car pulled up the driveway.
Leo emerged from the dark green SUV.
Annoyance mixed with her already dark mood as she met them in the driveway.
“Where’s Shea?” she demanded as Connor and Maisie scrambled out of the back seat.
“He asked me to drop the munchkins off for him.”
She swallowed back a gro
wl of frustration at the non-answer. “Why? What’s he doing?”
“I assume something came up at work.”
While Noah and Jack had lived with her and Shea only a few months each, Noah leaving to go overseas and Jack to pursue hockey in Detroit, both Luke and Leo had stayed in her home for longer patches time. Shortly after Luke graduated high school, he found his own place, but Leo, the youngest of the brothers, was with her on and off from the time he was twelve years old until he left for boot camp a few months before his eighteenth birthday.
After Noah, she probably knew Leo the best, which was why, despite his professional-grade poker face, she realized immediately that he was hiding something from her.
“You talked to him?” she asked. “How did he sound? Did he seem… normal?”
Leo’s gaze drifted away. “How do you define normal?”
“You know, grumpy.”
A thoughtful frown puckered Leo’s brow. “No, he didn’t. He was chill.”
“Chill?” Somehow, she added an extra syllable to the word.
“Happy.”
Her heart cracked. “Happy?” she whispered.
A rare smile found its way to Leo’s face. “He even made a joke. It was a crappy joke, mind you, but he tried.”
Shea was happy? She hadn’t seen him happy in years. Maybe not ever.
Leo’s customary scowl returned. “You okay?”
Unable to speak around the lump wedged in her throat, she nodded.
As Leo drove off, she sank down on the top step of the front porch and looked on as Connor and Maisie trampled through her flowerbeds. Even when they separated several large blooms from their hearty stems, she observed the destruction with indifference.
Was that it? Had Shea signed the papers? Was their marriage over?
The thought should’ve brought her some relief, but the way her chest constricted and her stomach clenched didn’t feel like relief. Not even a little.
Shouldn’t she feel… lighter? Like a burden had been lifted? The torturous cycle of anger and self-doubt, anxiety and angst, was finally coming to an end. She could start over. Fresh. Filing for divorce was supposed to feel good. Or at least she should feel better.
Shouldn’t she?
She hadn’t thought it was possible to feel worse.
Three nights later, Shea sent Luke to pick up Connor and Maisie. Beneath her sorrow, a sliver of anger needled. All week she’d waited to hear from Shea, or Miles Sinclair, but her phone didn’t ring. No texts. No emails. No calls. Nothing.
“Let me guess.” Resentment laced her words. “Something came up?”
“He has a date,” Luke said cheerfully.
With the gut punch, she sucked in a sharp hiss of air.
Alarm stole over Luke’s handsome features. “I mean a meeting. It’s a date, meeting. A meeting… date?”
“Who with?” She immediately regretted the question, and yet she let it ride.
Luke scratched the back of his neck. “I, uh, can’t remember.”
“Liar.”
He dared to try his charming smile on her. “It’s the baby. I haven’t slept in days and I can’t remember shit.”
His wife, Emily, had delivered their firstborn only two months prior, and at mention of the baby, Isobel softened.
“How is the little guy?”
“Except for the not sleeping, he’s great.” Luke ran a hand through his hair, causing the dark strands to stand on end. “He will sleep eventually, won’t he?”
The tinge of desperation in his voice coaxed a reassuring smile from Isobel. “He will. Eventually. I promise.”
Luke strapped the kids into the car seats he’d borrowed from Shea’s vehicle, and as they backed out of the driveway, a heavy glumness settled over her. Was Shea really on a date? He wasn’t even going to talk to her? Yell at her? Say goodbye?
He must’ve signed those damned papers, then, eager to go out with this other woman. Isobel would put her money on the scheming Amber Jessop. The woman had been after Shea since high school. A colleague in law and now thrice divorced herself, Amber often openly flirted with him, sometimes right in front of Isobel.
She retreated inside the house and, in the kitchen, filled a coffee mug with wine. Settling on a barstool at the island counter, she gulped down the syrupy liquid and then immediately poured another. She took several greedy swallows while a tornado of angst spiraled through her, whipping up dark memories of a failed marriage.
They’d never stood a chance. She could admit that now. Married as teenagers, neither she nor Shea were prepared to handle the heap of obstacles set before them. Some hurdles were self-created, like her unexpected pregnancy, but others, such as the constant turmoil stirred up Shea’s volatile father, Daniel, had been outside their control.
Their lack of money added a layer of stress on top of everything else and when Shea started work at the law firm, she’d hoped things would get easier for them. They didn’t. Indeed, with the money came new pressures on their relationship. Different, and far more sinister.
Early on, Shea’s new boss had invited them to dinner at his house, a lavish estate overlooking the Grand Traverse Bay. Immediately upon arriving, Isobel had felt awkward and out-of-place among Shea’s coworkers and their glamourous wives. The wealthy wives of powerful men, the women chatted about things Isobel didn’t understand, like frustrations with their housekeepers and their husbands’ mistresses.
Stunned, Isobel had gaped at the women as they openly conversed about the fact that their husbands were sleeping with other women. There was no anger in their voices, though a touch of bitterness crept into a word or a look here and there. But mostly they spoke with a matter-of-factness that had devastated Isobel. As though they discussed the weather or traffic. Some nuisance they had no control over. Nothing of consequence which could, or should, be otherwise.
“I didn’t think it’d happen so soon.” Isobel detected a hint of anguish in the woman’s voice who, like Isobel, was married to one of the new lawyers with the firm.
“The first affair is always the hardest,” the senior partner’s wife had reassured her. “It gets easier.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” another woman offered. “It’s the stress.”
“It’s the men. They need it.”
The experience had imbedded a kernel of doubt just below the surface, and through all the years Shea worked at the firm, it had rubbed and chafed. Isobel had tried to ignore the dark suspicions and ugly doubts, but she wasn’t always able to forget what she’d heard that night, and wonder.
The years passed in a blur of anxiety and grief. She and Shea grew up and grew apart, as their lives took divergent paths, his increasingly career-focused and hers family-centered.
Until one day she felt more alone when he was there.
Slowly, she dropped her head to the countertop. The smooth granite felt cool on her forehead. She and Shea had been a couple since she was in the eleventh grade. Not a single day of her adult life had passed without him as her husband.
Until today.
And at the first opportunity, he’d stepped out with another woman. Amber Freaking Jessop, no less.
Like Shea, Amber had gone on to get her law degree and join some high-powered legal firm on the mainland where, to this day, she worked and resided but for a few months out of the year when she returned with the warm weather to her summer home on the island. In recent years, Isobel had grown to hate the tourist season.
A wave of dizziness rocked her, but not from the wine as much as from the realization that she was officially a bitter divorcée.
Saturday night, Jack dropped off Connor and Maisie, making up some excuse about spending time with his niece and nephew before he headed to training camp the following week with his hockey team, and another three days filled with wild mood swings passed while she awaited word—any word at all—from either her possibly ex-husband or her divorce attorney.
So on Tuesday morning, she greeted Mr. Sinclair a
t his office door, and twenty minutes later he confirmed that Shea had not returned the signed papers.
Isobel’s anger turned to indignation, which quickly morphed into righteous indignation. Who did he think he was? Some carefree single dad? A bachelor? Did he think he’d just cut her loose and carry on as though their life together had never happened? Did he think that the next fourteen or so years, until Connor turned eighteen, needn’t include her?
It’d been two weeks since he’d received those papers and yet he hadn’t signed them. Was he going to? Or was he just going to date Amber while he stayed legally married to Isobel?
That evening, when Shea’s normal pickup time rolled around, she watched from the front porch swing as Noah’s black truck rolled up her driveway.
Anticipating this exact move, she waited for him.
But she bit back a curse to discover he must’ve anticipated her anticipation, for he brought protection.
Isobel offered Noah’s wife, Mina, a genuinely warm smile.
Then her gaze sliced to Noah. “Where is he?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“With friends.”
Isobel’s teeth clenched so tightly, her head started to ache. “Which friends?”
“He didn’t say.” Noah glanced at Mina, who looked slightly ill. “Did he say anything to you?”
Mina’s mouth opened. “He—”
“Welp—” Noah clapped his hands together, “—we better get going. Mina and I are taking the kids to dinner. Then we might stop off at the beach, try to soak up some of this sunshine before the weather starts to turn on us. Then we’ll be dropping off the little ones with their dad.”
Isobel kissed Connor’s chubby cheeks and weathered a storm of Maisie’s tears, cut short by a bribe from her uncle for a post-dinner ice cream cone, before waving goodbye from the porch as they drove away.
The anger and despair that’d ruled her emotions the past two weeks suddenly seemed a distant memory. She was calm, composed, and a newfound sense of certainty overrode all else.
Certainty of one thing—that it was time she had a little talk with her husband.
Ex-husband.
Possibly soon-to-be—whatever. She needed to find his devious ass.