Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper
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ate.
“Still in the city. Currently headed toward Barney’s.”
“You’re supposed to be back in D.C.”
“I decided to stay the night.”
“And I had planned to take you out on the town!”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t sound it.”
There was a smile in Ellen’s voice, so Addy didn’t bother to deny it. As grateful as she was for her friend’s consideration, she wasn’t sorry she’d missed the outing. Ellen’s idea of cheering her up would be a night spent in some currently hip spot where thirty-somethings with their own set of divorce papers were trying to anesthetize reality with Cosmopolitans. “I’m still in training wheels on the social scene, Ellen. Rusty and not interested.”
“Yeah, the unapproachable signs are hard to miss. Poor Teddy’s been asking me for detour instructions again.”
A young, fast-track attorney at Owings, Blake, Teddy Simpson had made no secret of his interest. He’d been consulting Ellen on a regular basis for tips on getting Addy to go out with him.
But the thought of entering the dating scene again all but gave her hives.
“Let me guess. You’re going in search of a little black dress for a night out in the city.”
“Actually, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“Whoo-hoo! Is there a man etched into this anywhere?”
“No. I thought I’d fix myself up, get a table in the Oak Bar and spend the evening with a book.”
“Excellent social outing,” Ellen said with a frown in her voice.
“Practicing for the future.”
“When you decide to stop living like a nun.”
Addy smiled. Ellen had been on her case for months. Get back out there. Find someone else, and you’ll forget all about Mark.
But Addy didn’t think it was possible to forget eleven years of marriage, and especially not one that had ended as hers had. If anything, it had run a stake through her heart and anchored her to a single spot of relative safety from which she was reluctant to move.
“Okay, one more night of this solo stuff, and you’re mine,” Ellen conceded. “You’re thirty-three, not eighty-three, and I can’t in good conscience stand by and let every social skill you ever had atrophy. Tomorrow night. We’ll paint Georgetown red.”
“I can hardly wait,” Addy said.
“Just finish the book tonight. You won’t need it for a while.”
The line clicked off with Ellen’s usual abruptness.
Addy put the cell phone back in her purse, turned the corner to the front entrance of Barney’s. The customers here all looked as though they took their Vogue subscriptions seriously. Lots of black, chunky heels, skin that had been exfoliated and moisturized into a blemish-free existence. She took the escalator to the third floor, bought a too-short black dress and a pair of too-high heels to go with it, both of which dealt a near death blow to her AmEx.
On the way back to the hotel, she passed an antique store, caught a glimpse of herself in the wavy glass of an old framed mirror. She stopped, stared for a moment, wondered how she could have thought a new dress and shoes could fix the tear inside her. Allow her to look in the mirror and see a woman capable of getting past her husband’s betrayal. The truth? There wasn’t a black dress in Manhattan that could get her past that.
Nothing she had believed about herself fit anymore. If her life had once been a puzzle whose pieces had long been put in place, it had all been ripped apart the morning she found Mark in bed with his pregnant lover. Since then, she’d been trying to put those pieces back together, but nothing fit where it had once been. Her vision of herself as a desirable woman, her once-certain career goals.
An older man in a red bow tie stepped to the window, raised an eyebrow in inquiry. She lifted a hand and walked on.
Back in her room, she took a long bath. Up to her neck in bubbles, fatigue hit her in a wave, sent off little alarms along her nerve endings. People weren’t supposed to be this tired at thirty-three, were they? This kind of tired was the stop sign at the end of the road for lawyers who’d been practicing for thirty years. The kind that made them start thinking about retirement and second homes in south Florida.
Maybe she just needed a vacation. Some downtime. Owings, Blake expected a lot from its attorneys. Sixty to seventy hours a week was standard unless they had a big case going, and then it was whatever it took to get the job done. Past that, Addy shied from taking apart her own question. Examining the nuts and bolts of it.
At some point in her marriage, she had developed a fairly keen ability to let things she didn’t know how to fix merely coast along as they were. The fact, for example, that somewhere along the way, she and Mark had begun to feel like two roommates sharing the same home. “Morning, honey,” on the way out the door to work. “Night,” before they went to bed. And very little else in between.
Every marriage had its problems. Hers had certainly been no exception. And yes, she would take full credit for sinking herself so deeply into work these past couple of years that she had ignored the warning signs. Late nights. Saturdays at the office.
But the simple truth was that she had trusted her husband. Had married him thinking he was a man who would take his vows as seriously as she did. And this was the part she couldn’t get past. That she could have been so wrong.
When she’d been eight or nine years old, she’d gone on a camping trip with her church youth group. There had been a heavy rain on the first night, and early the next morning she had waded out into the middle of the river that flowed near where they had pitched their tents. The water had risen quickly, covering the rocks she had used as a path coming out. No one else had been up yet, and she stood in the middle of the once placid river, transfixed with fear. She had known that just below the surface were rocks that would lead her back to shore. But some might have already grown too slick. And what if she slipped and fell into the current? Was she strong enough to swim back?
She had finally forced herself to move, found her way to shore before anyone realized she was missing.
In these past six months, she hadn’t been able to make herself pick a path back to safety. She just kept standing in the same spot while the water rose around her.
The bath was cool now. She stood, reached for one of the big white towels hanging beside the tub. Maybe she should just order room service and go to bed. She thought of Mark, knowing he wasn’t alone tonight, this first night of their divorce. He had started a new life. With another woman and a baby boy, now six weeks old. Addy had been made aware of the birth after running into a mutual friend of theirs in the grocery store, the information imparted with a kind of I-hate-to-tell-you-this-but reservation, beneath which was hidden an almost malicious glee to be the first to reveal the news.
One thing was true about divorce. It showed a person who her friends were. And weren’t.
Suddenly, Addy was sick of rehashing the same stuff she’d been rehashing for six months. She would put on the new dress and go downstairs. Ellen was right. She was spending way too much time alone with her own thoughts. At least in a room full of people, there was the odd chance of drowning them out.
CHAPTER TWO
THE OAK BAR, the Plaza Hotel’s wood-paneled watering hole, had a gracious charm that allowed even out-of-towners to feel welcome. It was the kind of place where people didn’t mind double-digit pricing for their highballs. Heavy, dark-wood tables filled the room, surrounded by brown leather chairs, invitingly worn.
In town for a medical conference, Culley Rutherford had agreed to join three of his buddies here in a salute to old times. They were drinking scotch. He was nursing fancy-label bottled water.