“Me?” Again with the feigning.
“Yeah. You’re sleeping with Julia Kate’s tennis instructor, and I want a divorce.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CRICKET
For months I had wanted to shout those words at Scott—I want a divorce!
But now they seemed so anticlimactic. Maybe it was because I’d had a lot of time to come to grips with the dissolution of our marriage. Or maybe because the grief and anger seemed farther away now. Or maybe my “give a damn” was busted and I wasn’t interested in fixing it.
Scott, however, played his part at hearing the uttering of those fated words. His eyebrows shot up, and he looked momentarily like a carp caught behind glass, all wide eyed and gulping. “What? A divorce?”
I lifted a nonchalant shoulder. “I know you think I’m a dumb blonde. But I’m not.”
“I don’t think you’re dumb, and you’re wrong. I . . . I . . . I really need a drink.” He held up a hand to, I’m assuming, Dak. I had sat facing the proliferation of neon beer signs and baseball memorabilia tripping over themselves along the wall so that Scott would be forced to look at the room behind me, specifically at where Griffin sat just over my right shoulder. We had decided he would sit far away enough so that he didn’t attract immediate attention when Scott first arrived.
“What can I get cha?” Dak called.
“A Mic ULTRA.”
“No go on that. Bud Light work? Or we have the Great Raft beers?”
“Reasonably Corrupt will do.” Scott folded his hands and looked at me in a way that told me I was about to be gaslighted. Or dressed down like a silly child.
“How appropriate,” I uttered under my breath.
He gave me a flat look. Dak appeared at my elbow with a can of the local beer and a clean glass. Setting it down, he gave me a look that made me feel a little calmer. “Anything else? Cricket?”
“No, I’m good.” A total lie, but what was a little white lie at this table?
If Scott had his part to play, I had mine. I needed to summon the hurt and anger knocking around somewhere in my heart so that I looked like the distraught, betrayed wife. “Look, let’s not even try to do this whole ‘Who, me?’ thing, Scott. We’re too old to play games. I know you’ve been cheating. You know I know you’ve been cheating. You even paid off my first investigator. So let’s just move to the ‘What now?’ portion of this meeting.”
Scott poured his beer, frowning at the foam. He took a sip and sighed. “I’m sorry, babe.”
Those words did what they should have done—they hit their mark. Suddenly my bravado caved. Maybe the hurt and anger weren’t so hard to find after all. Moisture gathered in my eyes as I stared at the three little hairs he’d missed shaving that morning. At the silver frost at his temple. At those familiar hands cupping the glass. At the gold band he still wore on that left hand, the band I had placed there reciting vows in front of the church. I fumbled for the folder with the photographic evidence, opening it, looking down at him holding Stephanie in his arms, so I could bat away the sadness and regain my composure.
His gaze zipped to the photos, and I saw the apology in his eyes, which flung another arrow at my heart. I had no doubt that Scott was sorry for hurting me. Somewhere under his horribleness was the man who had loved me once.
Surely.
“I have an attorney and have already filed for divorce,” I said, sliding the pictures so he could see that there were at least five of him and Stephanie in compromising situations.
“Who’s your attorney?”
“Jacqueline Morsett.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Would I use someone you knew? No. I need someone who hasn’t played golf with you, Scott.” I tapped the photos and lifted my eyebrows. “Besides, this is really all I need.”
“Cricket, we don’t have to—”
“Yeah, we do. There’s a reason why you did this to us. It’s a horrible thing to do to our family, Scott, but our marriage hasn’t been what it should have been for a long time. I’m not accepting blame. This affair is on you, but I accept that maybe you felt unloved. I know because I have felt much the same, like something has been missing for a while. So maybe we were on our way to being over anyway. It’s just, there are better ways to end a marriage than screwing someone else, you know?” A tear or two may have fallen.
He looked chagrined. “I know. I am very ashamed of myself.”
“But not enough to stop. You’re at her house all the time. Again, I’m not stupid.” But I felt that way at that moment. Like a very stupid woman who had been so focused on small things that didn’t matter—what font to use on name tags at Open House, what to put in Julia Kate’s Easter basket, if I should have Botox—when I should have seen that Scott and I were pulling away, a gulf ever-widening between us.
“Stephanie and I fell in love,” he said, looking into his beer. He couldn’t quite meet my eyes after he said that, could he?
I sighed, another arrow thumping into my heart. “So I guess that is all that needs to be said. No sense in pretending we’re even going to try to fix anything. It’s done. I haven’t told Julia Kate anything yet. I think it would be better coming from us both, so we need to choose a time soon to sit down with her. She’s at a difficult age, so she’s going to need lots of support. Maybe a therapist, too. At any rate, we are both going to have to be around to give her constant presence and ensure she feels loved.”
Ah. And there was the flicker. He wasn’t planning on being around. No, Scott was taking his size-2 ball lobber and heading to the crystal waters of the Caribbean. He’d made this mess and was going to leave me to clean it up while he relaxed in the sunshine. Just like my cat growing up. Jingles had loved to knock everything off the countertops and saunter away like a total ass.
I broke those arrows off and hurled them to the ground. Not so sad anymore.
“Sure,” he said.
“So I want to do this amicably. We can split everything we’ve built during our marriage, including the house Printemps occupies—I’ll pay you half the market value. Anything we came into the marriage with, we take. Like the lake house is my family’s place. That sort of thing. I want to be fair. I won’t allow the anger I feel for you to override my integrity. I expect the same of you.”
“Well, I need to get an attorney and let him advise me—”
I held up a finger. “That’s fine. But I would prefer that you make up for your indiscretion by helping me pursue an expedient divorce. Because you committed adultery, we don’t have to wait the standard six months, and though I know you stepped out on me, I also know that you would never treat me unfairly or leave your daughter without means.” Those words didn’t roll so easily off my tongue. Because that’s exactly what the bastard had planned to do.
“Of course not,” he said as he glanced away.