Her attorney strongly encouraged her to quickly and quietly file a formal divorce petition in the courts and let a process server deliver the application to Josh.
She knew her father would lose his mind if she zoomed ahead with a quickie divorce—which would be fine. A reason to do it, in fact.
Except that Josh would also losehismind, for other reasons, and she wasn’t that cowardly.
It was her fault they were in this position, so no. She had to explain the situation to him herself.
She really didn’t want to. It wouldn’t go well.
I’m so sorry.The apology she’d tried to give him as he stormed out of her life. That she would try to give him again today, whenever she finally made her way to Pine Harbour…and he wouldn’t accept.
She was going into the lion’s den and she knew it.
And she was doing it alone.
She’d reluctantly agreed to keep her mother posted, but considering the fact that it was Monica’s life that had been turned inside out, she didn’t understand why her mother was being so clingy about this situation. On the other hand, unnecessarily injured feelings was a Bianca Fischer classic.
So there didn’t need to be a logical explanation why her mother wanted hourly updates on this side trip.
“How is the weather there?”
She could picture her mother staring out the window of her Upper East Side apartment, out across Central Park, in the general direction of Middle of Nowhere, Ontario, Canada. “Fine,” she lied. No need to mention the wet flurries.
“I looked up Toronto weather. It’s snowing there.”
“I’m not in Toronto. And I learned how to drive in Switzerland, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“You spun out and crashed a Ferrari. Your father shouldn’t have—”
And that was enough of that conversation. “Gotta go, Mom. I’ll drive safely.”
She quashed the little flutter of inherited fear when the rental car agent repeated the pilot’s cheery warning of intermittent wet snow flurries, instead focusing on the promise the weather would clear shortly.
Good. While—one collision notwithstanding—shehadlearned to drive in Europe, so it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered gross wet white stuff on the road, she wasn’t looking forward to a white-knuckle drive through a foreign country.
Even if it did look a lot like the one she’d just departed in many ways.
But there were lots of small signals that she’d left behind the comfort of Southern California for a journey into the unknown—in more ways than one. The road signs were in different measurements. Where she’d expect the speed limit to be fifty miles an hour, it was eighty kilometres. And her phone coolly informed her she only had seventy-three of those kilometres to go before she would be face to face with the last person on earth who wanted to see her.
The bumper stickers and billboards all had a slightly different tone to them. She imagined them all saying,Josh doesn’t want to see youandYou should have a lawyer handle this.
When she stopped at a coffee shop, she did a double take when the woman at the counter asked her if she wanted a divorce cookie.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you want a frosted cookie?”
“No.” She cast a longing look at the treat. She didn’t deserve such goodness. Not yet. Maybe after she did the hard thing. “Thank you.”
The woman gave her a sympathetic smile. “Long drive today?”
“Something like that.”
“You aren’t from around here, are you?”
“How can you tell?”
That got her a shrug. “You’ve got that not-from-around-here vibe. First visit?”
