A smile flitted over Hannah’s lips. “Does ‘not yet’ translate into you are falling in love with him? And has he asked you to give up anything?”
“Yes to your first question and no to the second.”
“Then what’s your problem, Tonya?”
“When I fall in love, I don’t go halfway but all in, because I don’t know how to separate what’s goodtome from what’s goodforme. I’ve have a couple of relationships since my divorce, and each time I put up a wall to keep the men at a distance because I’m not emotionally equipped to love and lose. I lost my younger brother to a drug overdose, and it still haunts me to this day.”
“I’m sorry, Tonya. Again, we’re not that different because I, too, lost a brother. He was nine years old when he died from meningococcal meningitis. Has Gage said anything negative about you having your restaurant?”
“No.”
Hannah shook her head. “You keep telling me that Gage hasn’t tried to change you, so I don’t know why we’re having this conversation. I’m an attorney, not a therapist, but you have to learn to accept that people we love we will also lose. I loved and lost Robert even before he passed away. Once he confessed to sleeping with other women, I was devastated, and I actually thought about killing him but I knew he wasn’t worth me spending the rest of my life in prison. I moved out of our bedroom and never slept with him again. In my naïveté I’d believed I had a faithful husband, yet in twenty-nine years of marriage he’d slept with so many women that he couldn’t remember their names. And even before becoming a widow I’d lost both my parents.”
Tonya closed her eyes. “I must really sound selfish and gauche.”
Reaching over, she held Tonya’s hand. “No, you don’t. You’re only human. You have a fear of loving and losing, while I feared sleeping with a man because I was married to a philanderer. If Gage is anything like St. John, then you should have a wonderful relationship with him. I don’t know whether he’s told you, but his first marriage wasn’t something to write home about.”
“You know about that?”
Hannah smiled. “Yes. Don’t forget that even though I was a DuPont, I’m also a Baptiste and a Toussaint because I’m married to St. John, which means I’m privy to family secrets. Should I assume Gage told you about his ex?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Then he’s also familiar with loving and losing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe some of your anxiety is coming from how quickly you’re falling for him.”
Tonya forced a tight smile. Again she wondered if she was that transparent. “You’re right.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Hannah crooned as if she had discovered a map leading to buried treasure. “I hadn’t realized I’d fallen in love with St. John when we were in school because we were dating other people. But when I returned for the reunion last year and found out he was single, I invited him to DuPont House with the excuse that we had to catch up on what had been going on in our lives.”
“Did he come?”
“Not at first. He took me out to dinner, and after that it was all she wrote. I wasn’t back two weeks when I realized I wanted to sleep with him, and by the time you guys came down we’d been screwing like rabbits.” Hannah counted on her fingers. “And five months later we were married. I never could’ve imagined being this happy, and it was all because I was willing to risk falling in love again. My grandmamma used to say, ‘opportunity is like a baldheaded man; you have to catch it when it’s coming towards you or your hand will slip off and it’s gone forever.’ In other words, Tonya, you’re being given the opportunity to start over in a new place with a business you’ve always wanted, and with a new man who respects you for you. Gage has a reputation of being into himself, and if he’s willing to open up and share himself, then you’d be a fool not to accept him. Remember, we all have an expiration date, and none of us know when that is, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to enjoy what time I have left on this earth.”
Tonya digested everything Hannah said and knew she was right. She had spent the past sixteen, almost seventeen, years living in the past because the man she had married and vowed to love in the good times and bad times had turned into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
She nodded. “I’m glad we had this talk. And as my grandmamma used to say, ‘tomorrow isn’t promised,’ so I’m going to make the best of what life is offering me. None of us knew that day when we went to Wakefield Hamilton that it would be our last day. And their offering us a severance package could not soften the shock of suddenly finding ourselves unemployed.”
“Remember I needed a pep talk when I went back to clean out my apartment and told you guys that I wasn’t marrying St. John.”
Tonya grimaced. “Please don’t remind me of what we said to you, because I don’t know where that came from.”
“You said what needed to be said, other than knocking my hard head up against a wall. I’d been so hung up on Robert cheating on me that I didn’t want to hear what St. John had to say about why he’d cheated on his wife. Once he told me, I couldn’t stop crying, because he’d stayed in a marriage where his wife wouldn’t let him touch her because her uncle had sexually abused her when she was a child.”
“Oh, no!” Tonya gasped.
Hannah nodded. “So we’re not alone when it comes to screwed-up marriages.”
“How right you are, because if Jasmine’s ex had done to me what he did to her, I know I would be serving time right now. I would’ve cut that SOB so low he would have to walk on his knees to get around.”
Pressing a hand to her chest, Hannah laughed until tears rolled down her face. “Same here, but I would’ve waited for him to go to sleep and give him a Lorena Bobbitt and then tossed his junk down the garbage disposal.”
It was Tonya’s turn to laugh hysterically, although what Jasmine’s husband did to her was no laughing matter. “How dare he get another woman pregnant and then cheat his wife out of becoming a mother when he underwent a vasectomy.”
“That’s why I gave her the advice she needed to get what she deserved when going through her divorce,” Hannah said. “I couldn’t believe it when she told me everything he’d done to her. At first I wasn’t going to help her, but when she said she suspected her attorney was being paid by her ex to screw her out of everything she’d worked for, I knew I had to help her.”
“Was he working for the other side?”
“Damn straight he was. I called and told him I was going to report him to the bar for violating his ethics if he didn’t refund her retainer. It took exactly twenty-four hours for him to messenger a bank check to her. I referred her to another attorney, and she got what she wanted.”
