“I appreciate your concern. But I know exactly what I’m doing.”
She nods, her lips twisting like she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek.
“Hallie is?—”
“Halliday,” I correct. No one calls her Hallie since she lost Jenny. No one except me. Not even her own parents.
Lavinia’s eyes snap to mine, and she purses her lips. “Halliday is twenty years younger than you.”
“I know how old she is.” I take another sip of my brandy, wishing I’d poured a larger glass.
“As your friend, I want to make sure you’ve thought about this. She might want children.”
“I understand that. She’ll be an incredible mom.”
Lavinia’s brows shoot up her forehead for the second time since she walked into my office.
“You… That’s something you want to do again?”
“That’s something Hallie and I will decide together.” I place my now empty glass down onto the low table between us.
“I see. I suppose I never saw you getting married again. Not after the way your marriage to Elaina started. I thought you were put off for life.” She presses her lips together like she’s said too much.
“Lavinia.” I lean forward over my knees, holding my hands out. “I know you were Elaina’s friend all those years. And I know you were there when it all started. But you were also there all those years we were married, and when we had our children. Maybe neither of us chose the other. Our parents made that choice for us. But I wouldn’t change it. I have Sullivan and Sinclair. And for as long as he was here, I also had?—”
“She cheated on you,” she hisses, her eyes flashing with an uncharacteristic hate that I’ve never seen in her before.
“She did.”
“She never gave up on the man who broke her all those years ago. She had you. She got to marryyou. And yet she still talked about him. Wondering what he was doing. Whether he’d met someone else. Even after I lost Jared.” She presses a hand to her lips and blinks rapidly at the mention of her late husband. “Even after I lost him, she still couldn’t appreciate what she had. Couldn’t see from my loss just how lucky she was.”
“It’s all in the past.”
She shakes her head, ignoring me. “Such a selfish woman. She never deserved you. I had to listen to her pine after him like a puppy,” she spits.
I wait for the betrayal to hit me like it used to, carving itself into my gut like this deep, ugly cancer. But nothing comes. No matter what happened, it’s all done now. I refuse to take any lingering resentments forward into my life with Hallie. Yes, I felt betrayed at what Elaina did. But I wasn’t heartbroken. Because she never had all of my heart, just like I never had hers.
“She made her choices, Lavinia.”
She sniffs and looks at me with glassy eyes.
“She did. She could easily have said no if she’d wanted to. But I knew for certain that she didn’t deserve you the minute she told me she’d replied to his letter.”
I sigh. “Elaina wrote to him first.”
I damn well remember that much. How when I found the box of letters that Elaina had hidden, the earliest dated one was from him, Neil, thanking her for reaching out and tracking him down online. That’s what hurt the most when I found them. That she’d been the one to initiate contact.
“No, she didn’t.” Lavinia picks up her glass and drains what little is left inside it. “I was so fed up listening to her that I found him online and messaged him, pretending to be her. I thought if he replied that it would be a wakeup call and make her come to her senses. That she would do the right thing. That she might finally look at you the way you deserved.”
My heart thuds in my chest as I stare at her.
“You did what?”
Lavinia looks at me, her eyes brightening like I’m actually about to thank her. Tell her she was so smart, and I’m grateful.
She’s damn well deluded.
“I gave her an opportunity. One to prove that she deserved you. And she failed. She wrote back to him and started up their filthy little affair behind your back. I told her she had to tell you, and she promised she would. I volunteered for a charity mission overseas because I couldn’t bear to watch as she made a fool of you every day.”
