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A hiccup of silence. “Ash.”
“And Piers.” That grit returned to his tone.
“I didn’t expect… Wow. Can I call you guys back in two minutes?”
Piers nodded.
“Sure. Talk to you soon, Sylvee.” Ash ended the call. They sat in silence for a long, thudding heartbeat.
Then he pushed away from the table. “I can’t eat. Just hearing her voice. Fuck!”
Piers got up too. They dumped their food and just got out of the grub hall when Ash’s phone rang again.
He only glanced at the screen. “It’s her.” He put the device on speaker.
“Sylvee.”
“I’m sorry, guys. I was in mediation with Charlie.”
“Mediation? What does that mean?” Piers asked.
She sucked in an audible, shaky breath. “You guys…caught me at a bad time. Charlie and I are getting divorced.”
Their gazes locked. Eyes wide.
Fingers biting tighter around the phone, Ash shook his head. “I always knew Charlie was an idiot.”
* * * * *
Just hearing Ash and Piers’s voices flooded Sylvee with emotion. Exactly what she didn’t need right now.
For the last two years she and Charlie had been fighting over—well, everything—she’d been a knotted ball of emotions.
She sank to her plush leather office chair behind her big, modern desk, still cradling the phone. She sat here every day negotiating other people’s lives, but she hadn’t taken nearly enough time to fix her own.
For a moment, she stared blankly at her closed door. Right now, she couldn’t think of anything she’d like more than to talk to her old friends.
“Honey, it’s Ash. Talk to us.”
Oh no. Just when she thought she was finished crying over the loss of her marriage, and the long fight, tears stung her eyes at Ash’s crooning tone.
What she wouldn’t give for one of his or Piers’s big hugs right now. Those protective arms always enveloped her when she had a problem. Her friends propped her up at the worst of times and celebrated the best.
“Charlie and I are getting a divorce,” she repeated. “Things went south long ago, but we fought to keep the torch lit. Well, at least I did. Anyway, it’s not about pointing fingers. It’s over—all but this ugly fight we’re still having over dividing assets.”
“You guys are both lawyers. You didn’t have a prenup?”
“Oh, we do. But dividing the mutual assets has been another story.” She pushed out a sigh. “I’m sorry to dump all this on you. You caught me at a bad time.”
“Never apologize to us, Peachy.” Piers’s deep voice projected through the phone, wrapping her in a warm hug just like it did back in high school whenever she was having a bad day.
His nickname for her pulled a watery laugh from her. “Nobody’s called me that in years.”
The guys gave her the moniker because if asked how she was doing, she always responded with, “Peachy” whether she was having a high or low moment.
Somehow, over the years, she’d lost the habit of saying it.
Come to think of it, she’d lost a lot of herself.
