“Quit your bellyaching.” Carina got to her feet. “Come on. We need to rehydrate.” She made a frowny face. “And I need something to eat.”
Whitney lifted her hair, where it stuck in damp clumps to her neck, and rolled her mat as she got up. “I need a shower.” She glanced around the room. “I was really hoping Kally would be here.”
“She probably knew The Stretchinator was teaching today,” Olivia said. “I’ll look up the schedules online. I say we skip when she’s teaching.”
“Yeah, I’m in it more for the tone and balance than the fat burn. That was brutal,” Whitney agreed.
“You two are whiners. Come on.” Carina marched out the door and Whitney jogged to catch up.
They dumped their mats in their cars and walked down to the coffee shop, which happened to have a special this morning. One-dollar mimosas.
“Oh girl, I’m totally getting the mimosa and a cranberry orange muffin. The one with all the icing on it,” Carina said.
Whitney got up and grabbed water from the cooler for all three of them. “Not until we rehydrate.”
“You’re a party pooper,” Carina said, then guzzled the water. “Great. Now I don’t even want a mimosa. My belly is full of water.”
They placed their order and sat at one of the tables out front.
Whitney put her forearms on the table. “The whole disaster-planning because of the viral video has me thinking seriously about figuring out a way to provide premarital services. We could offer monthly talks with specialists. People need to havecoping mechanisms for the hard times. We see it all the time. Hard feelings, or going too far to go back, are not reasons to end a marriage. A simple apology can go a long way.”
“You’re not saying anything I don’t already know by the stats I’m tracking. It’s true. Some of them are boneheaded reasons to divorce.” Carina shook her head. “What of it, though? It’s our job. We are giving them the service they’re asking for.”
“Yeah, but what if we really could service both sides?”
“How would that even work?” Carina said.
Whitney walked through her plan. The details for a strategy, with one on-ramp and multiple points of exit. Bringing everyone in on one path, through discovery, mitigation, or counseling, and then either to couple’s therapy or down the divorce path. “It’s all marriage-focused. Why not serve them from one gatekeeper? We could be sure those rocky marriages do the hard work and the prenups before they go off the deep end.”
“So you’d have a a certified group of counselors specifically trained in premarital and post-divorce counseling?” Olivia leaned forward with interest. “That makes sense. I really like it.”
“We could share Carina’s statistics highlighting failure points of marriages. There is more that could be done outside of our framework of the law.” Whitney looked to the two she trusted most. “Am I crazy?”
“No,” Olivia said, “Learning from others’ mistakes is supposed to help us grow and live a better life, right? This would offer an alternative to a friend’s speculation over margaritas at a reasonable price that people could afford.”
“I don’t have anything against a margarita,” Carina said.
“I’m not saying we need to do anything now,” Whitney continued, “but if we could kind of think about it. Come up with a long-term strategy. How we might separate the duties and even where we’d house it. We know there’s no room, and probably not an appetite for it at Barron, Winters & Wall.”
“That’s clear from Grant’s little hissy fit the other day,” Carina said. “Plus, it would probably need to be separate for the sake of privacy, and not blurring any legal lines, but there’s value there.”
“We’d have to be really careful that there was no conflict of interest,” Whitney said. “I think it’s a suitable business model for us to consider for the long-term. I’d love to brainstorm this all the way through lunch, but I have to go.”
“She has a date,” Carina said to Olivia. “A date-date, with the handsome painter.”
“The artist,” Olivia corrected her, then turned to Whitney. “What are y’all doing?”
Whitney felt her cheeks flush. “He’s taking me to Maymont.”
“It’s so gorgeous there,” said Olivia. “The gardens, or the mansion?”
Her mouth dropped open. “I really don’t know. I didn’t ask for any specifics.”
“Doesn’t even matter. It’s all gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, the arboretum, even a petting zoo. The little otters in the nature center are so adorable. You know, otters mate for life. Maybe we could have little otters as part of our new logo if we break off from the firm.”
“No.” Carina shook her head. “We aren’t having animals on our logo. No, ma’am.”
Whitney stood. “I’m with Carina on no cutesy little animal logos. Maybe my new artist friend could whip something up for us.” She wiggled her shoulder. “I’m off to have a picnic at Maymont.”
