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“No. No, Scott.” Head shaking, I tried to interrupt. “That’s not how it––”
“Yeah,” he said, talking over me in an eerily calm voice. “It all makes perfect sense now. I’m flying back to New York alone.” He paused, ran a hand through his hair. “I want you out of this house by the time I return.”
He walked out, slammed the door shut with so much force it bounced back open.
A girl could dream. And sometimes those dreams turned into nightmares.
“Philanthropist, real estate magnate, naval officer, prankster…” The crowd overflowing the Central Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue chuckled along with the priest. “…Franklin Marshall Blackstone was many things, but the roles he most cherished were husband…”
There had to be five hundred people in the church and every one of those heads turned toward the first pew where Marjorie sat elegant as ever in a simple black suit, expression stoic, and her hands folded neatly on her lap, her son and daughter flanking her on both sides.
“…father, grandfather. Franklin Marshall Blackstone valued family above all else…”
The priest carried on while I stole glances at the back of Scott’s head and watched John comfort Devyn as she cried in his arms. A portrait of Frank looking majestic rested on an easel next to the shiny maple coffin covered in white flowers. The entire place was covered in white flowers come to think of it.
I loved the man smirking in the portrait more than anything, but I was also angry at him. Angry that he had a hand in destroying the relationship he’d basically forced me into. I wondered if he could hear me cursing him out as I sat amongst the people who were here to genuinely mourn him and the rest that had come to get their picture in the Times and the Post. That said a lot about Frank. Usually the people that read those two papers didn’t mix, but Frank mixed with everyone.
After Scott had left me standing, strike that, after he’d left me crumpled on the floor in tears, I’d texted Drake to come get the dogs. Then I packed all my belongings, every single item in that house, and dropped off the boxes at the FedEx in town.
I’d caught the next flight out without even dropping by Laurel’s place to say goodbye. I cried the entire two-leg trip. Caught an Uber. Cried the entire ride into town. When we hit traffic in the midtown tunnel, I was sure the driver was going to chuck me. I unlocked the front door to my apartment. Burst into tears. I was pretty sure I was all cried out. You never know, though.
Sensing eyes on him, Scott’s head turned a fraction. He scrutinized the mourners behind and to the right of him with cold calculating precision. He’d shaved and his hair was perfect again. He looked unfamiliar, like a stranger I’d once had a dream about.
Somehow, he found me in the crowd. Our eyes locked for a brief moment, and his expression turned downright arctic. I wasn’t sure which was worse his hot temper or his cold disdain.
“What the fuck’s with him? What’s with the serial-killer look he just gave me?” Miller whispered on my right.
It had taken me a good ten minutes of heavy breathing out on the sidewalk to gather the courage to walk up to them. Marjorie had given me a faint, sympathetic smile that gave me hope, but one eviscerating glance from Scott told me to find someplace else to sit. If I was ever considered family before, it was abundantly clear I was now persona non grata. Which was why I was sitting elsewhere, on the opposite side of the aisle from the family, next to Miller.
And earning speculative stares from everyone wondering why I wasn’t sitting with my husband.
“That was meant for me,” I whispered back. “I think he may have even blocked me.”
An elderly woman wearing a Chanel suit, a snow-white bob, and a look of superiority seated in the pew directly ahead of us shushed us.
Miller leaned into me. “Give him some time to cool off…he’ll get over it.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
I didn’t voice out loud my fear that when Scott finally did get around to speaking to me it would be to tell me he wanted a divorce.
I wanted to believe Miller, though. I was down, but I wasn’t out yet.
“What can I do?” Miller asked for the millionth time this week.
Picking my eyes up off the screen of my desktop computer, I stopped typing and aimed a flat stare at my one and only friend these days.
“Put a pillow over my face and smother me?”
Miller placed the hard copies of the contracts I’d asked for on my desk. “What about a few cocktails instead?”
The clock read 7:30 p.m. and I still hadn’t finished going through all the deals Frank had initiated before he’d passed away. My career was the only thing keeping me propped up, which was why I poured everything I had into it. I was fairly certain that, if I stopped moving, I would die of a broken heart. With one stone I’d lost the two men I loved most. With the exception of Mr. Smith.
