“I am not mad at him, but it makes a lot of sense now.”
“What does?”
“His decisions.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the choice he made to keep me away while he’s recovering is probably to do with this. So it’s actually really helpful to know.”
“Yes, probably you’re right. And men are so funny about being hurt. They don’t like their precious masculinity to be threatened.”
“I’m just gonna call and check in on him.”
“Okay. Sure. I’ll just be here. Filling macarons until the day I die.”
Shaking my head at her dramatics, I grabbed my phone and walked out back, taking my coffee with me before sitting on the small chair at the cafe table we had for breaks during good weather.
He was a lion with a thorn in his paw. That made so much more sense, and it lifted a weight off me. I didn’t like feeling as though we were drifting apart, but as I brought my phone up to my face so I could video chat with him, notification after notification popped up on my screen. Text messages from Clara, from Elles. Plus Google alerts about my husband and my business, and my stomach churned.
I hadn’t expected to ever see these. My business was rarely in the news. But I set it up a long time ago because I wanted to know when people were talking about us or when news outlets maybe mentioned us. Our social media accounts, up until recently, had been deader than a doornail. But when I married Taylor Savage, things changed. It was a slow trickle. The more I was photographed with him, the more the store was mentioned.
We didn’t get looky-loos or clout chasers coming into the shop, but it gave us more attention and more business. Usually, the alerts were little, like a mention of Taylor Savage and his wife, blah, blah, blah, or some such nonsense. But today, the first news article I selected was one I wished I could put away and never look at again. A picture of my husband with his knee brace on, a baseball cap covering his head, the brim pulled down low as he walked out of his attorney’s office with a manila folder in his hands.
The headline read,Trouble in Paradise for the Scottish Bad Boy and His Bride? Taylor Savage Visits High-Powered Divorce Attorney.
Now I was the one who was going to put her head in the toilet. I didn’t even know he was going anywhere today. There had been no indication that this was on the horizon. It had only been a few months, and I thought we were happy.
A text came through from Elles.
Elles: It’s going to be okay. I’m gonna kill him. But it’s going to be okay. This isn’t going to hurt the business. You know what they say? No publicity is bad publicity.
I typed back a quick message.
Me: What are you talking about?
But then she sent me the article.
Hockey’s Bad Boy Narrowly Escapes Gold Digger’s Plot.
I shouldn’t have read it. But I did. And it made me sick. It all came through in a blur. Pictures of us were analyzed for body language. They picked me apart, showing how hesitant I was to touch my husband. How I distanced myself from him at every event we went to and how successful my new business was now that my husband had given me his money. There was no mention of our agreement, just that Taylor confirmed he’d funded the expansion of our bakery, and then we got married on a whim. The thing that hurt the most was his quote. “No one expects something like this to last.”
I hadn’t expected it to last. Not until I fell in love with him. And now? Now I was the stupid one.
My phone rang. Taylor calling. Why even bother?
I answered, frantically swiping my tears away as I realized it was a video call. And there he was, wearing that fucking hat.
“Tink? Are you all right?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m sorry. This got out of hand.”
“I’ll say. You know, if you weren’t happy, you could have just told me. You didn’t have to go and draw up divorce papers.”
“You don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Yeah, I do. You’re done with me. You’re moving on. You’ve decided nothing lasts forever. Right? You didn’t expect this to last.”