Page 12 of Embracing the Change

I wasn’t even a blood or by-marriage member of their family, for goodness sakes!

It was the wrong time to ask that question. I was in the car with three bags packed to the gills in the trunk (yes, we were to be gone only a week, no, I did not think for a second that I’d overpacked), and there was a yacht waiting to whisk us on a family Caribbean cruise.

To be able to escape thinking about the disaster that awaited me with Jamie being on that damned boat, I looked to my phone.

When I saw what was on the screen, I frowned.

Roland.

He’d been bothering me for forever.

What he thought we had to speak about, since our children were all grown and had moved on to lives of their own, I did not know.

(By the way, my children and their partners had been invited on this trip. But, in the time allowed, Allegra and Darryn couldn’t make arrangements to adjust their schedules at the hospital, Nico and Felice were in Vermont teaching summer courses, and they couldn’t make it, and Valentina and Archie were sadly in Allegra and Darryn’s boat and hadn’t had enough notice to arrange time off for a vacation.)

But I’d lost track in the last couple of years of how many times Roland had approached me at events, sent texts, made calls and left voicemails, practically begging me to meet him for dinner, which, when that came to naught, turned to drinks, which became requests for lunch, and I knew how desperate he was getting when he asked me out for coffee.

Yes, I drank coffee.

Yes, I’d meet friends for coffee (though, when I did that, mostly what we consumed was tea, and not the liquid kind).

But I didn’t sit down for coffee with my ex-husband.

Roland, I’d painfully learned, had not been an inveterate flirt.

He’d been an incurable philanderer, and I knew there was no cure because I’d searched for one.

He, however, hadn’t. Even if he promised on more than one occasion that he would.

As the docks came into view, I was in such a mood, I did what I rarely did anymore.

I read his text.

I know you’re no longer seeing Oakley so CALL ME!

A chill spread across my skin because he knew.

Which meant everyone knew.

Only some of them suspected Jamie and I weren’t actually together together.

But now everyone knew we weren’t in any way together.

I cared very little about what people thought of me. I never had. Mother had taught me that from early on.

Oh, Mother was a stickler for the rules of society.

It was just that…she made them.

It was easy to follow the rules if you were the one who wrote them.

Why I cared that anyone knew I’d lost Jamie, I had no idea.

But I cared.

And Roland knowing?

I cared very, very much.

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