Page 56 of Other Side Of Never
“Well then, who the fuck am I?”I quipped.
“Deflection will get you nowhere,” Wren advised.
“Spill, lady,” Noelle added.
A sigh the size of which might have instigated a tsunami on the other side of the planet escaped me.I didn’t like thinking about him, never mind talking about him, but perhaps it was time I began to purge him from my system.
I learned my lesson and learned it well when I was married to Gary.It did not bode well to isolate yourself or cut out your friends.
“My ex-husband isn’t a good man,” I began.“At first he was sweet and charming, but over the years it got to be where I couldn’t do anything right.”
“He was critical of you?”Wren asked softly.
I nodded.“I embarrassed him.”
“What the fuck?”Harley muttered, her brows crashing down over her eyes.
“He said I was too blunt, abrasive, and aggressive.”I shrugged.
“You mean direct, to-the-point, and assertive?”Shae challenged.
I snorted.“Yeah, that.”
“All the traits we admire in men,” Noelle surmised.
“In-fucking-deed,” Harley clipped.
“We’re getting off topic,” Noelle murmured.“Let her tell her story.”
“He began excluding me from his business social functions because I challenged the opinions of his co-workers.”
“What does he do?”Shae asked.
“Litigation lawyer.”
“When I found out he’d been taking his PA in my place, we had a knock-down, drag-out fight that ended with him kicking me out.”
Noelle gasped.
“My name wasn’t on anything other than my business and a tiny rental condo I bought before I met him.”
My mind drifted into the past.“It took three weeks for me to understand what he’d done to me all those years.He never contacted me or asked me to come home, so I found a tiny walk-up above this charming independent bookstore run by an incredibly grumpy silver fox straight out of one of your romance novels, Noelle.”
“Finally, this story is beginning to look up,” she teased.
I smiled.“That apartment became my haven.I pulled my things out of storage and set it up so nicely.And it was barely a hop, skip, and jump to Cocoa Loco.
“After another month of no contact, I filed for divorce.
“And that’s when the phone calls, emails, and text messages began.
“First, he was ‘checking on me.’Then, he wanted to reconcile.When I instructed my lawyer to send a letter insisting any and all correspondence go through our lawyers, he began to unravel.
“And when he found out I’d had contact with his children, he went ballistic.
“It got to the point where my hands shook every time my cell dinged with a notification.I silenced all alerts, blocked his messages, and sent his emails to spam.
“So, he began showing up at my door.”
