Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

I took a manila envelope out of my shoulder bag and slid it across his desk. “I had my lawyer draw these up. It’s a settlement. It lists all of the assets I brought to the marriage, plus a request for the equivalent cash value of my car, the equity I have in the house, my part of our savings - enough to get me started. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want anything from you that I didn’t earn. I’ve already signed them. I’d appreciate it if you signed them and we could get this over and done with.”

I’m pretty sure all Mike heard was “Blah, blah, blahdy blah, I’m going to make this easier for you.” But I didn’t say all that for him. I said it for me. If one of us was going to learn from this, I’m glad it was me.

I stood and offered Mike my hand. “Good-bye, Mike.

He pursed his lips and grasped my fingers. I had been holding that hand since I was nineteen years old. I knew every ridge, every scar. It was warm and solid in my hand. And it might as well have belonged to a stranger. I shook it. He smiled sadly.

“Good-bye.”

“Lacey,” he said as I walled out the door. “I’m dropping the lawsuit, and so will Beebee.

Beebee gasped. “But -”

“So will Beebee,” Mike said again, giving her a stern look. “A clean split, okay? I’ll tell Bill we want to do this as quickly as possible. No more fooling around.”

I smiled and nodded. “Thanks.”

I was pretty sure that was the closest thing I was going to get to an apology.

I walked out of the office with a clear conscience.

Somewhere in my heart a little door closed with a clean, quiet “snick.” I was through with Mike Terwilliger. And he had moved on to a woman who, while she obviously didn’t make him entirely happy, was still better suited to him than I was. Whether he stayed with her or left her within a year, I knew it wouldn’t affect me either way. Instead of waiting for them to collapse on themselves, I would be living my life. I may not have wished them well, but at least I wasn’t devoting precious energy to wishing they would spontaneously combust.

Surely that had to be a sign of emotional development.

As I hauled in the bags of groceries I’d bought in town I found another package from Maya on my doorstep. It contained very subdued, expensive-looking letterhead for Season’s Gratings. It listed both Maya and me as owner/operators. “Okay, final offer time,” Maya’s note read. “Full partnership.”

I’m not going to say it wasn’t tempting, especially when I saw what my share of the profits would be as a full partner in Maya’s company. But I’d finally made a clean break from Mike and Beebee. Even though it had some, let’s say, negative aftereffects, I couldn’t say the newsletter was a mistake. I’d taken a stand. The newsletter had shown people that I was more than my father’s daughter or my husband’s wife. I made my own choices, even if those choices had the potential to get me in a lot of trouble. And it had brought me to the lake, to Monroe. And even if things with Monroe had taken a turn toward the end, his friendship had helped me figure out what sort of person I wanted to be.

Still, somehow it seemed like a step backward to write more. The newsletters were my way of standing up for myself. As much as I wanted to help these other women, they needed to do the work for themselves. They needed to find their own way of striking back at their exes, or not, if they managed to cool down.

I opened my e-mail and composed a new message for Maya entitled, “You may find this hard to believe…

Mike had provided everything I had asked for, plus some family Christmas decorations and an heirloom rocking chair I’d forgotten in my flight from the house. He even agreed to replace my iPod, which had mysteriously been run over by Beebee’s car.

It was the nicest present he’d ever gotten me.

In return, I was giving Mike the skeleton of his boat, unscathed. He’d sent movers for it the week before I planned to move out of the cabin. It would have felt like a hostage exchange, if not for Wynnie Terwilliger ‘s glowering at me from the front seat of the moving truck. She made it a little less friendly than a hostage exchange.

Samantha felt bad for taking my retainer, but not taking my divorce case or my lawsuit to trial. It looked like Mike and I were going to be able to wrap everything up in mediation now that we’d agreed to start acting like adults. She didn’t feel bad enough to repay my retainer, but she was helping me move, so I guess it was a wash.

I had elected not to move into the Pheasant Hollow apartments, no matter how nice they were. Because the only unit available had recently been abandoned by Beebee and that would just be weird. So I was using my first month’s paycheck to put a deposit on a rental house Sam found. It was just a few blocks away from Emmett’s, close enough for the occasional visit, but well outside of smacking range.

I was toting the last of my bags out of the cabin when I ran into Monroe and a giant basket. We’d been carefully maneuvering around each other for weeks, afraid to broach the subject of our relationship, now that I was finally ready to call it one, or what my moving out would mean for us. Conversations were short, superficial, and unsatisfying.

I chuckled. “Funny, I didn’t order a big manly man bearing chocolate..

“Maya sent this for you,” he said, hefting the basket onto the porch railing.

Maya’s basket was full of various chocolate products and a specially printed card with avenging angels dancing around the border. “I still love you even if you don’t reconsider (PLEASE, PLEASE reconsider). Call me,” I read.

“Creepy and yet resourceful,” I said, handing it to him.

Monroe seemed pleased and surprised by the contents of the little card. “So you couldn’t pull the trigger, huh?”

“No, I don’t think it would have made my life mean more or make me feel better. I don’t think it would do any of those women any good. What worked for me probably isn’t going to work for most women. Someone told me I’d make a pretty decent novelist. So I think I’ll give that a try”

“No, you’re going to be a great novelist. I finished the book, and there are some rough spots,” he said. “But there’s some seriously scary stuff going on there. For a day or so, I was honestly a little leery of my bathtub because I was afraid the shower curtain would try to smother me.”

“Thanks,” I said, laughing. “Emmett hated that bit, too, when I told him about it. I’m still editing, and will probably start submitting it to agents in the next few months. But, in the meantime, I’ve been offered a position working for a pathologically disorganized antiques expert who can rat me out to our mother if I don’t reach my performance goals.”

Monroe watched Emmett huff and puff as he loaded my suitcase in the car. “I would say he wouldn’t do that, but I know I’d be wrong.”

Emmett draped himself dramatically against the frame of my car. “Honey, I told you, I don’t lift things,” he groaned. “Nice to see you again, Monroe.”

“Hi, Emmett, how are you?”

“Peachy freaking keen. So are you two finally going to kiss and make up or what?” Emmett huffed, with his usual amount of tact. “I don’t know if I can stand any more of this romantic tension. Or lifting. I can’t emphasize the lifting enough.”

“We’re working on it,” Monroe told him. When Emmett didn’t take this as a hint to leave, Monroe gave the front door a pointed look.

“Emmett just says things sometimes. We’re having him tested,” I said, adding, “I’ll get everybody out of here as quickly as possible.”