Chapter Five
Friday arrived way too fast for Gayle’s nerves. Even after she’d added a massage to the facial the evening before, even after ninety minutes in the hot yoga room and a day spent on the road visiting some of her more robust retailers—once one of her favorite things about her job—she was a frazzled, jumpy mess. She couldn’t choke down her lunch but made sure to drink plenty of water during the day. She was no rookie when it came to imbibing booze and anticipated tonight would mean martinis—real ones, like, with gin—which meant her body needed to be prepared for the onslaught.
At three-thirty, she shut her laptop and sat for a few minutes, using her therapy-taught meditation methods to gather herself. It was ridiculous, all this worry. What in the hell did she have to lose, anyway? She was going out with a friend for a few drinks and some tipsy dancing with strangers. No biggie.
A chill shot down her spine. She placed her hands on the glass desktop beside her computer, staring at her recently painted fingernails—red, her signature color for such things—and made a serious attempt not to freak all the way out. She had no business doing any of this. She was a thirty-six-year-old widow, well past her prime.
No, this wasn’t about impressing anyone. This was about having fun. And she deserved to have some fun. Evelyn was right about that, as she usually was. Gayle smiled at the thought of her friend, who’d begun her career in this very company not too long ago, now married to and working alongside the owner of one of the most successful breweries in Michigan—hell, in the entire Midwest these days—with a beautiful little baby girl. Evelyn and Austin had been steadfast friends during the early, woozy days around the funeral and after. She was lucky to have them.
She was lucky.
Right.
Gayle curled her fingers into her palms and pressed both fists into the cold glass.
Stop it. Stop it now, Gayle Jackson Connolly. You have more money than some entire cities. You can go anywhere, do anything you want. If you wanted to quit this job today, you could walk away and not give it a half a second’s thought. There are people within half a mile of you right now who are hungry, desperate to pay rent, utilities, medical bills. Focus on helping them, not on how hard it is to breathe every time you remember your husband is dead.
She did help, of course. She donated the value of her entire salary every month to several charities that focused their efforts on homeless families, abused women and hungry kids. She was even on the board of a couple of those charities and had begun to dutifully attend boring meetings in the name of paying some of the wealth of her life back to the universe, somehow.
And all this on top of the Connolly Foundation she’d set up, thinking she’d turn herself into a Melinda Gates-style widow, traveling around, writing, talking, throwing money at starving children.
All of it was intended to help others, but also herself—to provide a suitable distraction for the God-awful reality of her loneliness, the mountain of her grief, the canyon of her despair. It had, to some extent, but of course, now here she was doing the eight-to-six workday drudge again, even though she didn’t have to.
She sighed and rose slowly, feeling her knees and hips release the tension she’d balled herself into in the last few minutes. A quick glance at her tablet revealed the date. Her well-trained mind rolled through the ongoing countdown she’d been living with since the accident. She was coming up on three years. Great.
She picked up her tablet, stuffed it into her bag and headed for the closed door.
“Have a nice weekend, Gayle,” her admin said with a wide smile.
Gayle blinked at her, suddenly unable to remember the woman’s name. Then it hit her. “Thanks, Susan. You too.” She shook her head at herself all the way to the flight of metal stairs down to the main lobby. She’d fired the first two admins. They’d been too slow to keep up with her. No wonder these people are terrified of me. Evil Queen indeed.
She smiled vaguely at all the people wishing her a nice weekend on her way to the building’s entrance, accepting she hardly knew any of them. At least outside their typical contexts—in sales meetings or in one-on-one rah-rah get-your-ass-in-gear coaching sessions. She shouldered her way out of the air-conditioned interior into the oppressive heat of a late-July afternoon, her mind scrolling through the various excuses she’d give Evelyn. There was no way in this universe or the next two she’d be going out tonight. It was just too ridiculous to consider.
She made it all the way home, only half aware that part of her had been looking forward to tonight’s little adventure.
“Home,” she called out, putting her bag down and her keys and watch in the bowl on the landing space in her mother’s kitchen. She leafed through the stack of mail, then poured herself a huge glass of water, furious that her pulse kept racing and her heartbeat pounded in her ears.
“Hey, honey.” Her mother, a well-preserved seventy-year-old, paused to kiss her cheek briefly in her act of flipping on the kettle for more tea.
“How’s the new book coming?” Gayle leaned against the sink and studied the woman who stood staring out of the window, in her writing zone, as Gayle well knew by now.
“What? Oh, pretty well, I think. How was your day?”
“Fine, thanks.” They stood in comfortable silence until the kettle sang out. Her mother poured the water over a fresh chamomile tea bag, smiled in Gayle’s general direction and wandered back toward her office.
Realizing any sort of distracting conversation with her mother would be futile right now, Gayle glanced at the hot yoga schedule she’d stuck on the cluttered fridge front and decided this would be a double day. She’d gone to the six a.m., but she needed something more to calm her, to get her to the hour she had to get primped and pretty and go out with her friend. She ran up the stairs to the room she’d re-inhabited in the last three years, changed into another of her wildly expensive sports bras and shorts outfits, pulled a sundress over them and headed back downstairs.
As focused as she was on her goal—getting out of the door and across town for the four-thirty practice time—she nearly plowed right over the woman standing at the foot of the stairs, hands on her hips, her faded blue eyes narrowed. “Jesus, Mom, what the hell?” Gayle stepped to the side, her mind already calculating she’d be lucky to make it in time, if she were already in the car and pointed toward the studio.
“I’ve made a decision about something,” Trudie Jackson declared.
“Oh? Can it wait a bit? I want to get to—”
Her mother held up a long-fingered hand. Gayle swallowed a sigh. Living here for the last few years had been a life-saving move, but there were plenty of times her knee-jerk, adolescent responses to her mother burst out of her.
“This is important, Gayle. Sit.”
“I thought you were writing.” She heard the whine in her voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
“I am, but it can wait.” Gayle’s mother was a millionaire in her own right, a multiple New York Times best-selling author of feel-good, sexy romances for the last twenty-plus years. She wrote under two different pseudonyms, boasted an army of loyal, rabid fans and had been featured repeatedly on national TV as the world’s oldest living erotic romance author. Her latest claim to fame was that one of her books would be turned into a premiere cable series within the next two years.
She was a five-foot-nothing whirlwind of energy, bustle and charm and while a single mother working two waitressing jobs, had raised Gayle, making sure her girl had the best clothes, healthiest food and all the normal, teenaged fun her money could buy. When she’d finally found an agent while Gayle had been busy drinking her way through college, she’d burst onto the romance scene and never looked back. Gayle was proud of her, but found it ironically hilarious that Trudie was the most cynical woman about men and love she’d ever encountered.
“Okay.” She sat, tapping her fingertips on the kitchen table. Trudie stared at them. Gayle stopped tapping and put her hands in her lap, biting back the sharp rebuke.
“You need to move out,” her mother said, with a typical bluntness but using words that shocked Gayle to her core. She must have looked as startled as she felt, because her mother reached over and grabbed her hands, clenching them tight inside her own. “Honey, I love you but this…” She let go and waved her arms around, indicating the cute but slightly cramped Cape Cod-style home Gayle had grown up in, left and come back to heal. “This isn’t good for you anymore. You need to get out, learn to live on your own again. Find…find some fun.”
“Mom,” Gayle said, her voice breaking in spite of her efforts to remain calm. “What are you… I’m not going to date, if that’s what you’re talking about.”
“Partly, yes, but mostly I mean you need to rejoin the land of the living. It’s time, honey.”
Tears poured out of Gayle’s eyes with no warning. “I think I can decide when that time comes, Mom.” She sniffled and swiped at her cheeks.
“No, I don’t think you can.” Trudie sat back and crossed her arms.
“Jesus, why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
“I am,” her mother replied. “And I’m sorry to have to be this person, but you’re working again, which is great, so it’s time you moved out, got your own place and got on with your life.”
“Okay. Your opinion is noted.” Gayle rose, unable to say anything else. “I’m going to yoga.”
“Gayle, honey, wait.”
She hesitated at the door out to the garage and squeezed her eyes shut, mentally yelling and cursing at Ethan for something like the zillionth time for getting on that fucking private jet in the first place. Her mother’s hand rested on her shoulder, a gesture which sent her spiraling back almost three years to when she’d spend hours staring into the air around her, willing the whole thing to be nothing but a vivid nightmare. Trudie would sit with her in silence as long as Gayle needed, seeming to sense her desire for a bit of peace amidst all the babble—the arrangements, the double whammy of memorial services in Cali and Michigan, the never-ending parade of sympathetic faces, the tears. Sometimes she’d simply touch Gayle on the shoulder, just like she was doing now, as if to anchor her to the earth.
“I get it, Mom. But I…I need to get to my yoga class.” She shrugged Trudie’s hand off her and barely made it in time for the breathing exercise and Helen’s raised eyebrow at her double practice for the day.
As she lay in her final savasana, sweat pouring off her, her entire body a giant, grateful wet noodle and her mind blissfully blank, she realized her mother was right. As usual. She should move out and get on with her life again. She rolled to her side and closed her eyes at the realization she was, indeed, moving on, but without the man who’d spent the better part of two years convincing her to love him back, only to lose him seven years into their marriage. And to what? To convenience. It was more ‘convenient’ for him to travel by private jet from California to Florida so he could meet with the latest distributorship he was buying. It was more ‘convenient’ to combine it with a trip to Disney.
She heard a strange noise and realized it was coming from her, so she clapped her hand over her mouth and attempted to shove the inevitable, encroaching memory dump out of her head. At least the part of it she could cope with thinking about. Sadly, there was still some of the day’s horror she still refused to acknowledge. Sometimes she believed she never would.
“Gayle?” Helen’s soft voice and cool hand on her shoulder made her flinch, then roll onto her stomach so she could get up from the soaking wet towel. “You all right?”
“No,” she said in a tight whisper. “But that’s not your fault.” She grabbed her mat, towel and drained water bottle and stumbled through the now-empty room out into the cool back hallway, avoiding the sympathy stares of everyone around her. Jesus, would there ever come a day she could get through and not turn into a sodden, weepy mess? Even she was getting sick of herself. And her mother was too, since she was prepared to kick Gayle out on the streets.
She rolled her eyes at her inner hyperbole. She could buy any piece of property in this town she wanted. Resolved, but with the sort of knee-jerk reaction she knew she might regret down the road, she pulled out her phone and found a familiar name. After tugging her sundress down over her damp skin, she grabbed her stuff and put the phone to her ear. “Yo, Hettinger, you busy?”
“Never for a pretty lady,” the man’s deep voice replied. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to buy something downtown…a loft or something. I know you live down there so…”
“Well, we’re about to move once the house renovation from hell gets done. But not too far away. And Kayla’s taking over the loft.”
“Is there anything else for sale right now?”
“I’ll find something for you. What do you want to spend?”
“I…don’t care. But I need something fast. One bedroom is fine, two is preferred. A view of something other than the top of a building would be ideal.”
“I think I know just the place. A few buildings down from mine. One of my buddies owns a couple and his tenants are about to leave.”
“I don’t want to rent it.”
“I know. I’ll tell him. He’ll sell…when I tell him to.”
“You have that kind of power, now, eh, big stuff?”
“Yeah, I guess I kind of do. Listen, Gayle, I heard you were working again, for TriCities. I think that’s great.”
“Yes, I am and thanks.” She sat in the hot car and gnawed at her lower lip.
“So this place I’m thinking of will probably run you at least eight hundred…”
“Thousand?” She gulped, still unable to grasp the breadth and depth of her new-found, wholly unwanted wealth.
“Yeah. That okay?”
She sucked in a long breath, blew it out and reminded herself she could probably buy the whole building he was talking about and still have plenty of money to live on for the rest of her natural life. Ethan had been wealthy when she’d met him and had run the San Francisco-based distributorship himself mainly because it was a business he truly enjoyed, not because he needed a salary. His grandfather had been one of the original real estate barons of the West Coast and his father had grown the business so well, Ethan had been born with a dozen silver spoons. But he’d been made to work for his father from the time he was sixteen—he’d done maintenance on buildings, endless hours of yardwork, then graduated to the accounting side, and rental management while he was in college.
When Grant Connolly had jumped into the beer and wine distribution business with a partner, his son Ethan had found his calling. He’d taken over, after working his way up through the ranks in a way not dissimilar to Gayle’s—merchandising, sales, brand management. When she’d started working for his company, he’d been CEO for over fifteen years and remained a perpetual member of ‘California’s ‘most desired bachelors’ club. Until he had laid eyes on her, of course.
After their Hawaii wedding, he’d set up a trust in her name, plus one other, over the course of their life together, and had declared her his sole heir in the unlikely event of his early death. It had shocked his parents, but they’d loved their son, and her, eventually, so they’d not contested anything.
She was worth something in the neighborhood of forty-eight million bucks. A mind-numbing sum of money managed by a slew of smart people she met with quarterly to review how they were growing her fortune, while she played a direct role in the management of the charitable foundation. A different set of people were in charge of her daily monetary requirements, including paying credit card bills she never saw.
Her married life to Ethan had been cushy in the extreme. They’d worked side-by-side at the distribution company, but he was prone to whisking her off to France or the Bahamas on a moment’s notice—although he always made sure to coordinate it with her assistant and her travel schedule. They’d had a beautiful home overlooking the ocean, two cars—each—plus someone to clean and even cook for them if they wanted it. Her walk-in closet next to her beautiful bathroom had been a work of art, kept filled with all manner of clothing, shoes and bags. And Ethan had loved nothing more than buying her jewelry. She’d gotten rid of most of it, only hanging on to pieces that didn’t hurt her soul when she looked at them.
But while all of it had seemed wonderful, beyond anyone’s wildest fantasy of a fairy tale, she’d rejected it at first. She hadn’t believed the man had wanted her for anything more than sex—something they’d had a lot, and early on in their relationship. At times, lying wide awake late at night and missing him so much she could barely think straight, she would remind herself of the fact she had cost them at least three years of marital happiness with her foolish stubbornness.
It hit her again now, hard, and right between her eyes, making her sway in her seat. “Yes, Trent. It’s fine. Let me know when I can see it.”
“You got it, gorgeous.” Silence descended between them while Gayle tried not to burst into tears—again. “Anything else I can do? Hey, do you want to come up to the lake house sometime? We’re going up—”
“Nothing more for now, thanks,” she interrupted him, unwilling to listen to a half-hearted invite for a weekend away. She knew from Evelyn that Trent had a new wife, Melody, who was pregnant, and Taylor, his teenaged daughter from his first marriage, was giving them fits over her college choices, or lack of them. The last thing they needed was to feel obligated to entertain her. “Tell Melody and Taylor I said hi.”
“Will do. I’ll text you once I get something set up for you to see.”
“Thanks, Trent. Talk to you soon. Bye.” She hung up before he could say anything else, took a few seconds to grip her steering wheel, then pushed the ignition button and listened to the expensive German-engineered engine purr to life. She’d killed a couple of hours with the extra yoga practice. Now she had to figure out how to kill three more before she could start getting ready for the big night out.