Eleanor held the ties against the mannequin’s neck.
Selena assessed the outfit, then nodded. “The red.”
“I agree.”
The two were working in the space Eleanor had recently rented. It was an open loft area in downtown Denver that would be perfect as they continued to expand. Running Head to Toe out of her apartment just wasn’t practical anymore.
The business was a simple concept directed at busy single men. Head to Toe put together a complete outfit that would fit whatever need those men had. An outfit composed by women who knew what they were doing.
Don’t have a woman in your life who can tell you what tie to wear? What color looks best on you? That, no, that belt and those shoes don’t match. Try Head to Toe!
It had been the banner that ran along the top of the website, and, with the help of some targeted Facebook ads, orders had started to pour in. Business casual, formal, club scene and even the local bar look. They told Eleanor what they liked to wear, how they wanted to look, and Eleanor put together the perfect outfit for them. As the orders continued to come, she spent more time focusing on advertising. Now her market research was generating real results.
So much that, beyond the warehouse people she’d hired to handle shipping and Selena—whom she had hired a few months ago to help keep up with orders—Eleanor was now looking to expand further with a dedicated client service support team.
Which meant filling the loft with office furniture and computers.
A sign on the door.
Actually, she needed the door first.
It had become what felt like a 24/7 effort on her part, but she didn’t mind the work. Watching something grow under her efforts was one of the most satisfying things she’d ever done.
Beyond that, the constant workload stopped her from thinking about Max.
Most days.
She heard a hesitant knock on the doorframe, which outlined the entrance to the space. Eleanor assumed it was her next interview. She was looking for someone with experience who could help her grow both a design team as well as a customer service department.
While there were men out there who had no problem navigating the online site, some men had a harder time using the tools provided to get a sense of what their own personal style was.
They liked talking directly to Eleanor and Selena, but quite frankly, neither could keep up with the phone calls any longer.
Eleanor peeked around the mannequin, startled to find Harry. Her former father-in-law.
Or more accurately current father-in-law as Max had yet to sign the divorce papers. Eleanor assumed he was being stubborn, but she couldn’t imagine how that was supposed to be a strategy for him.
Any hope she’d had about their marriage had gone out the door when four months after she left him ticked by on her calendar and she hadn’t heard from him. Not even an irate call at some off hour because he’d be phoning her from Norway to tell her to go eff herself.
Instead, there had been only silence. Which hurt more than anything. Because it told her, more than all of his professions of love, that leaving her had been too easy for him. Where for her, if it hadn’t been for her idea for this business, she might have crawled into a hole and stayed there forever.
Maybe Harry had come as an envoy. With the papers. To put an end to the marriage finally.
Eleanor walked through the open loft to meet him. She’d seen both him and Sarah when she’d gotten back. She’d considered them her family, and it had been almost as devastating to tell them she was leaving as it had been actually leaving Max.
She knew they didn’t understand. She knew she’d hurt them. But Max had left her with no options.
“Hello, Harry.”
“Nor,” he said, using Max’s nickname for her. Max had always felt Eleanor was too regal, and since he was no damn king, he liked to call her by a name that was his and his alone.
It hurt, she thought. Even after all this time. Eleanor had lost her own father when she was just eighteen. Having Harry in her life had filled a hole that had been empty. Divorcing Max had brought back even that pain. The pain of not having that father figure in her world, who was always there with a ready hug to tell her everything was going to be okay.
“How is Sarah?”
He didn’t look good, Eleanor thought. He looked older than she remembered when it had been only a few months since she’d last seen him. Suddenly now, she was worried. Was someone sick?
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said gruffly. “So I’m just going to come out and say it. Max is...Max is gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean? Off on another assignment? I suppose I assumed that.”
Harry shook his head. “No. After he got back from the last assignment, he called us to tell us what happened with you two. We told him you had been by to see us and explain. He said they had gotten additional funding, and he was going to do another month at sea. That as soon as he got back he was going to come home to the States and fix things between you two. I told him he should do that now. I told him how serious you seemed about the whole thing. That you had said you wanted a divorce. But you know how stubborn he can be.”
She did. She knew exactly how stubborn he could be.
“The ship...it’s gone. They think it went down in a storm. They’ve been looking for weeks and weeks. But there is no communication and no sign of it on any radar. I just got a call from the university today. They told us at this point we have to assume there were no survivors.”
He stopped talking, and Eleanor took a second to process what he was saying.
Max was on a ship. The ship was gone. There were no survivors.
Max was dead.
It was the strangest thing she ever did, but she laughed. Actually laughed at her husband’s grieving father. She reached out and gently touched him on the arm.
“Oh, Harry, Max isn’t dead. He can’t be.”
She would know it if he was dead. She would feel it. Her plan in life was to hate Max Harper every day from now until the day she died. A lifetime of hating him for not putting her first. For not choosing correctly when he had a choice between his work or her.
A lifetime of it.
He couldn’t be dead.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I know things didn’t end well between you two. Sarah and I were both so sad about that.”
“He’s not dead, Harry. I would know it.”
He nodded. “Sarah says the same. But we can only go by what the experts are telling us, and they have officially declared him dead. We’re going to hold a service, and we would appreciate it if you were there. No matter how you two ended, you were family. His and ours for a time.”
Harry patted her hand, then turned to leave. Eleanor shook her head, still not understanding what had happened. There was no way this could be right. No way she was going to lose Max.
Again.
She stumbled back to her desk in the center of the loft and pulled up her laptop.
“Eleanor? Everything okay?”
She ignored her assistant while she typed Max Harper Oceanographer in a Google search page.
And there it was on her screen.
Max Harper, renowned oceanographer and climate scientist, declared dead along with the crew of the ship the Savior.
She fell to her knees, and Selena immediately crouched on the floor next to her.
“Eleanor,