Jenna shifted in her chair impatiently. “What? A little bit what?”
“I don’t know. Lukewarm, I guess. Something kind of tepid about the whole thing.”
Jenna felt defensive—and tried not to let it show. “Logan and I are both mature adults now. We know what we want. If that seems lukewarm to you—”
Lacey put up a hand, palm out. “Look. Sorry. I’m talking out of turn. Logan adores you. He always has.”
Jenna easily read between the lines of what Lacey had just said. When Lacey used words like tepid and lukewarm, it wasn’t Logan she was talking about.
Jenna shifted in her chair again. “There is a lot more to making a marriage work than how much heat is generated.”
“I realize that,” Lacey said gently. “Honestly I do.” She reached across the table and wiggled her fingers. “Come on. Put ’er there.”
Jenna slid her hand into her sister’s.
“So,” Lacey said. “What do you plan to do now?”
Jenna groaned. “Leave the country?”
Lacey gave Jenna’s hand a squeeze. “Come on. Seriously. What next?”
“Well, I’ll see a lawyer on Monday, just to make certain of my options.”
“And then?”
“If it turns out there’s nothing I can do but give Mack his two weeks or divorce him all over again, I’m going to wait a while. Hang tough, as you put it. See if, just maybe, I can outlast him. I mean, eventually he has to get tired of hanging around here…doesn’t he?”
“Hey, don’t ask me. I’m only the little sister—and if he won’t give up and give you the papers, then what?”
“What choice do I have? I’ll start divorce proceedings. Again.”
Lacey looked down at their joined hands. “What will you tell Logan?”
“The truth.”
“When?”
Now Jenna was squeezing Lacey’s hand. She teased, “For someone who has never liked Logan, you seem awfully worried about him all of a sudden.”
Lacey pulled away. “What do you mean, I never liked Logan? Of course I like Logan. Just because he drives me insane with his endless and irritating advice on how I should run my life doesn’t mean I don’t care about him—and you haven’t answered my question. When will you tell him?”
“As soon as he gets back from Seattle.”
Jenna went to see a new lawyer on Monday and heard what she already knew. She could turn in the old papers, signed by both parties, and be eligible to remarry in about six months. Or she could start the whole process all over again.
After she talked to the lawyer, she did nothing. After all, she told herself, that was what she had planned to do, see if she could wait Mack out.
Logan had arrived home too late on Sunday for them to get together. But Monday night they went out to dinner. Jenna planned to tell him about Mack then. But she didn’t. She said nothing. She spent the meal asking him a thousand unnecessary questions about his trip and trying her best not to let him see how on edge she was.
Logan stopped in at the house for a while when he took her home. Lacey was there. Logan mentioned that he’d noticed an ad in the Meadow Valley Sun. The local art supply store needed a sales representative.
“Thanks, Doc,” Lacey replied. “But I think I’d rather enter a convent. Or maybe hire myself out to a medical research lab somewhere. You know, as a human guinea pig for important experiments that could mean the end of cancer in our lifetime.”
Logan let out a weary sigh. “Lacey, I’m not joking. It might turn out to be a good thing for you.”
Lacey opened her mouth to utter more wisecracks, but Jenna caught her eye. Lacey smiled sweetly. “No, thanks, Doc. Really.” A moment later she slipped from the room.
She reappeared as soon as Logan left.
“You didn’t tell him, did you?” She was shaking her head.
“I just couldn’t bear to.”
“You’ll have to. Eventually.”
“I know. And I will. Eventually.”
But not right now.
For right now, Jenna waited. Though she couldn’t sleep at night and she was distracted in the daytime, she waited. And felt frustration and misery and a kind of righteous fury that Mack had put her in this untenable position in the first place.
She waited, hoping against hope that Mack would see how unreasonable and outlandish his ultimatum was. That she’d check the mailbox one evening and find the signed papers there—along with a short note of apology from Mack saying he regretted any pain he’d caused her and he was headed back to Key West.
She waited.
And she thought too much about Mack—so much that she found herself wishing more than anything that she could make herself stop thinking about him. She wished she could stop thinking about the ways he was the same as he used to be—and the ways he was different. Wished she could stop wondering about what he might be doing with himself, hanging out at the Northern Empire Inn with nothing to do but wait for her to call. She wished she could stop thinking about how she shouldn’t be thinking about him and she was going to stop thinking about him—which only led her to think about him some more.
On Wednesday she and Logan met for lunch. He frowned at her across the table and said she seemed distracted lately. He wanted to know what was wrong.
She evaded. She thought, this will all blow over. Mack will come to his senses and send me the papers and then Logan and I can laugh about how silly the whole thing was.
Logan said, “Those papers haven’t come from Florida yet, have they? Is that what’s been on your mind?”
She gulped and admitted that the divorce papers had been on her mind, and that no, she didn’t have them yet.
“Maybe you should call Mack McGarrity again.”
Before she was forced to come up with a reply to that suggestion, the waiter miraculously appeared with their food. Once the waiter left, she exercised great care to move the conversation onto safer ground.
On Wednesday evening, as she was closing up the shop, Jenna thought she saw Mack across the street, just going into a store called Furniture By Hand. She stood at her own shop window for several minutes, waiting to see him come out of the other shop’s door. He never emerged, at least not while she watched for him.
She wondered, was it really Mack? Or just someone who looked like him? Or worse, could it be her imagination working scarily overtime? It occurred to her that she couldn’t even be sure that he was still in town.
That night she called the Northern Empire Inn for the second time. She asked for Mack McGarrity’s room. And the clerk put her through.
He answered on the second ring that time. “McGarrity here.”
She said, “I was hoping you might have come to your senses and gone home.”
“No. I’m still here.”
“This isn’t right, Mack. It isn’t fair.”
She heard him draw in a breath. “It’s only two weeks, Jenna.”
“Give me those papers and go back to Florida where you belong.”
“Not until you come with me.”