A tiny woman sat propped up on her bed with a lunch tray in front of her. When she caught Adrienne staring at the TV screen, she waved her fork at Nick’s image. “They call him the Where’s Waldo of Music. I call him dreamy.”
“He just follows you around, doesn’t he?” Aubrey asked from behind her.
“He’s everywhere,” the tiny woman said as she attacked her dessert. “Kind of like the holy spirit,” she said through a mouthful of cake.
“Wowzers,” Aubrey said. “Nick just got elevated to deity.”
#
“There’s my car.” Adrienne nodded at her Camry when Aubrey pulled the Oldsmobile into the apartment complex’s parking garage.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Aubrey asked.
“Absolutely. I have a set of car keys in my purse.” She winked at her sister. “So I can make a quick getaway if needed.”
“What if he’s there?”
“Then we’ll talk.”
“But you said you don’t know what to say!” Aubrey’s voice lifted in panic.
Not knowing what to say or do was probably what Aubrey, as a professor, feared the most. But as an attorney, Adrienne was used to thinking on her feet.
Although, not when it came to matters of the heart. In that area, she was almost as inept as her sister.
“I’ll see you back at the house,” Adrienne promised.
“I’m going back to the hospital,” Aubrey said.
Adrienne nodded. “Call me when either Mom or Dad wakes.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to rest after your long flight?”
“I’m sure.”
Adrienne supposed she could claim the apartment as hers and force Seb out, but that would require a lot of emotional energy she didn’t have.
Strangely, she didn’t feel sad as she moved through the rooms she used to consider hers. Seb had picked out most of the furniture and the art on the walls. It looked like a spread from a magazine, but one she didn’t particularly enjoy.
She took pity on the dying plants on the kitchen windowsill and found a box so she could take them to her parents’ house, knowing Aubrey would approve. The basil appeared scraggly and the dill had wilted but the rosemary seemed hardy, if prickly.
Most of the apartment wore an empty and abandoned look, but a discarded pair of black socks lay on the floor next to Seb’s side of the bed. She tried not to look as she headed for the closet and her clothes, but then she saw a hair. A long, straight black hair lay on the fluffy white pillow.
That hair said more to her than Seb ever could. It was the final statement in her long debate. Of course, she’d known about Therese. Why hadn’t she ever considered her—the other woman—in Adrienne’s bed?
Adrienne stomped into the kitchen, pulled the roll of trash bags from the cupboard and began to fill one bag after another with everything she considered her own. In her closet, she considered her business suits. She hated them—not only their boxy shoulders and slim skirts, but because they represented the person she’d become. In the end, she left all but the most expensive one hanging in her, make that Seb’s, closet.
On her way to her parents’ house, she called Crenshaw and told him she quit.
#
“Life it too short,” she told her mom as they sat side by side in her dad’s hospital room. “Watching you take care of Dad made me realize I have to let Seb go. It’s not fair to him, or to me, to try and stay.”
Her mom patted Adrienne’s hand. “If you think you’ll be happier without him, then of course that’s what you have to do.”
Adrienne frowned at the raindrops streaming down the window. “But I made vows before God. Those should count for something, right? I know you and Dad aren’t religious, but…”
“Actually,” her mom interrupted, “it might surprise you to know that I’ve been doing a lot of praying these last few days.”
