An online novel by Gillette Edmunds

When Barbara stopped crying, she lay down and Michael arranged for a spare bed at the front desk and then ate lunch alone. When he returned to the room, Barbara was sitting up looking at herself in the dressing table mirror. Michael sat in the chair.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Wow, this all happened so fast,” Barbara said. During years of cheerleading in middle school, high school, and her freshman year of college, Barbara had developed a habit of using teenage vocabulary such as “wow,” “you guys” and “hooray”. Four years of college in which she received high marks but never settled on a major, achieving a general degree, and three years of law school in which she never took her classes to heart, had little effect on her vocabulary outside the classroom. “I’d like to go home tomorrow if there’s a plane. Maybe I’ll spend a few days alone, just lazin around the house. I have to tell Tom and Cindy something when they come home from Mom’s. What are you going to do?”

Michael leaned forward in the chair and grinned.

“Stay here two days,” he said. Leaning back, he continued. “I am not going to London again. It was a bad idea. I never should have taken this vacation in the first place. There’s no excuse for not getting your work done. My clients are waiting. No one else is going to do my work. There is a huge deal pending that I may have to rush back for anyway. The tenth largest merger in history and here I am out of the country. After two days I should have everything in order in my mind and then I better get back to the office. I might even get called back sooner.”

“But don’t you want Sonya back?”