Mr. Smithfield - Louise Bay Page 0,58

clients felt when I advised them to do something they didn’t want to do. The difference was this was personal. Not business. I didn’t want to sit in the same room as the woman who’d left our baby. Who’d left me. Who’d broken every promise she’d ever made.

“A meeting about what?”

“Maybe she wants to explain. She did leave in rather a rush.”

I wasn’t sure it had been a rush. She’d taken every single item of clothing she owned. And over the months after she’d left, when I’d come out of the initial fog of grief at losing my wife, I’d realized there was nothing in our home that had been hers before we’d married. Her graduation photos. The pictures of her and her sister. Even the chair that had been her grandmother’s had mysteriously disappeared. She hadn’t just taken off on impulse. She’d planned it. Every time I thought about it, it was like her leaving for the first time, and a fresh wave of anger engulfed me. She hadn’t wanted to talk then. She hadn’t wanted to discuss anything as she was removing every trace of her life from our house. She’d done that in complete secret.

“Maybe you’ll find out why she left,” Gillian said.

“I don’t care why she left.” Of course, I’d tortured myself in the aftermath. How had I driven away my daughter’s mother? Why hadn’t she come to me? What had I missed? And then answers started to drip through. Alternatives that came to me in the middle of the night.

She’d met someone else.

She’d been having an affair all along.

She’d only been after my money.

She didn’t like being a mother.

But none of the answers mattered because there was one thing I knew for certain—she’d lied to me. She’d lied when she’d said she loved me. She’d lied when she’d said she loved my daughter.

“If you don’t want answers, then think practically,” Gillian said. “What we want to avoid is her turning up on your doorstep out of the blue.”

The thought crawled over my skin like a cockroach.

“This way you get to control the situation. You’ll know exactly where you’re going to see her, when, and for how long.”

She had a point. If she was determined to speak to me, she’d find a way. She knew where I worked. Where I lived. And if she came to the house and Bethany was there, with Autumn . . .

“Okay, I’ll meet her. But I want it to happen soon. Your offices.”

“Her solicitor suggested the two of you could have lunch.”

Her solicitor could fuck right off. Lunch was never going to happen. “If she wants a meeting, tell her it will be at your offices Monday at four. I’m not negotiating on this.”

“Very well. I’ll go back and see what they say.”

“Tell them it’s a binary choice. Meeting at your offices or no meeting.”

I shut off the call and headed back to the office. I had a job to do. A daughter to provide for. I wasn’t going to waste time thinking about my past. I was going to focus on my future.

Twenty-Five

Autumn

Hollie and I sat at a table that looked like something out of a magazine—glinting flatware, cream orchid head in a tiny vase, and a crisp white linen tablecloth. I bet burgers weren’t on the menu here. We were by the window and could see the Thames peeking through the bright green leaves of the trees. Even now I was constantly surprised at the amount of green in London—far more than I’d been expecting. I was forever stumbling on a square or a park I’d never heard of and no one had ever mentioned, and I loved to explore.

“How did you talk Dexter into bringing me here today? Doesn’t he want to taste all the food for the wedding?” I asked as I glanced around, trying to take everything in from the deep pile carpets to the ornate gold and frosted glass light fixtures over the bar.

“I guess he’s used to this kind of thing. Going to lunch at the Savoy is no big deal to him.”

I could have lunch at the Savoy every day for the rest of my life and I still wouldn’t get used to it. “But it’s his wedding.”

I was pretty sure I’d be able to be a wedding organizer by the time Hollie and Dexter were married. I’d been happy to discuss every detail with Hollie and support her in her choices so she didn’t feel guilty or awkward. The money, the