Chapter 4
Four
Brax hung up the phone, wondering how the hell his life had gotten so fucked up.
The state of Washington had no record of his divorce ever being filed. He and Mia were still legally married.
Holy shit.
Jonah came into the living room, a bottle of Jack Daniels dangling from his hand. “I’m gonna guess, from the look on your face, that the news is not what you were hoping.”
Brax scrubbed a hand down his face. “We’re still married.”
Holt set down a trio of glasses. “Well, that’s a hell of a thing. Didn’t you ever think to check on it before? To make sure it went through?”
“It hasn’t come up.” Relationships of any kind weren’t something he’d sought out. After Mia, he hadn’t been interested in risking that again.
Jonah poured them all a healthy two fingers of whiskey. “What happened with you two, anyway? I mean, I know you said she left a long time ago, but what really happened?”
Brax had less than zero interest in getting into this, but as his mess was impacting his friends, he recognized he owed them some kind of explanation.
Accepting a glass, and figuring it was five o’clock somewhere, he sank back into his chair. “We got married right after she turned eighteen.”
“Damn, that’s young,” Holt observed.
“We met in the foster system when we were kids. Were best friends for years. Neither of us had anybody else. I’d been planning on asking her as a sort of platonic marriage of convenience, just so we’d have each other when she aged out, too. But then her foster father assaulted her.” His hand tightened on the glass as he remembered, with vivid clarity, seeing the bastard holding Mia to a wall by her throat. “I nearly killed him. Probably would have if she hadn’t stopped me. But I had to get her out and away.”
Jonah sucked in a breath. “Shit.”
Brax tipped back the whiskey, wishing the burn of it would wipe out the memories of what had come next. “Major shit like that has a way of bringing things to light. Like the fact that we were in love with each other. So, we got married for real, so they couldn’t try to put her anywhere else and I could keep her safe. And it was good. I mean, we were poor as dirt, and we worked our asses off, living paycheck-to-paycheck, but we were together. And then one day she was gone.”
Jonah splashed more whiskey into Brax’s empty glass. “That was just it?”
That definitely hadn’t been just it.
“I didn’t realize anything was wrong until she didn’t come home after work. Then I contacted her boss, who said she hadn’t been in at all that day. I checked with all our friends, called all the area hospitals. Nobody could find her. I was totally losing my shit by the time I contacted the police to report her missing. We all spent weeks searching. I went everywhere I could think to go. Put up posters. The whole shebang. And then I realized her go bag was missing.”
Holt frowned. “She kept a go bag?”
“For as long as I’d known her. I never thought it was odd because we got moved so often, and frequently on short notice, in the foster system. It was a big deal when she stopped checking it every day after we got married. And I guess I just forgot about it until then. When I reported that fact to the police, the detective on the case said I needed to accept that maybe she didn’t want to be found. I didn’t want to listen, but when there was no sign after more than a month—” Brax shrugged. “I couldn’t stay in our apartment after that. I was so pissed. So hurt. I needed somewhere to put all that rage, so I divorced her—thought I divorced her, via mail—and enlisted.”
“Divorce by mail is a thing?” Jonah asked.
“It is in Washington.”
“Huh.”
Holt set his glass aside. “Given the issues with the postal service, the idea of divorce by mail seems kind of risky.”
“I was twenty-two and one step above broke. It was what I could afford.” And it had been the easiest way to dissolve things. No judges. No lawyers. No having to admit to anyone, face-to-face, that the woman he’d loved had left him without a word.
Easing back on the sofa, Holt began massaging his knee. “And you never heard from her again, until today?”
Brax hesitated. “She wrote me for the first few years I was in the Marines.”
“Wait, wait. She wrote you?” Jonah demanded. “How did she even know where to find you?”
“I’d left the details with our landlord in the event she came back. I guess she did at some point.”
“So, what did she say?”
“I don’t know. I never read any of the letters. Just marked them return to sender.”
Jonah slapped his glass down on the coffee table. “Dude, seriously? Didn’t you wonder?”
He had wondered. There were times when the wondering had eaten him alive. But he didn’t want to hear how she’d been unhappy, and he hadn’t even seen. How he hadn’t been enough for her. How the life they were living didn’t work for her anymore.
“We were over. What did it matter?”
“Except you’re not over,” Holt challenged.
“Evidently not.” But they’d fix that. Once and for all, they’d take advantage of this awkward-as-hell reunion and get a damned divorce.
Bracing his elbows on his knees, Jonah leaned forward. “Look, man, I know you weren’t expecting any of this. I’ll understand if you want to bail on this project. Being in the same town as your ex is not what you signed on for.”
He’d given it some thought. A part of him wanted to get the hell out of Eden’s Ridge and away from the woman who’d stirred far too much when she’d appeared today. But that smacked of cowardice. “No. I said I’d do it. And it makes sense that we need to interact on some level to get this divorce sorted.”
“All right. Are you going to be able to work with her on the renovation if we go that route?”
Shit. Brax hadn’t considered that. Porter had said this was Mia’s area of expertise. Not that they’d gotten through the consultation at all after the surprise reunion. But he didn’t want to ruin Jonah and Holt’s opportunity by letting this shit run his life.
“We can keep out of each other’s way.” And he was grown-up enough not to spout all the petty, spiteful things he’d thought to say to her over the years. At least not in front of others.
Holt frowned, his brows drawn together in a thoughtful expression.
“What?” Brax prompted.
“There’s one question—well, there are about a hundred questions I’d want answered. But the biggest one I’d want to know the answer to… If she left you the way you think, why didn’t she seek a divorce in all these years? Wouldn’t she want to be able to move on with her life?”
Brax wanted to believe that didn’t matter. He wanted to hang on to the version of events that had been his constant companion for the past decade. But the same question had been niggling at him. Because it was weird.
Then again, nothing about her defection had been normal. Who the hell knew what had been in her head or why she hadn’t done the logical thing? At this point, he didn’t care. He just wanted to be done with her so he could finally get on with his own life.
“I’m not sure that could have gone much worse.” Mia dropped her head to Porter’s kitchen counter.
“The fact that you kept your shit together through the rest of the workday was impressive and, I feel compelled to say, was wholly unnecessary. I’d have understood if you needed a day off.”
“And have the rest of the day to stew in my juices? No, thank you.” She looked up as Porter set a beer down in front of her. “I’m not sure this is sufficient for unexpectedly running into my estranged husband, who has evidently thought we were divorced for the past decade.”
“I’ve got you, girl.” Porter’s wife, Maggie, set a shot of tequila beside the beer. “We’re out of limes, but I figure it’s an emergency.”
“I love you.” Mia tossed back the shot, wincing as the alcohol burned down to her gut. “Thank God Luca was down at the Ganaway job with Brick today. The last thing I need is to deal with his thoughts on this whole thing.”
“Does he know Brax?” Maggie asked.
“No. He knows the aftermath of Brax. Which was… bad. So, he’s always quietly hated him. He doesn’t understand my allegiance, and I don’t have the bandwidth to have that argument with him again right now. I know it’s coming because there’s not going to be any keeping this a secret. Of course, that’s assuming my very presence here doesn’t torpedo our shot at getting this gig. I’m really sorry if this costs us the job.”
Porter slid onto the stool beside her and gave her shoulder a brotherly squeeze. It was a mark of how much she’d settled in here that she didn’t shy away from the touch.
“Screw the job. We’ve got plenty of work to keep the company occupied well into summer. I’m worried about you. I saw the look on your face. If he’d stabbed you in the gut, I don’t think you’d have been any more shocked.”
“Sounds about right.” She scrubbed both hands over her face. “I’ve imagined seeing him again so many times, and I never knew what to say. And then today, finding out he’s thought we were divorced all this time was just—I guess part of why I held on to hope for so long is because we weren’t divorced. I thought there was a chance, however remote, that someday we’d come back to each other. Which is stupid. I know what he thinks I did, and I have no defense for it.”
“What he thinks you did?” Leave it to Maggie, the attorney, to zero in on the discrepancy.
Even now, the truth clogged in Mia’s throat. She poured herself another shot of tequila. “It’s complicated. There are reasons I couldn’t tell him, and I can’t tell you.”
“Fair enough. I know something about that.” The NDA Maggie had signed years before had nearly derailed her relationship with Porter before the truth had come out from an entirely different quarter. “Are you still bound by those reasons?”
Was she? Curt was dead. All the players she’d been connected to were dead, too, as far as she knew. Was nearly twenty years enough time to keep a secret? What would Brax do if she told him everything? Not just what had happened ten years ago, but who she really was. Why she’d been foster care to begin with. Would it change how he saw her? Make him revise his bad opinion?
But that was pipe dream thinking. He’d never give her the chance to give that explanation. And even if he did, the truth sounded like some kind of fiction. A wild tale she’d concocted to justify the unforgivable.
“It doesn’t matter. He wants a divorce. I won’t fight him on it. He has a right to move on with his life, and maybe, if we do this, I’ll be able to move on with mine.”
But she didn’t know how. She’d learned how to live in limbo during these years without him. She’d learned how to live in fear in the years before him. But she had no idea how to function in a world where even the possibility of a connection to him was no longer a reality.
Porter studied her. Mia knew he saw more than she wanted, but she didn’t have it in her to hide her roiling emotions. Not now.
“You don’t want to let him go.”
“No.” She didn’t want to give up. And that just made her ten kinds of fool because the angry man she’d seen today wasn’t her Brax. He wasn’t the guy who’d saved her life. Wasn’t the guy who’d gone out of his way to make sure she had flowers to carry on their unconventional wedding day. Wasn’t the guy who’d walked her to and from school every single day after he’d aged out of the system himself, just to make sure she was safe.
The realization that her Brax might well no longer exist absolutely broke her heart. Mia hadn’t realized her capacity for grief could get any bigger. But she knew better than most that people could learn to survive far more than they realized.
Porter’s voice was gentle. “Isn’t it worth trying to talk to him about this, now that you’re in the same place?”
“He sent back over a hundred letters unopened before I gave up trying. I don’t expect him to be any more interested in an explanation now than he was then.” Because she couldn’t stand the look of sympathy on Porter’s face, she tossed back the second shot and turned her attention to Maggie. “So, what’s involved with filing for divorce in Tennessee?”
An abrupt wail sounded from down the hall.
“Hold that thought. Her Fussiness has awakened from her nap.”
Porter slid off the stool. “I’ve got her. Y’all go ahead.”
They both watched him go.
Maggie lowered her voice. “Okay, I don’t know if there’s anything you want or need to say that he shouldn’t hear, and you aren’t obligated to tell me a damned thing. But if any of this involves some kind of legal entanglement beyond a divorce, you can count on my discretion if you need a sounding board. I know what it’s like to get in over your head.”
Mia’s throat went thick. None of what she was dealing with fell under a true legal entanglement. That would’ve been so much simpler than the reality and would’ve provided her with far more protections. But it was a lovely reminder that she had friends here, and even if her marriage was over for good, she wasn’t alone.
“Thanks, Maggie. I really appreciate it.”
Porter came back, his sixteen-month-old daughter in his arms. The sight of those sleepy eyes and that downy blonde hair sticking up in every direction as she snuggled against her father’s shoulder was an extra bittersweet punch today. Yeah, she needed to wrap this up and get home to Leno, where she could lick her wounds in peace.
“So… the filing?”
Maggie leveled her with a look but didn’t press. “The paperwork itself isn’t complicated. You’ve both had entirely separate residences for years, so unless he decides to come after the assets you’ve accrued since then?—”
“Unlikely.”
“Then it would be uncontested. Once the initial request is filed, Tennessee requires a sixty-day cooling-off period for couples with no offspring.”
Mia struggled to ignore the phantom pain in her side. “Well, we don’t have any of those.” And never would.
“Then the two of you can sort out the details yourselves, in terms of division of assets and the like, and submit the appropriate paperwork to the court clerk. It’s pretty simple at that point.”
Simple. As if the dismantling of a marriage was an easy thing.
“One other thing,” Maggie added. “Tennessee also requires a six-month residency before allowing someone to file, so unless he wants to file in whatever state he has residency, you’re the one who will need to file.”
Mia shut her eyes. She’d get through this. Somehow. “Okay, if that’s what it takes, then that’s what we’ll do.”
Needing to escape, she slid off her stool. “Thank you both for the moral support. I’m gonna get on home. Porter, maybe it’s best if you’re the one who calls Jonah to reschedule the consultation. Assuming he even still wants one.”
“Sure. I’ll do that. You sure you’re okay?”
“Not even a little bit. But that’s never stopped me before. I’ll see you tomorrow.”