Chapter One #2
The women he knew, his family, the staff at his office, were rich, expressive forces of nature, determined; they wore their femininity.
Ivy seemed to shrink from it. She had been a little like that when he’d known her before, but not to this extent.
Perhaps it was her discomfort at the setting but, despite her apparent intention to hide, she was still… luminous .
And then he dismissed the unusually elegiac fancy.
He’d not seen or heard from her in six years.
He’d not searched for her, looked her up or allowed himself to wonder about the waitress he’d met while spending three months working in London.
Because she had been the means to an end, and that was all he’d needed her for.
Even now that she was sitting on a chair less than a foot away from him, she was still just that: a means to an end. She flicked a glance at him just as he looked back to the judge, whose penetrating gaze brightened with satisfaction.
‘Now that we’re all here,’ the judge said by way of segue from one opinionated rant to another, ‘I am ready to hear your application for divorce.’
‘As both parties are in agreement—’ Simon began, before the judge cut him off.
‘Are they?’ the judge asked Simon. ‘Are you?’ he demanded, looking between Antonio and Ivy.
Antonio nodded once, firm and decisive.
Several little bobs of Ivy’s head confirmed her agreement.
‘Really?’ the judge demanded of her again.
All eyes turned to Ivy.
‘Yes?’ she answered hesitantly.
‘That sounds more like a question than a statement, Mrs Gallo.’
Ivy blinked, as if surprised to hear herself addressed as such. She opened her mouth to speak but, once again, the judge cut in.
‘Do you know what?’ the judge asked them, apparently without requiring a response.
‘I believe in marriage. I believe in the sanctity of it. I believe that once you make that binding declaration, your lives are entwined for ever,’ he said, his finger striking his desk with each sentence.
‘I’m not religious, and I’m not a legal zealot.
But I believe in the importance and inviolability of giving your word to something.
‘So, Antonio Gallo, are you a man whose word is not of value?’ the judge demanded, much to the horror of his lawyer.
‘Absolutely not,’ Antonio replied indignantly.
‘Yet you promised to love, protect and honour this woman,’ the judge accused, pointing at Ivy. ‘And nothing about your marriage, your time together or your prenup implies the slightest hint of that.’
Antonio frowned.
‘A prenup which gives Mrs Gallo nothing, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
That had been their agreement. He had paid Ivy two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to marry him. She had agreed that she had no right to anything beyond that, and as such the divorce was supposed to have been easy. His lawyers had assured him of such a thing.
Clearly no one had expected Carmondy.
‘You signed this willingly?’ the judge asked, waving a piece of paper at Ivy.
She nodded.
‘Did you have a lawyer present?’
She bit her lip before swallowing. ‘I didn’t need one, Your Honour. I knew what I was signing.’
The judge’s gaze turned on Antonio accusatorily. ‘When you married her, she became your family. She became yours , not to own, but to protect, to care for. It is a responsibility you have deeply neglected,’ the judge stated.
‘Hold on a minute—’ Antonio said, nearly rising to his feet. He was enduring this entire farce precisely because he was trying to protect his family.
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ the judge warned.
Antonio ground his teeth together so hard he’d need to see a dentist when he got back to Italy.
‘I am sick to the back teeth of people marrying and divorcing willy nilly.’
Was the man having a stroke? Why was he talking about teeth? What on earth was a nilly? And what did it have to do with male anatomy?
‘Are you okay?’ Antonio asked.
The judge stared back at him. ‘No! I am not. I am fed up with rich people who treat marriage like a tax haven, and the British Courts like a toll booth.’
‘Well, that isn’t prejudiced at all,’ Antonio said sarcastically.
The judge opened and closed his mouth. But really, Antonio was only speaking the truth.
‘Okay,’ the judge said, finally finding his voice. ‘I am refusing to grant this divorce, until it can be proved that you have both worked as hard as possible to rectify your differences.’
Antonio sat back in his chair in shock. He’d never heard of anything like it. Neither had his lawyer, as evidenced by the way Simon’s mouth hung open.
‘Your Honour, this is highly irregular,’ Simon said when he finally found his voice.
‘That it may be, but this is my decision. You will have three assessments with a court-appointed mediator in order to determine that you have genuinely given everything you can to make this marriage work, and yet still have irreconcilable differences.’
‘Assessments?’ Simon asked in confusion.
‘Yes, assessments. Interview-based assessments. Three of them ,’ the judge demanded hotly.
‘Where? In England? I can’t stay here,’ Antonio bit out at the ludicrous suggestion. ‘I have business in Italy.’
‘And your wife, Mr Gallo?’ the judge demanded.
Antonio drew a blank.
The judge looked at Ivy, who winced. ‘I have work too. Here,’ she said, sealing his fate with yet another black mark against his name, apparently.
‘The assessments can happen in Italy if you want to pay for the travel and accommodation of the mediator, and can negotiate that with Mrs Gallo, or you can stay in England. Make a decision, Mr Gallo. I have already made mine. Dismissed.’
Ivy McKellen wasn’t quite sure exactly what had happened, only that it most definitely wasn’t what Antonio Gallo had wanted to happen. And from the look on his face, that was as unique as a unicorn.
‘We do not have time for this,’ he said to the lawyer who, less than a month ago, had knocked on her door and deposited nearly half a tree’s worth of legal paperwork with sticky tabs indicating where her signature would end her marriage.
Please sign, date and return.
That was how she had been informed of Antonio’s intention to obtain a divorce.
Please sign, date and return.
She’d been taken a little by surprise at how much it had left her off-kilter.
Of all the shocks she’d experienced in the last six years, really, her divorce shouldn’t have even registered.
Especially as she’d known that it would come eventually.
Despite what he’d said, a man like Antonio Gallo couldn’t remain in a convenient marriage for ever.
She’d wondered about the kind of person who had finally caught the notorious lone wolf of the financial world, the man who had often been referred to as the invisible hand behind the world’s most lucrative business deals, and promptly stopped herself.
It was none of her business. So she’d signed the papers and na?vely believed that was the last time she would see her name anywhere near his.
But yesterday she’d received an email informing her that she had to be in court. Today.
Just a formality.
As they emerged into the hallway outside the judge’s office she wondered whether perhaps there might have been a different outcome if Antonio hadn’t managed to antagonise the judge so much. An antagonism that seemed new. She certainly didn’t remember that from before.
Ivy shifted, trying to ease the ache in her feet.
She’d worn the nicest pair of shoes she owned, but they’d absolutely massacred her heels.
She looked up as Antonio squinted down the hall.
While she could practically see the cogs in his brain working, she searched his features for other changes the last six years had wrought.
He was slimmer, yet somehow more imposing.
Hard angles had replaced the traces of softness that she’d been able to see when they’d first met.
The cut of his suit displayed the breadth of his shoulders and a trim waist. The light-coloured linen fabric stood out like a beacon amongst the grey department store suits worn by nearly everyone else in the building.
He’d commanded attention six years ago, even in the little, out of the way coffee shop in central London, but now the allure of him was impossible to deny.
As evidenced when a woman tripped over her own feet as she did a double-take that had Ivy sending her a sympathetic smile.
‘Can we go above his head?’ Antonio asked his lawyer, having missed the interaction.
‘It would take too long,’ the lawyer replied miserably.
Of all the things she’d been worried about—seeing Antonio again, being summoned to court and, in her worst moments of fancy, being discovered and arrested for fraud—the last thing she’d expected was this .
Three court-appointed visits to assess their reconciliation attempts?
How were they going to prove that? And where?
In her flat-share in Apsley Road? The thought of Antonio’s imposing frame squeezing into the little two-bed flat with Simon the lawyer, a court-appointed assessor and Sang Hee, her Korean flatmate, pushed her worryingly close to hysteria.
But it wasn’t as if she could go to Italy.
She had only just started her new job at the local library and couldn’t take a holiday barely a month into it.
And even if she could have, Ivy would never leave at such a critical time for the library.
She’d been volunteering there for nearly a year now and they were finally about to raise enough money for the community’s much-needed afterschool club.
Government cuts to local councils had pushed them so far down the waiting list that Ivy and the other staff had been forced to take matters into their own hands.
They’d had bake sales, they’d painted faces.
They’d done everything they could to raise enough money and with their efforts matched by local businesses they were so close.