Wish You Were Gone(36)

Emma didn’t respond. It did matter to her. Lizzie wouldn’t understand. She’d never been married. Never even been in a long-term relationship since Emma had known her. But this was her husband. The man who had chosen her and only her. Supposedly. She wanted to know what sort of woman James would have risked their marriage over.

And she was certain, at this point, that this woman had been with James the day he died. If not actually here, physically, at her house when the accident occurred, then at the very least with him in the city while Emma was waiting in the restaurant like an idiot for him to show. When else would she have gotten her hands on his phone? She wanted to meet this woman. She wanted to look her in the eye and ask her what she knew about her husband—what the hell was going on with him that day.

“I mean, unless you think he left her something in the will,” Lizzie said.

Emma’s head snapped up. “The will?”

“Shit. I didn’t even think about that,” Gray said. “You should call your estate lawyer. Who did you guys use? Cantor Feldman?”

Emma’s heart was doing an odd flutter-step thing that made her put her fork down. “We had our wills drawn up at the same time. Everything just goes to me and the kids.”

“Unless he had it revised and didn’t tell you. It happens all the time,” Gray said. “Seriously. Call your lawyer. I’ll do it if you want me to. I can—”

“No. It’s fine. I’ll take care of it,” Emma said.

The last thing she needed was Gray hearing the details of James’s will before she did. Suddenly she wanted her friends gone. She wanted to go upstairs and scream into a pillow until her vocal cords snapped. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. If she found out he had done this, if he had undermined their wills and left something—anything—to some random nameless, faceless female and shortchanged her or the kids… she would find a way to travel back in time and kill him herself.





GRAY


Back at her office, Gray couldn’t sit still. The mistress thing was an angle she hadn’t even considered. James Walsh was a jackass, yes, but he was also a hard worker. He’d lived for the work, for the schmoozing, for the travel, for the deal-making. She paced the rug in her large, corner office. Did a man who worked that hard and spent any free moment he had getting half in the bag have time for a mistress on top of a family? Something about it felt off.

Gray paused as a notification came through on her computer, and she checked her email. One hundred fifty-three unread messages. She was really falling down on the job. She sat and clicked open the first message—a rant from one of her former clients about spousal support. She forwarded it to the paralegal team.

Maybe she should help Emma figure out who this mistress was. There was no way her friend was going to give up until she found the home-wrecker, no matter what Lizzie said. She’d seen it in enough spurned women’s eyes over the years—Emma needed to know, and she wasn’t going to stop until she got hard evidence. Gray couldn’t have pristine, na?ve Emma running out and trying to hire a private investigator. She couldn’t even believe she’d said that out loud. What had she been thinking? It had to be the fact that she’d been caught off guard. Divorce papers. That was not something she had seen coming.

Call the contractor. That was what she needed to do. If she simply texted the number to Emma as she asked, there was a chance it would never get done; and if she accomplished one task, she’d feel more on solid ground and able to tackle the next thing. She picked up her phone and saw a string of missed calls and two voicemails from Derek.

Shit.

She’d turned her cell notifications off at Emma’s so she could focus and had forgotten to turn them back on. Gray shoved herself out of her chair again and called him back without listening to the messages.

“Mom?”

“Derek? What’s going on?”

“No one’s seen Dad all day.”

Gray reached out and crushed the leafy frond on a window plant one of the assistants had put in her office without permission.

“What? I put him on the train myself this morning.”

“Carlos said Dad told him to clear his day, and then never showed.” Derek sounded beyond tense. “And Mom? Felix Woodson just tweeted that he was dumped by his PR firm. Except he used a lot of expletives. The phone’s ringing off the hook. Apparently he’s not the only one.”

“Dumped? I don’t understand.”

“He was one of James’s biggest clients,” Derek said. “And Selena Fitzgerald’s agent just called, freaking out. He said she was dumped, too.”

Gray was starting to sweat. She couldn’t wrap her head around this—couldn’t keep up—and she hated that feeling. It happened to her so infrequently she didn’t know how to process it.

“She said Dad told her personally.”

Gray turned around and sat on the windowsill, the corner digging into her ass through the fine wool fabric of her skirt. “Derek, I don’t understand. Are you telling me your father is dumping James’s clients?”

“It sounds that way. But if he is, he’s not doing it from the office. No one knows where he is.”

Damn it, Gray, she chastised herself.

She should have known he would do something like this. Darnell was all about loyalty. All about trust. And after what James had tried to do to him, well, this did seem like the right move. But he could have done it discreetly. How could he go off the cuff and start cutting people? He’d given Gray no warning that something like this was going to happen—that he was planning anything out of the ordinary. Had he even talked to the firm’s lawyers? Had he looked at these athletes’ contracts or consulted the board? He had to know that a sweeping gesture like this would have consequences, and a rant on Twitter would be just the beginning. For a man who couldn’t shut up about the firm not needing any more bad PR, this felt like a rash move.