**********************
“I fucking enjoyed that!” he thought to himself, with a kind of grim satisfaction. Nick sat at his desk staring out the window. He’d gone straight to work—the “business trip” he’d told Emily about was pure bullshit. He just wanted her to have a few days to feel miserable.
He asked Suzanne to come in and explained the situation to her briefly.
“Emily and I are having a … well, a little tension at home. So I’m staying away for a couple of days, and she thinks I’m on a business trip until Thursday night—in case she happens to call, okay?”
Suzanne looked troubled. “I’m so sorry, Nick. Anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “Thanks, no, Suzanne—I hope we’re going to get through it.”
She smiled a little and said, “been there, done that. Ralph and I once split up for almost a month, way back before we had the kids. It was pretty grim at the time—now we look back and joke with each other about it.”
They chatted a moment more before Suzanne went back out of the office, and Nick realized he felt a little better. God knows I’m not the only guy who ever had marriage trouble, he thought to himself.
The three days passed quickly, to Nick’s surprise. He’d booked a nice room at the Hyatt on Capitol Square, so he could walk to and from his office. He worked late every day, getting back to his room around 9 pm for a quick room-service dinner, and he got a lot accomplished, sketching out his short-term and long-range plans for his new department. He made phone calls and emailed his contacts in Tokyo, he consulted with the other Far East personnel at Thomaston, and in general he got his new job off to a good solid start.
He checked his cell phone a couple of times a day, always finding one or more messages from Emily, and he deleted them without even bothering to listen. He did the same with her emails, after glancing through them to make sure there weren’t any problems with his sons.
Nick was lonely, of course. He missed Emily, as angry as he was, and he missed the boys like crazy. He even considered parking down the street from his house to get a glimpse of them, then decided he could wait until Friday. But the “business trip” gave him a taste of what a divorce might actually mean, and he didn’t like it one bit.
Of course, that wasn’t the plan. The plan was to scare Emily shitless, really put the fear of God in her, and see if that was sufficient to get her head back on straight and put their marriage back together. If not … if not, he’d deal with that when he had to.
**********************
With a degree of self-restraint that made him proud, Nick waited all the way until Thursday afternoon to check Emily’s secret email account. He wanted to see what she’d been up to, but he also didn’t want to torment himself constantly.
When he looked, he found nothing to or from April—obviously she and Emily had been talking on the phone—but six messages since Monday morning from that asshole Pritzker. Why had she changed her mind? What had happened to the magic they’d been sharing? What had he done wrong, why was she mad at him?