Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper

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      The bellhop, an older man with white hair and shoulders hunched from the weight of several decades worth of suitcases, directed her through the hotel’s ornate lobby to the elevator and up to her room. Inside, he pointed out the minibar, the safe inside the closet. “May I get you some ice before I go, miss?”

      “No. Thank you. I’m fine.” She handed him a tip for his help, and with a nod, he left her alone. Under other circumstances, she might have enjoyed the luxurious room. An Oriental rug, two double beds with a mound of pillows propped high, a wall cabinet which housed the TV, fax machine and Internet connection.

      Heat crowded the room. She cracked the window, letting in the sounds of the city below, the whine of a trumpet, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the paved streets.

      With methodical movements, she emptied her suitcase. Nothing inside except two wrinkled suits and workout clothes she’d worn to Crunch, the club she’d escaped to each night that week in order to avoid the late dinners she was semi-expected to attend with her client.

      On another spur-of-the-moment impulse, she grabbed her purse and headed back out of the hotel. The rain had stopped, so she didn’t bother putting up the umbrella the doorman had just handed her. Barney’s was a short walk away, and she headed up 59th Street, aware that she could be accused of trying to avoid the pain gnawing at her stomach. And maybe she was. She’d racked up enough billable hours in the past six months to put her in the running for junior-partner status. Work was the distraction she needed. As long as she focused on whatever case was before her, she could avoid looking at the state of disaster currently posing as her personal life.

      She crossed over to 60th and headed toward Lexington Avenue. Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her purse. “Hello.”

      “Where are you?” Ellen Wilshire rarely bothered with greetings. As a newly appointed partner in the same firm for which Addy worked, she trimmed minutes from her non-billable schedule just as she trimmed fat from every morsel of food she ate.

      “Still in the city. Currently headed toward Barney’s.”

      “You’re supposed to be back in D.C.”

      “I decided to stay the night.”

      “And I had planned to take you out on the town!”

      “Sorry.”

      “You don’t sound it.”

      There was a smile in Ellen’s voice, so Addy didn’t bother to deny it. As grateful as she was for her friend’s consideration, she wasn’t sorry she’d missed the outing. Ellen’s idea of cheering her up would be a night spent in some currently hip spot where thirty-somethings with their own set of divorce papers were trying to anesthetize reality with Cosmopolitans. “I’m still in training wheels on the social scene, Ellen. Rusty and not interested.”

      “Yeah, the unapproachable signs are hard to miss. Poor Teddy’s been asking me for detour instructions again.”

      A young, fast-track attorney at Owings, Blake, Teddy Simpson had made no secret of his interest. He’d been consulting Ellen on a regular basis for tips on getting Addy to go out with him.

      But the thought of entering the dating scene again all but gave her hives.

      “Let me guess. You’re going in search of a little black dress for a night out in the city.”

      “Actually, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

      “Whoo-hoo! Is there a man etched into this anywhere?”

      “No. I thought I’d fix myself up, get a table in the Oak Bar and spend the evening with a book.”

      “Excellent social outing,” Ellen said with a frown in her voice.

      “Practicing for the future.”

      “When you decide to stop living like a nun.”

      Addy smiled. Ellen had been on her case for months. Get back out there. Find someone else, and you’ll forget all about Mark.

      But Addy didn’t think it was possible to forget eleven years of marriage, and especially not one that had ended as hers had. If anything, it had run a stake through her heart and anchored her to a single spot of relative safety from which she was reluctant to move.

      “Okay, one more night of this solo stuff, and you’re mine,” Ellen conceded. “You’re thirty-three, not eighty-three, and I can’t in good conscience stand by and let every social skill you ever had atrophy. Tomorrow night. We’ll paint Georgetown red.”

      “I can hardly wait,” Addy said.

      “Just finish the book tonight. You won’t need it for a while.”

      The line clicked off with Ellen’s usual abruptness.

      Addy put the cell phone back in her purse, turned the corner to the front entrance of Barney’s. The customers here all looked as though they took their Vogue subscriptions seriously. Lots of black, chunky heels, skin that had been exfoliated and moisturized into a blemish-free existence. She took the escalator to the third floor, bought a too-short black dress and a pair of too-high heels to go with it, both of which dealt a near death blow to her AmEx.

      On the way back to the hotel, she passed an antique store, caught a glimpse of herself in the wavy glass of an old framed mirror. She stopped, stared for a moment, wondered how she could have thought a new dress and shoes could fix the tear inside her. Allow her to look in the mirror and see a woman capable of getting past her husband’s betrayal. The truth? There wasn’t a black dress in Manhattan that could get her past that.

      Nothing she had believed about herself fit anymore. If her life had once been a puzzle whose pieces had long been put in place, it had all been ripped apart the morning she found Mark in bed with his pregnant lover. Since then, she’d been trying to put those pieces back together, but nothing fit where it had once been. Her vision of herself as a desirable woman, her once-certain career goals.

      An older man in a red bow tie stepped to the window, raised an eyebrow in inquiry. She lifted a hand and walked on.

      Back in her room, she took a long bath. Up to her neck in bubbles, fatigue hit her in a wave, sent off little alarms along her nerve endings. People weren’t supposed to be this tired at thirty-three, were they? This kind of tired was the stop sign at the end of the road for lawyers who’d been practicing for thirty years. The kind that made them start thinking about retirement and second homes in south Florida.

      Maybe she just needed a vacation. Some downtime. Owings, Blake expected a lot from its attorneys. Sixty to seventy hours a week was standard unless they had a big case going, and then it was whatever it took to get the job done. Past that, Addy shied from taking apart her own question. Examining the nuts and bolts of it.

      At some point in her marriage, she had developed a fairly keen ability to let things she didn’t know how to fix merely coast along as they were. The fact, for example, that somewhere along the way, she and Mark had begun to feel like two roommates sharing the same home. “Morning, honey,” on the way out the door to work. “Night,” before they went to bed. And very little else in between.

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