Southern Lights: A Novel

She had a minor court appearance the next day, and took a cab uptown to the restaurant he had suggested. It was a chic, busy Italian bistro with good food, that she’d been to before, but not in a long time. He was waiting at a table when she arrived, looking at some papers, and slipped them back into his briefcase. He had a town car and driver waiting outside.

They talked about everything from politics to law to his children, who were twenty-one and twenty-five. His twenty-one-year-old daughter was at UCLA and loving it, and his twenty-five-year-old son was in London, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had recently graduated from NYU, at the Tisch School of the Arts. He said his daughter wanted to be a doctor, everyone else in the family was literary or artistic, including their mother, who he said was somewhat eccentric but great fun. He spoke of her like a sister. Alexa hadn’t reached that point yet with Tom, and probably never would. But at least they had finally reached a good place. Tom had come to say goodbye to her and Savannah the day after the wedding. He looked depressed and hungover, and she felt sorry for him. But not sorry enough to want him back.

Alexa said that she and her daughter were leaving for three weeks in Europe right after the sentencing in the Quentin case on July 10th. It was still two weeks away.

“I’m going over too,” Edward Baldwin said easily. “I use my ex-wife’s house in the South of France, in Ramatuelle. It’s near Saint-Tropez, but not as crowded. I’m going to Umbria after that. I’ve rented a villa. Where will you be with your daughter?” He was interested in her and friendly, but she didn’t have the feeling that he was pursuing her, and she liked that. Maybe they could be friends.

“Paris, London, Florence, and maybe something in the South, like Cannes or Antibes. I haven’t been in a long time, but this is a graduation present for my daughter and we had kind of a tough spring. I had to send her away for four months during the trial and before. She was getting threatening letters, from the defendant. He was doing it to unnerve me apparently, I learned later, and it did.”

“How awful.”

“Yeah. It was pretty scary. That’s how she wound up in Charleston with her father. I had nowhere else to send her.”

“Have you stayed close since the divorce?” He had assumed she had the same kind of relationship with her ex that he did. Alexa laughed and shook her head.

“We didn’t speak for ten years. And he hardly saw his daughter, until February. But the last four months changed all that, so I guess it was a blessing for us all, except his wife.” She decided to give it to him in a nutshell. “Simply put, he got dumped by his wife, who abandoned him and their two boys. He married me, everybody was happy, and his first wife came back seven years later, I got dumped, and he went back to her. And his mother helped. I’m not from the South, his first wife is. All very simple. So I came back to New York, became a lawyer, and lived happily ever after. I have one daughter from that marriage, and two stepsons I love and just saw again for the first time in ten years, one of whom was the groom at the wedding. And my ex has a very cute ten-year-old who was the vehicle wife number one used to get him back.”

“Let me guess,” Edward Baldwin said with a look of disapproval. He didn’t like the story, although she told it lightly and with a touch of humor, but he could see the hurt in her eyes. “And now they hate each other, and he wants you back.”

“Something like that.” Alexa nodded. “I’m not interested. It’s all over for me.”

“It sounds like a bad southern novel,” Edward Baldwin commented. His divorce had been simple and clean. His wife left him, but he didn’t blame her, and they were still friends. She had done it nicely. “Do you hate him?” He looked curious as he asked. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she did. Hearing the story, he disliked him. He despised men like that.

Alexa didn’t hesitate this time. “No. Not now. Something healed it for me when I went back there, and saw him, and how weak and pathetic he really is. He betrayed me, but ultimately he betrayed himself, and now he would betray her. I don’t hate him now. I feel sorry for him. But I was pretty angry for a long time. Ten years. That’s too long to carry a grudge. It’s heavy lifting.” She had discovered that the hard way, and realized it when she finally set it down.

“You never remarried?” She laughed at the question and shook her head.

“Nope. I was too hurt. And too busy with my work and my daughter. I’m happy like this. I don’t need more than that.”