Filed To Story: The Lingering Kiss of Farewell Novel
Calvin turned and looked out the open door to where his secretary would normally sit.
“Janine’s not there right this minute,”
he stated, waving at the empty desk.
“You have what?”
Wil asked, he could indeed see his secretary wasn’t at her desk.
“A need to understand this bill that I just got.”
He held out a bill from the Evans and Stevens law firm.
Wil read it,
“Ah, that would be because Marilyn is not footing the bill where anything to do with you is concerned, and so that is the bill from my meeting with her and her lawyer. You wouldn’t have that bill if you’d not touched her,”
Wil stated pointedly.
“It’s a fortune,”
Calvin muttered as he sat down across from Wil.
“First class tickets, a five??tar hotel, all meals and transfers.”
“Mm.”
Wil nodded, he could see it was.
“Let it go, Calvin, I’ll go and talk to accounting myself. On that note, you’re about to get hit with another bill. I’ve got another meeting with Marilyn and her lawyer at the end of the month.”
Calvin sat staring at him for a long minute and then just nodded.
“Why so many meetings? I thought you’d sorted it all out during that last trip. Calvin waved his hand at the bill Wil now had.
“So what exactly is going on?”
he asked.
Nothing is going on, just a follow??p. I can do it over the phone if you like, but considering who you think she is, or could be. I just figured you’d want me to lay eyes on her, and actually see her progress; after you injured her and all,”
he muttered, he was more than unhappy about that, especially now that Wil knew he was the one that was right.
Calvin frowned deeply at him, didn’t like hearing that himself by the look of it, but then he nodded slowly.
“T’d like to go myself…”
“You can’t.”
Wil cut him off,
“not until the restraining order is over, just leave it alone.”
He sighed
“Show, Marilyn and her lawyers you can actually do that, then I’ll broach the subject myself with her after some trust building. Which I am trying to do with these meetings. If I can manage it, I’ll approach putting you in a room with her, see if she is amenable to it. That is my actual goal, Calvin, with these meetings, it will just take time,
I feel.”
Calvin was just sitting staring at him with that look of ‘I think you know something and don’t want to state it out loud.”
“I’ve got court in an hour Calvin, I’ll deal with this, and you’ll not be forwarded bills in the future regarding this matter. I’ll just have the company accountant pay for them due to the agreement between you and Marilyn.”
He stood up to go and do that. He clearly needed to have a word with the accounting department.
Though he did understand it was the cost of that bill that had been flagged by the accountant and likely the name attached to it as well. Everyone knew what had happened between Calvin and Marilyn.
Calvin stood up himself, and plucked that bill right out of his hand.
“I’m not busy I’ll go speak with accounting, you prepare for court. What company is it today?”
Calvin asked him.
Wil had to refrain from taking the paper back, because he knew that telling Calvin to stay out of it, to leave it curiosity. alone constantly probably wasn’t all that wise, it was likely to just pique he vin to stay out of it, to leave it
A part of him wondered if Calvin was so very calm nowadays because he was letting Will think he’d let it all go. When he hadn’t, was he trying to fool him and lull him into a false sense of security where Marilyn Riddley was concerned?
Though Wil had been keeping track of any travel that Calvin was doing, due to his concerns and so far, Calvin had not gone anywhere near the state of Virginia. Wil could only hope that Calvin was not secretly doing things and was actually letting things go, or he was likely just to make things worse, when Wil was hopeful that he was now going to be able to sort it all out finally.
Marilyn
Marilyn was just sitting staring absently out at the creek that ran between her office and the house, a cup of tea in her hand, as she thought about how the next few chapters in her new book were going. Some days everything just flowed smoothly, and she could work nonstop for 10 or 12 hours.
Other days it could take half a day just to get one chapter right when she wrote it, and was unhappy with it, deleted it and tried again, or kept certain parts of it and worked on it again, multiple times until it finally came together. It wasn’t as easy as everyone thought it was to pull a book together, and could take months or years of planning and plotting to get it all right.
She moved her eyes from the scenery and back to her laptop only to realise it had happened again. Somewhere along the way she’d put her cup of tea aside and her hands were at the keyboard and her fingers were flying over the keys. She’d not even been thinking about Calvin or her old life.
But there were now as she hit the enter key, a file opened before her, and pictures popped up on the laptop. There were many pictures of an ocean view taken from what she could see from the top of a cliff. As she clicked through them, there were many of her younger self smiling at the camera. Things she’d taken herself she knew, there were plenty of selfies taken of her on a bench seat up on a cliff top.
There were pictures of a house, and from what she saw all the pictures of her at that house were again. selfies. There were photos of her in a garden, one of her sitting with her laptop under a tree. She was smiling. it was even tagged ‘my writing place. There were some of her inside that house, everything was just her on her own, there was no Calvin.
But that house in them was something to look at. It was big and impressive. William had told her that they lived apart, her in a house by the ocean and Calvin in the city. This was she could only presume the house she as Marrin had lived in, the one in their divorce that she was supposed to get, but had opted to take cash for instead.
What she was looking at she realised was her life as Marrin Reeves, her life outside of their marriage, when she wasn’t posing as his wife, but was living at the house he’d bought for her to live in.