The Man Who Can't Let Go novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Kiss
Virginia opens the door of a surprise party in the dark and her husband kisses her before the lights come on. She puts divorce papers on his girlfriend's cake, and he says he never got a word from her in three years.
Virginia Madden pushed open the door of the VIP room, and a pair of arms closed around her waist.
The room was dark, and a man's mouth came down on hers, hard and sure.
She knew him by the smell before she knew him by anything else.
Soap with cedar in it, and clean cotton, the same he had used since they were seventeen.
She had been gone for three years, and her body still knew him first.
It was her husband, Tobias.
For one second she kissed him back.
Then the lights came on.
A crowd stood in the club's VIP room with paper horns and party poppers.
"Happy birthday, Sisi!" they shouted, and the poppers went off anyway.
Paper ribbons fell across Virginia's shoulders and into her hair.
Then they saw whose arms she was in, and the cheering stopped one voice at a time.
A man by the bar said, "That's not Sisi."
A woman near the cake whispered, "Isn't that his wife? I thought she was in Maine."
"Why would she come back now?" someone else asked.
Near the door, a girl in a sequin top held her phone up and kept it there.
Tobias's arms dropped from her waist.
He stepped back and looked at her face for a long moment.
His hair was shorter than she remembered, and there were shadows under his eyes that she didn't remember at all.
"Ginny," he said.
Nobody had called her that in three years.
His left hand hung at his side, and his gold wedding ring was still on it.
She noticed it and decided it didn't matter.
A woman in a green dress pushed through the crowd.
She was twenty-six or so, with a paper crown tilted over dark curls and a face that opened up the second it saw Virginia.
"Virginia Madden," the woman said. "Oh my God, it's really you."
She hugged Virginia hard before Virginia could decide whether to let her.
"I'm Sisi," she said into Virginia's shoulder. "Saskia, really. I've heard so much about you from Greta."
Virginia stood very still inside the hug.
Greta was Tobias's mother, and she had never once said Virginia's name kindly.
"Please don't be upset about the kiss," Sisi said, stepping back and squeezing her hands.
"Tobias does it to everyone. Whoever comes through that door first at a surprise party gets kissed, it's a joke with him. It means nothing."
It was said so gently that Virginia almost thanked her.
She looked at the room instead.
Fifty or so faces looked back, and not one of them looked surprised that Tobias had a girlfriend.
A man at the bar muttered, "Sisi's right here, Tobe, in case you lost her."
Tobias didn't turn his head.
He was still looking at Virginia.
She had practiced this on the plane.
She had practiced it in the hotel mirror, and again in the cab, and in the corridor outside this door.
In every version she was calm and he was sorry, and none of them had a birthday cake in them.
So she stopped practicing.
She walked to the cake table, and the crowd moved aside for her.
The cake had white frosting and a ring of candles, and nobody had lit them yet.
Virginia opened her bag and took out a long brown envelope.
She laid it on the table between the cake and the stack of paper plates, and she set a pen on top of it.
"Happy birthday, Sisi," she said without turning around. "I'm sorry about your party."
"Virginia, you don't have to do this here," Sisi said softly.
"I do, actually," Virginia said. "I've done everything else the polite way."
She slid the last page out of the envelope and turned it to face him.
The word across the top was DIVORCE, in black type, and her own signature was already on the line at the bottom.
"I signed three years ago," she said. "My lawyer says you never did."
Tobias walked to the table.
He didn't pick up the pen.
He read the page once, slowly, and she watched his jaw move.
"Sign it," Virginia said, loud enough for the girl with the phone. "Then you can kiss whoever you like in the dark."
Somebody in the crowd drew a sharp breath.
Tobias lifted his eyes from the paper to her.
"What papers?" he said.
"Don't," she said. "I mailed them. My lawyer mailed them. Twice."
"Virginia." His voice was low and not steady. "I never got a letter from you."
"Tobias."
"Not a call. Not a page."
He pushed the paper back across the table with two fingers.
"Three years," he said. "You sent me nothing."
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