Divorced, Broke, and Back as His Perfect Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Shrimp Table
Lena serves at her ex-husband's engagement party, becomes the joke of his toast on camera, walks out, and agrees in the alley to be his wife again for a price.
I was carrying a tray of shrimp through my ex-husband's engagement party when his mother caught my sleeve.
"Lena, sweetheart."
She kissed my cheek, and her brooch snagged on my apron.
"My friend at the diner told me she was sending you. I told her not to warn you. I wanted to see your face."
"It's two hundred dollars cash and a bag of leftovers," I said. "I'm fine."
"You're too thin. Eat something before you go."
She still phoned me every Sunday, fourteen months after the divorce, and I still picked up.
My mother's care home had called that week to say a hospital fund covered her April bill.
I hadn't asked which fund. I owed thirty-eight thousand dollars and I was not in a position to argue with one.
I set the tray down at the shrimp table, and a woman in a pale pink dress stepped up beside me.
Bree Danner.
Brennan's chief of staff, and for two years before that, the reason I stopped sleeping.
Tonight she was the bride-to-be, with a pearl necklace and a soft voice.
"You're Lena," she said. "I wanted to thank you. Truly."
I waited for the knife.
"The binder you left in the kitchen drawer saved us. The plumber, the roofer, the dog's vaccine dates. I'd have been lost."
"It's a good binder," I said.
"Silly question." She laughed at herself. "What's Brennan's birthday again? I always mix up the fourteenth and the fifteenth."
"March fourteenth."
She typed it into her phone and smiled at me.
"You're a lifesaver."
It seemed an odd thing to ask the week of her engagement, but the band stopped playing before I could think about it.
Brennan stood at the head table and tapped his glass with a fork.
Two hundred guests turned. Phones came up.
He looked good. That was the first thing that hurt.
"I'd like to thank Mr. Hartwell for believing in a family man," he said.
An old man at the head table, with a cane resting against his knee, nodded politely.
"A lot of you know I've been married before."
People laughed in the right places already.
"Seven years to a wonderful woman who made a great pot roast. My mother says you shouldn't rush. I say everybody needs a first draft."
The ballroom roared.
"And there she is, folks. Still working the room."
He pointed his glass at me.
Two hundred phones turned toward the shrimp table.
Bree said, "Brennan," in a soft, scolding voice, and she was smiling too.
His mother, Gail, did not laugh. She put her hand flat on her chest.
The old man with the cane stopped nodding.
I looked at the tray in front of me.
I had put him through business school on tips. I had put my father's life insurance into his first truck, a hundred and forty thousand dollars he had never once mentioned in public.
I set the tray down. I untied my apron, folded it and laid it over the shrimp.
"Congratulations, Brennan," I said, loud enough for the back row. "You always did need an audience."
Nobody laughed this time.
So I walked out.
It took forever to cross that ballroom.
Dot, who owned the diner and had sent me here, caught me in the service corridor with my coat already open in her hands.
"Put it on. Don't you dare cry in front of that man."
"I'm not crying."
"Then put it on anyway."
The kitchen door opened before I reached the alley.
Brennan came out in his shirtsleeves, with the ballroom noise behind him, and he was not smiling.
"Lena. Wait."
"You got your laugh."
"I need you to listen. Edwin Hartwell asked me where you went."
I stopped.
"He said a man who jokes about a wife like that has something to answer for. Then he said he'd like breakfast with the first Mrs. Corrigan."
"The first Mrs. Corrigan is a waitress."
"He doesn't sign unless he's sure I keep a home. A year, Lena. You live in the house, you come to the dinners, you're my wife where anyone can see."
"You want to hire me."
"Ten thousand a month."
I laughed in his face.
My breath hung in the cold air between us, and I saw how badly he needed this.
"Fifty," I said. "Thirty-eight thousand to Maple Court for my mother's bills, paid the day I sign. Bree out of the house and out of sight whenever I'm in the room. Separate bedrooms. No touching unless somebody's watching."
"Done," he said, much too fast.
It should have worried me.
Instead I thought about the apron, the phones and the pot roast joke.
"Then I'll be the best wife you ever had," I said.
The kitchen door opened again.
Bree stepped out into the alley in her pink dress, with her phone in her hand, and looked from him to me.
"Oh, good, you're talking," she said warmly. "Brennan told me about Mr. Hartwell."
She put her arm through his.
"I'd rather it be you than a stranger, Lena. Honestly. Say yes."
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