Not a Love for Faint Hearts novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Hundredth
In a private room full of cheering friends Imogen answers the hundredth divorce request with Fine, drops her ring in his glass and sets her terms; outside, Camille's phone shows a text from Percy's mother: is she signed yet?
On the hundredth time Percy Wexford asked for a divorce, his wife said yes.
Imogen Castell had not come to the club to say it.
She had come because her friend Camille texted at nine: *He only wants to talk. I'll be right beside you. Just let him say it.*
Camille had met her at the door of the Ember Room and held her hand all the way down the hall.
"Breathe," Camille said. "You've survived ninety-nine of these."
Then she opened the door to the private room and said she'd get them drinks.
She did not come back.
Eight of Percy's friends sat around the long table, each with a glass in hand.
Percy sat at the head with his tie loosened.
He did not stand up.
"Thanks for coming," he said, in the voice he used on waiters.
He slid a paper across the table to her.
She knew the font. She knew the margins. This was the hundredth copy.
"Sign it," Percy said. "It's a round number. Let's finish."
At the far end, a man lifted his phone and aimed it at her face.
"For the group chat," he said. "Ninety-nine nos. Let's get the hundredth."
Dylan Keelan slapped the table and laughed.
"Come on, Imogen. Put the man out of his misery."
Somebody else laughed too, and then half the room did.
In the middle of the table stood a white cake box with a pink ribbon.
Dylan flipped the lid with one finger.
The icing said FREE AT LAST in blue letters.
A delivery slip was stuck to the lid. It said *Paid: Harbor Foundation Events*.
Imogen read it and thought, Camille is always paying for things.
She looked at Percy.
He was waiting for her to say no.
He had looked at her that way on the morning he woke up in the hospital, when he asked a nurse who the woman by the bed was.
The crash on their honeymoon road had taken the last fourteen months of his memory.
She was in every one of them.
For three years she had said no, and each no had bought her one more month of hoping he would look at her and know.
She had counted every request.
She was done counting.
"Fine," Imogen said.
Dylan stopped laughing in the middle of a breath.
The man with the phone lowered it, then lifted it again.
Percy's face changed.
She watched the relief come into it, and she knew it was the first honest thing he had shown her in a year.
"She said yes," Dylan said. "Percy. She actually said yes."
"Drinks for the whole room," someone shouted. "Percy's buying."
The room cheered.
Imogen waited for the noise to drop.
"I'll sign," she said. "But not on that paper, and not in this room."
The cheering thinned out.
"Thirty days from tonight is the Harbor Foundation Gala at Marlow Hall, on the twentieth," she said. "I'll sign on that stage, in front of the whole city."
Percy smiled at her.
"Until then you live at Larkin Street," she said. "In public you are my husband. You hold my hand. You say my name. You do not flinch."
"Anything else?"
"My bedroom door stays locked."
Dylan whistled low.
Percy leaned back and spread his hands.
"Thirty days, and then I'm free. Done."
"You all heard it," Imogen said to the room.
"Eleven witnesses," Dylan said, and grinned at the man with the phone. "It's all on video."
Imogen did not answer him.
She twisted her wedding ring off her finger.
The inside of the band was engraved with a single number: 100.
She had read it every night for three years.
She dropped the ring into Percy's whisky.
It made a small sound against the glass.
"Keep it where you can see it," she said. "On that stage you'll put it back in my hand."
Percy stared into the glass and did not pick it up.
Imogen picked up her coat from the chair and walked out with her back straight.
The cheering started again behind her before the door had shut.
In the hall, Camille was waiting with her arms already open.
"Oh, Imo," Camille said. "I heard. I'm so sorry. I should never have left you alone in there."
She smelled of rain and pale roses.
She held Imogen tight, and she was warm, and she was the only one in that club who had said she was sorry.
Imogen let herself be held.
Over Camille's shoulder, on the hall table, Camille's phone lit up.
The name on the screen was *Mrs. Wexford*, Percy's mother.
The message was short.
*Is she signed? Get it done tonight, before she changes her mind.*
Imogen read it twice.
Then she lifted her head and smiled and thanked Camille for staying.
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