The Love Wars by L. Alison Heller Read Free Book Online

really just reference Prince Albert? Okay, ‘Who?’ I’ll tell you who—Caleb Frank.”
    My stomach flips and while I want to know if he asked about me, instead I say, “Really? Why?”
    “Well, he didn’t specifically mention you, although he did say that it was good to see us and we should all hang out.”
    “Sounds very breezy.”
    “I know, right? No, the thing is, he wants to hire me to design his new office space—a whole suite of offices by the High Line. Gut renovation.”
    “Wow.”
    “No way I’m doing it, but isn’t it funny?”
    “Why wouldn’t you do it?”
    “Oh, come on, Mols. It’d be weird.”
    “Because of me? That was five years ago. Plus, isn’t this sort of a big deal? The chance to do an Internet millionaire’s splashy offices?”
    Long pause. “Yeah.”
    She’s dying to do it. And maybe actually hearing about Caleb more frequently will provide me with some perspective, likeimmersion therapy. “You have my blessing, really. I’ll call later, okay?”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    I look at my watch: two minutes until my meeting with Lillian. Time enough. I turn to my computer and type in “An.” My screen helpfully offers up the remainder of the phrase: “-astasia Peppercorn.” I spend a lot of time with this machine, and it knows me well.
    There’s one new picture from two weeks ago on some society photographer’s Web site. Caleb and Anastasia have their cheeks pressed against each other as though they’re at one of those amusement park photo booths, her pink hair mingling with his blond curls. He’s gazing at her; she’s pouting straight at the camera. Lovely.
    I click out of the screen, grab my notepad and walk down the hall to Lillian’s office. She’s summoned me to sit in on a consultation with a potential client. Usually, clients are nervous before a first meeting with Lillian—the point at which a divorce morphs from the theoretical to the actual—but nine times out of ten, once they get talking about how they want things to end up, they can’t stop. Lillian nods supportively as the bankers with stay-at-home wives, out of work for eight years while raising the kids, assume they’ll be exempt from paying alimony; she gently hands tissues to the jilted and stunned, who believe that because it was not
their
choice to end the marriage, they should walk away with a bonus prize, like say maybe both homes and the securities accounts; she furrows her brow in empathetic outrage when the moms insist they must get final decision-making authority for the children because of their husband’s long-held belief in homeopathy or Catholicism or just plain negligible common sense.
    I know, as they sit in her office and claim them, that none of these clients will wind up with any of these awards, and while Lillian doesn’t explicitly promise anything, she is, as she’s explainedto me, selling hope along with the heartbreak. An initial consult is a beautiful thing, she told me after the first one I observed; it’s probably the
only
place in divorce law where there are no unfulfilled expectations yet; once a divorce becomes real, that’s all it is—a series of unfulfilled expectations, the most fundamental, of course, being the unfulfilled expectation of until death do us part.
    I relax in one of Lillian’s cozy garnet guest chairs. Increasingly, when I’m here, I’ve felt Lillian’s office using its powers to lull me. I remind myself that I am there for an assignment, not a coffee-and-gossip session, and listen to her phone call.
    “I know, Ethan. Oh, that’s too bad,” she says, making delicate pen marks on a pad of paper. “Well, why did you let it get that high? If they’re not paying, just stop the work. Yes, just like that. I do all the time.” She laughs. “Oh, good. See you both then.”
    “Ethan Crosby?” I ask.
    She nods. “I called him to find out about Fern Walker, the woman we’re scheduled to meet with. He represented her in her divorce.” She