A Marriage Worth Fighting For

Chapter Two

Seven years earlier …

“Mail,” Alicia’s boss said shortly, tossing her a handful of envelopes, which made her heart sink as soon as she saw them. “Came yesterday.”

The last time she’d moved apartments, she’d won Tony Cottini’s permission to use his restaurant address for her mail delivery, since her job seemed a more stable entity than her place of residence, but she regretted it every time these letters came.

It was so obvious what they were. Overdue account notices, containing increasingly strident demands for payment. They were cold things, echoing the cold of the November day outside.

“Thanks,” she told him quickly, then stuffed the mail in the battered purse hanging on a hook in a dingy alcove and hurried to the serving window in front of the kitchen to line four plates of hot food along her arm.

Tony wasn’t a bad boss—if he had been, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into her current trap with the mailing address, because she wouldn’t have dared to ask—but he still had a healthy interest in her attaining maximum productivity levels at all times.

She delivered the food with a smile, took the order from the next table and skimmed back to the kitchen to slap it in front of the short-order cook, calling it out as she did so. “Three specials, two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, one on whole wheat, one scrambled, sausage and home fries, white toast.”

Okay, now Table Three.

It was only seven in the morning. Her feet had already begun to ache, but that would taper off after the rush hit its peak at around eleven. By the time she finished her double shift twelve hours after that, the rest of her would be so tired that the old reliable feet almost wouldn’t care.

Table Three had a doctor at it, eating by himself. She could tell he was a doctor because a) the restaurant was only a block from a major Manhattan hospital, so doctors grabbed a quick meal here quite often, b) he was reading a gigantic medical textbook and c) he’d forgotten to take off his name badge, which read Dr. Michael McKinley, Jr.

“What can I get you?” she asked him, coffeepot in hand.

At Tony’s, they didn’t bother with all that hi-my-name’s-Alicia-and-I’ll-be-your-server-today stuff. Again, he was a decent boss that way. He just growled at them every now and then, “Say whatever greeting you like to the customer. Just be sincere and say it with a smile.”

Oops, she’d forgotten the smile.

She put it on.

The one she’d practiced.

The one she’d paid for.

Or rather, borrowed the money for, at the kind of horrible interest rate you had no choice about when you had an unimpressive credit history.

The one she was, in other words, still paying for.

Dr. Michael McKinley Junior looked up from the giant book in response to her question, and his gaze arrived at her face in time to see the smile—its dutiful dawning, its practiced beauty and its slow fade when she thought about how much she still owed for these perfect straight white teeth.

He ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu and held out his cup for coffee like a thirsty man in the desert, which made her think he’d probably been working all night. She filled it neatly, to the perfect height.

There was a pride in doing good work. She’d learned that as an actress—okay, wannabe actress—and she’d always tried to carry it through into the rest of her life. Look at it this way: What if she had to play a waitress in a major movie someday? What if she was chosen to front a lifestyle TV show? Or feature in a national ad campaign for a top-selling brand of coffee? Or if a modeling photo shoot called for her to pose with a steaming cup in her hand?

Those fantasies didn’t come very often anymore. They’d been scoured away by six years of struggling to survive in Manhattan, since she’d arrived here off a bus from Tennessee at the age of seventeen. Six years of fitting acting classes and auditions around restaurant shifts. Six years of scraping together the money to eat and sleep, as well as updating her modeling portfolio and fixing her damned teeth.

She’d been told to do this by several modeling agencies, and it had seemed like an investment in her future, the one key piece of the puzzle that was missing. Once she had straight white teeth, the work would start to flow and the money would pour in.

But it still wasn’t happening, and there was this horrible slippery slope where you paid off the loan for the teeth with a credit card and then got another credit card to cover the maxed-out balance on the first one, and it was so hard to get ahead.

When did something stop being an investment and start being money poured down the drain? She hadn’t taken any of those expensive acting and voice and movement classes for a while, and her photo portfolio was more than three years old.

“You’re a beautiful girl,” she’d been told a thousand times. “But …”

Fill in the blank.

You’re two inches too short. You’re too big in the bust. You don’t have the voice. You’re too small in the bust. You don’t have the dance training. You’re a model and we’re looking for an actress. You’re an actress and we’re looking for someone who can sing … who can speak French … who can ride a unicycle … who can dance with bears while wrapping a flaming cobra around her neck and juggling ten chain saws.

Yeah, and don’t even go near the X-rated ways to complete the “someone who can” equation. This was one of her few sources of pride. She’d never stooped to porn videos or the casting couch.

But she was scared sometimes. Scared every day. She had nothing to fall back on. No close family, since Grammie’s death. Some distant cousins she didn’t even know. Friends in only a little less bad shape than she was. She could never call on them to bail her out. Most of them, she didn’t even know if they really were friends. More like fellow prisoners in the same trap. Maybe every single one of them would scramble over her dead body if it gave them a route to success. How much scrambling would she be prepared to do herself?

The desperate plans went around and around in her head. Work more double shifts so she could pay off the debt and get some money saved. Abandon her dreams of success, leave the city and find somewhere cheaper to live, take some night courses to earn a more realistic qualification.

She had nothing in that area, because she’d been so sure that the “You’re so beautiful” she’d heard since the age of nine would be enough.

There it was, right now, on Dr. Michael McKinley Junior’s face. You’re so beautiful. He didn’t say it out loud, but she’d learned to read it even when it wasn’t spoken. It was like the twenty-seven supposed Eskimo words for snow, so many variants of the same thing.

You’re so beautiful, but you’re out of my league.

You’re so beautiful, but you’re not my type.

You’re so beautiful, and I’m such a sleaze I’m not going to even hide than I’m looking down your uniform blouse.

In Dr. McKinley’s case, it seemed to be more like “You’re so beautiful, wow, you’re actually distracting me from my coffee,” and he looked so exhausted and bowled over and unaware of his own reaction that it was quite cute, because he was a good-looking man himself. Aged around thirty, she thought, with an imposing height and build, darkly even features and a warm, well-shaped mouth. So it was no hardship to meet his eye and lift the wattage of the smile a notch or two higher.

She gave him his breakfast perfectly.

And then he went, and that was that.

Or not.

Because he appeared again for supper just before she clocked off for the night, and he remembered her and told her, “You work longer hours than I do.”

“But your work is more important,” she answered, which was from-the-heart to a stupid extent, considering Dr. McKinley’s casual comment.

She had a complex, sentimental feeling about doctors, dating from Grammie’s illness, when a couple of them had been so good and thoughtful and kind, and yet they hadn’t been able to make Grammie better. That was thirteen years ago now, when she was ten, but it still colored her reactions sometimes. Colored her life always.

“Thank you,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s nice to hear that.”

And she could tell he had a healthy ego, but there was a sincerity to the words all the same, and the you’re-so-beautiful in his eyes had an extra something to it, a little spark.

And suddenly, right there while she poured his coffee, some instinct told her she needed to nurture and fan that spark more carefully and strategically and hardheadedly than she’d ever nurtured anything in her life.

Because maybe, just maybe, there might be something in it for her.

Chapter Three

She meant it, MJ could tell.

Go back to New York.

Even though Alicia had only whispered the words, they had more force for him than if she’d yelled them and physically pushed him toward the door.

She never fought him. On anything. It drove him crazy sometimes. He wanted to tell her, “I’m not asking for that from you. I don’t need such perfect agreement and acquiescence with everything I say and everything I want. That’s not why I married you. You are allowed to be a person, Alicia. An independent person, not just my wife. Your total obedience was never part of the bargain.”

So why didn’t he say it?

Standing here right now, in the hallway of the rental apartment attached to his younger brother’s house, looking at his beautiful blonde wife, the question reared up at him like a snake and made him paralyzed.

Why didn’t he ever say it?

Because he was scared, he realized. He was bloody terrified that if he pulled their marital bargain out into the bright light of day—or rather the bright light of words—the things they said to each other would shatter any possibility of keeping the life they had.

The life he wanted.

Really, MJ?

Hell, yes, he wanted what he had! Stellar career, beautiful, capable wife, happy children, well-organized home life.

Which brought him back to square one. Out of the blue, Alicia wanted a divorce and was standing in his brother’s hallway in Vermont, telling him to leave.

I’m exhausted.

Another inconvenient and powerful realization. She wanted him to go, and he was tempted to do just that—fling himself angrily out of here and tear back down the highway he’d just driven. But he didn’t think he would be safe on the road for another five-hour stint. He probably hadn’t been particularly safe driving up.

“I’ll check in to a motel,” he told her for the second time tonight.

“Will you find one, at this hour?”

“That’s not your concern, is it?” The words were sour and harsh with anger, and he saw her flinch.

“MJ—”

“There’ll be something. I won’t have to go beyond Albany. I can drive that far, without going off the road.”

She said nothing to this, and he thought it was because they had no precedents to go on. They’d never argued. There was never anything to argue about. She did what he wanted, said what he wanted, kept quiet.

Didn’t see him all that much.

Didn’t see enough of him for the two of them to rub against each other the way a married couple usually did.

That was one of the things she’d said in her note, which he discovered he already knew by heart. You’re never here. What did she want with that? He was one of the most successful orthopedic specialists in Manhattan. The kind that A-list celebrities came to after a skiing accident or when their kid broke an arm in the playground. The kind who put together seriously broken bodies flown in from a radius of hundreds of miles, or fixed limbs made hopelessly dysfunctional through trauma or genetic accident. He worked ninety hours a week.

And she benefited from those ninety hours with every breath she took. The beauty treatments, the shopping trips, the time for charity work that was far more about being seen at $3,000-a-plate fundraiser dinners than it was about the Amazon rain forest or the tigers in Bengal.

He suddenly came upon a bitter place inside himself where crouched this ugly little belief that she liked seeing so little of him. Shoot, it hurt to think that, but he realized he’d thought it for a while.

Thought it but never allowed the thought any space, kept the ugly little thing in a small, murky cave deep inside himself and was too busy and too in-demand as a surgeon to remember it was there, most of the time.

Now it knifed through him with a sharp awareness that almost made him gasp out loud. He controlled himself with the same iron will that helped him survive round-the-clock stints of surgery, and told her, “We both need some time. This has hit me from left field, Alicia.”

“Yes,” she replied briefly, as if she wasn’t surprised.

“Maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe you’ll say that’s a huge part of the problem. That I didn’t see it coming.

That I didn’t—”

Hell, he couldn’t go on. He was going to break down if he did. The degree of his emotion appalled him. And her blank, distant reaction appalled him more. She was just standing there, as if she was made of marble. As pale as marble, too, almost. But if this was painful to her, it wasn’t the same kind of pain he felt himself.

“I’m sorry.” The words were wrenched out of him as if a mystical hand had just reached inside his throat and pulled. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and he didn’t wait to see how she would react, just tore out through the front door, across the porch and down the steps to the car, where the engine still ticked as it cooled in the chilly night.

He knew he’d be back, and soon, but he didn’t know what he would say or do when he came.

Alicia felt shaky and sick as she heard the car drive away into the silent dark of the sleeping street. She’d expected to feel angry.

Oh, it was so strange!

She’d been so completely unsurprised to find him banging on that front door, demanding entrance in the middle of the night, but everything after that hadn’t gone the way she’d thought it would at all.

At some level, she’d wanted all the ego and impatience and one-sided demands. MJ so rarely betrayed any sense of vulnerability. Just those tiny glimpses in his last few words tonight had rocked her and undermined her certainty far more than he could have done with undiluted anger.

And then he’d listened to her.

She’d asked him to go, and he’d done so, and now she was left knowing she wouldn’t sleep tonight. He had talked about the two of them needing time. Writing that note to him this morning, she would have said that time was the last thing she needed. She’d had a ton of that.

She’d been thinking for months about leaving him. Flirting with the idea at first. What if I just took the children and left? Not meaning it, just playing with it. But then the thoughts had grown more serious, the plans more detailed.

She would have to leave the city, she’d decided, so that there was some physical distance between the two of them and so that neither of them had to face pressure from his father.

Who would hate this, she knew, because he expected perfection and order from his children.

She would have to soften the reality for Abby and Tyler, and leaving the city would help, there, too. They were so small; she didn’t want them to witness the ugliness and conflict. She had to find a secure, happy environment for them from the beginning, even if there was a later transition to a different, permanent home. Andy’s rental apartment checked all the boxes.

When she’d reached a concrete decision, there hadn’t been any momentous last straw to make it happen; it was simply a long, gradual accumulation, with a handful of moments that stood out from the rest.

Like the night Andy and Claudia had announced their engagement and their plans for the small, informal wedding that would be taking place in New York City just a couple of weeks from now. Alicia had urged Claudia to go for something bigger, even if it meant waiting, and when she thought back, she realized that MJ’s sister, Scarlett, had probably interpreted that in the worst way.

Alicia knew that at least some members of the McKinley family believed she’d married MJ for his money and status.

Well, they were right, weren’t they?

It was stupid and pointless to regret the rush of their Las Vegas wedding. Would their marriage have been any healthier and happier if they’d started it off with a well-organized splash, months in the planning? Would it have happened at all?

Doubtful.

MJ would have been bound to see sense and realize he could do so much better.

She shivered. It really was cold in the house. She’d tried the heating earlier tonight, but nothing happened when she touched the controls on the electronic thermostat. Apparently Andy hadn’t yet turned on the furnace, although he hadn’t mentioned it during their short phone call. Maybe he shared MJ’s preference for bracing doses of fresh air at a temperature of fifty degrees or less.

She crept upstairs and back to bed, but her churning feelings, her blank sense of the future and her freezing feet wouldn’t let her sleep, and when Abby and Tyler came bouncing into the room at just after six-thirty, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the day.

MJ checked out of the cheap motel on the outskirts of Albany at seven in the morning. His colleagues would be surprised to see him in surgery at eleven-thirty, after what he’d said to Raj on the phone last night, but it wasn’t their business.

Later, at his office, he would have to grab Carla, his office manager, and go through his schedule with her. He had to be realistic. If he and Alicia were going to give themselves a chance, then he needed to give them time. Time to talk. Time to compromise. Time to mine down to the depths of what was wrong.

It hit him again as he drove.

He did not want a divorce.

His throat hurt over it. His whole body hurt, knotted with the tension of rebellion and pain and refusal to accept his marriage was over.

He was not getting a divorce. He didn’t damn well believe in it! Not when you had kids. Not when you had a partnership that should have worked.

He accepted that Alicia wasn’t doing this on a shallow whim, and so he was going to have to work at changing her mind, and if she wasn’t expecting a fight from him over this, then she didn’t know him very well.

Did she know him well?

The question struck him suddenly, as if he had a passenger sitting beside him, grilling him on the issue. Did he know her?

Well, of course they knew each other! They each knew what the other ate for breakfast. They knew the sounds each other made in bed. He knew she liked diamonds and sapphires but not emeralds. She knew he detested reality TV.

Did any of that count as real knowledge?

They’d rushed into their marriage. He recognized that. He’d even recognized it at the time. He hadn’t thought it mattered, because in the moment he’d felt so incredibly, exhilaratingly sure. He’d had this all-seeing, all-knowing confidence—arrogance, let’s face it—that he could see the whole picture and that he understood what would make their marriage work better than anyone else.

How wrong had he been?

Chapter Four

Seven years earlier …

“Want to dress up tonight?”

Alicia gave MJ a questioning look and tucked the fluffy white hotel towel a little tighter between her breasts, and he thought that the gesture was an unconscious betrayal.

Of her increasingly urgent inner questions about where this relationship was going. Of the fact that the variety in her wardrobe was getting thin.

“I want to go someplace really special,” he added, so that she’d know he had plans.

“I’d love that,” she said, then warned him with a slow and almost cheeky smile. “But you’ve seen the dress before.”

“That’s okay. Gives me confidence. You’ve never yet worn anything I didn’t like.”

He suspected that most of her wardrobe came from charity stores, because even he, with no interest in fashion, could see that her carefully put-together outfits weren’t at the forefront of style. But she wore them with the aura of an Oscar-winning actress on the red carpet, as if she knew that she looked stunning, and as if she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of fabric and design on her upper body alone.