Page 78 of The Rebound Plan

“That you’re beautiful and brave.”

She shakes her head a little, but that gets me another smile, so I’ll take it.

But then she takes a deep breath, and my chest pulls tight even before she speaks. “I need to— I may have given you the wrong impression. With the tears and the fact that you saw me coming out of a law firm. And my…”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not, actually. Nothing is okay. I— I’m not leaving Max. I can’t, apparently. Not yet.”

Oh, fuck me.That’swhy she was crying? “Not…yet?”

She tells me, haltingly, about walking in without an appointment, just to find out what the process would be if she wanted to initiate a divorce—only to find out she can’t, because she hasn’t been a resident of Canada long enough. And either way, unless she wants to prove in a court of law that Max has been unfaithful, she needs to wait through a year of separation, which means living apart from him in a country where she isn’t legally eligible to work.

“Aspiring actresses don’t qualify for exceptional visas, it turns out,” she jokes.

It makes me want to burn down the entire world. “What are your other options?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Of course you do.” I reach for her, but she slides her hands away.

Right.

Fuck.

When I saw Shannon coming out of that family law office, I thought she was leaving him, and in that split second, the fantasy that I had tried so desperately hard to put on ice, so hard to get over, to rebound from—that fantasy roared back to life.

And now as she sits across from me, small and broken and trapped, I realize that what I had envisioned was coming from my point of view as a single, unencumbered man.

This life as the wife of a hockey player has trapped her, not only in misery, but literally trapped her in a foreign country with very few options. My simplistic fantasy will never be what Shannon wants.

We aren’t in this together. I am, at best, a casual friend who she had a misguided threesome with.

I suck in a slow, careful breath. “Is moving back to the States not an option? You could work there? I—” I could help, I want to say. I settle on, “Your friends could help.”

She blanches. "It's not that simple."

"Why not?”

She fiddles with her cup, nearly empty now. “You don't think that the press would immediately be on that? Here, a year-long quiet separation followed by a divorce once he's moved on—that’s…that's civilized and?—"

Civilized. The way she says the word sounds like a loaded bomb.

"You don't want to embarrass him," I say.

"No, of course not." She's earnest. He doesn’t fucking deserve how kind she is being to him.

"Why not? He's clearly hurt you."

"It's—I told you, it is complicated. I am not—Russ, I don't know who you think I am, but I am not that girl. If I were to have a splashy divorce at the earliest opportunity in New York City, for example, sure that might embarrass Max, and he would hate that. But do you know what would happen next?”

Solemnly, I give her the respect she deserves and don’t pretend that I’ve thought this through as much as she has. “What?”

“He would use everything that he knows about my past to destroy me. and any chance I would have of moving on from that, finding any kind of job that follows anywhere in my limited skill set, would be destroyed. I have already accepted that, on the other side of this divorce, when it happens, I will be a nobody, and I'm fine with that." Tears slip from her eyes.

And I can’t let her cry alone. I just can’t.

I reach across the table and gently swipe them off her face.

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