Page 6 of Wait for Me

And Logan had paid for her plane tickets.

As he had also paid for the three upper deck balcony suite staterooms they were staying in for seven nights. He had given her some privacy, but had put Mrs. Ping in the same stateroom as Jonas.

Must be nice to push off the caring of his son to a nanny…

Wait a minute. Didn’t I have a part in it by moving out of the country without my son?

Her faced warmed at her own realization that she was a bona fide hypocrite.

This was truly an opportunity from God for her broken family to come together for seven days to take a normal family vacation—if it could be normal with all of them staying in separate staterooms.

Still, that space helped.

Helped what?

Marie pushed away the plate of food. She couldn’t eat it. It wasn’t that the international buffet she had absentmindedly piled on her plate looked simply inedible. It wasn’t that she had been forced into a vacation by a five-year-old spitting image of his father.

The man she had once loved.

Marie looked up, wondering whether to get another plate and force herself to eat something to settle her nervous stomach.

Nervous?

She was rarely nervous, except…

Except when she was with Logan.

But he isn’t here, is he?

He was probably in his stateroom conducting business calls and working on his vacation—

Nope. There he is.

Standing by the dessert bar, Logan towered over the petite woman dressed in the shortest mini skirt that Marie had ever seen. Shorter than a tennis skirt, for sure.

She was cute.

Logan seemed animated, telling a story, being lively and funny, as per usual—except during their last days of marriage together when he wouldn’t even smile at her. Then, he had only laughed when he wasn’t with Marie. Wouldn’t that be considered a cruel and unusual punishment?

Now he laughed heartily with that little woman.

Marie tried to look outside the window next to her table. Grey, overcast skies the color of everyday Seattle went along nicely with her mood right now. Over the water, in the distance at the wharf, giant cranes stood still, waiting for their next call to labor.

Maybe it would be sunny, for a change, the next time she came to town—if there was ever another reason to visit Seattle than to settle into the gloom of a loveless marriage that once was.

She remembered their last cruise together—just Logan and her—sailing through the Aegean Sea in their attempt to resuscitate a dead marriage. They had fought for two days onboard that yacht. By the third day, they both had gotten off at Mykonos, and went their separate ways, the rest of the paid cruise drowned in the Mediterranean. Marie flew to her mother’s house in Marseilles, and the next day, she filed for a divorce.

All that time, Jonas had stayed behind in Atlanta with his doting nanny.

Ah, dark days indeed.

Why am I thinking about the past?

Shouldn’t I give it to God?

Why couldn’t she compartmentalize this part of her life like she had compartmentalized different aspects of her career, playing roles in deep undercover, taking on criminals all over the world, living her life as ordinarily as possible?

But she could not put her ex-husband away. Thoughts of him, memories of him, times with him had all persistently occupied Marie’s mind for the last three years. No matter where she had been, what she had done, he had followed her around in her head.

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