Read Online Let Me Love You Again (An Echoes of the Heart Novel Book 2) by Anna DeStefano - Free Book Online Page B

carrying on your family’s legacy. I’m glad my daughter got to see this place. I really didn’t mean to be so rude.”
    Ginger turned from watching Camille, too. She fiddled with the pearls she wore at the neck of a silk sweater twinset. A multi-karat diamond twinkled atop the thick platinum band on her wedding finger.
    “I can understand the long day part,” she mused. “The whole town is talking about it. Honey, I’d have sprinted for the hills, too. Both times.”
    Selena’s mind blanked, not following at first. She was so tired, she was practically dead on her feet. And it was only four o’clock.
    “Oliver being back,” Ginger explained. The bell atop the door jingled, announcing another customer’s arrival. “It’s going to stir up a lot more people than just you. The town’s buzzing about you two meeting up at the hospital this morning, after he drove right up his parents’ driveway earlier and just stood there, staring at you.”
    “Which is why”—Belinda breezed to their side, joining the conversation without missing a beat—“I thought we’d discussed you steering clear of the hospital while he’s in town. Why would you go and open yourself and Camille up to even more gossip?”
    The bell over the door chimed again.
    “Let me go see if I can help Camille make her selection.” Before she slipped away, Ginger exchanged smiles with the new mother and daughter who’d come in, the little girl skipping along instead of walking.
    “Tennis shoes,” Selena called after her. “Something that will last through a summer of playing outside in my mother’s yard.”
    “So,” Belinda said, “you’ve definitely decided to stay awhile longer?”
    The other mother glanced over from the table of dress shoes, the patent leather kind that little girls in the South wore to church on Sundays. The woman looked away when she realized she’d been caught eavesdropping.
    A growing part of Selena would have liked nothing better than to pack her and her daughter’s things and leave Chandlerville by nightfall.
    “We don’t seem to have a choice but to stay,” she said to Belinda, keeping her voice down and praying her mother followed suit. “Parker’s got his lawyer delaying the divorce again, asking for new briefs about joint assets. Something about categorizing them differently. The school year is almost over, taking my anemic income stream with it until I can find something else. Parker’s and my joint accounts are still frozen. And I haven’t saved nearly enough yet to get me and Camille set up with a place of our own.”
    “He called again?” Belinda turned her back to their still-avid audience. When Selena nodded, Belinda sighed. “Why do you encourage him? Stop answering when you know it’s him.”
    “I was leaving the hospital.” Selena stared the other mother down until the woman finally moved herself and her child across the store. “I was distracted. Besides, I can’t risk agitating him more than he already is. He’s swearing he’ll hold things up until I agree to fly myself and Camille back to New York to meet with him in person.”
    “The more your lawyer has to do to get you out of this marriage, the less money you’ll ever see from whatever settlement you’re awarded.”
    Selena shrugged, despising the no-win limbo her husband and his financial resources had exiled her to.
    It had all been explained to her. Why a judge’s ruling would be better than a protracted trial. How a mediator might be an option. But that would require either Parker’s agreement or a judge’s order, and so far Parker’s attorneys had prevented the latter. And while she didn’t owe her own legal team a dime until a settlement was awarded, they’d take their fee out of whatever she received. And that bill was growing at an alarming rate, given that Selena had filed to end her marriage six months ago.
    “I hate this, Mom. Owning nothing of my own, having nothing to offer Camille that Parker doesn’t