Free DOUBLE KNOT by Gretchen Archer Page B

her: fault or no-fault. I’m a little of a divorce expert, having been
     through a few. Okay, three. Three divorces (humiliating), two previous marriages (even
     more humiliating), and in all that only one ex-husband. (Humiliating all the way around.)
     (But I’m not one to dwell on the past.) (What’s done is done.) (Move on.) Fantasy
     wasn’t a divorce expert. She’d been married to the same man, the father of her three
     sons, for fifteen years. She had an accidental affair with a psychotic surgeon and
     it cracked her marriage wide open. With this news, it looked like there’d be no repairing
     it.
    “I don’t know the details.” No Hair rubbed his bald head. “She’s not talking. Not
     that I’ve heard from her for her to talk.”
    “She hasn’t called at all?” I asked.
    “Not only that, she’s not taking my calls.”
    “Mine either.” She returned text messages in the middle of the night. She returned
     emails days later. Obviously, she didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ll go knock on
     her door,” I said. “I’ll just show up and make her talk. And I’ll do it as soon as
     I see my husband for five minutes, check in with Bianca, and bottom line, I need more
     hours in the day.”
    “Me and you both,” he said. “When we ever get this Probability business out of the way and before you have the babies, I’ll need your help restructuring
     this team. I can’t do this alone. I haven’t been home in time for dinner in two months.
     I haven’t had a day off in three. Grace is about to have a fit.”
    I felt my eyes sting. “I’m so sorry, No Hair.”
    He placed a big meaty paw over my hand. “This isn’t on you. But I do need this boat
     business out of the way so I can have my life back.”
    “Don’t you call it a ship?” Sniff.
    “Does it make any difference?”
    “The difference is a ship can carry a boat but a boat can’t carry a ship.”
    “Why does it matter?”
    “It’s just, you know,” I said, “the right word versus the wrong word.”
    “How long do you want to talk about this, Davis?”
    I picked at my Pea in a Pod sweater. “I’m done.”
    “When we get off the ship , you’ll be on maternity leave, Baylor’s pretty much set with Bradley, and Fantasy’s
     going to have to decide if she’s coming back to work or not. Thank goodness I still
     have you for a few weeks.” He tapped a stack of Probability files. “I need you to dig up dirt on these people.”
    “Again?” This was back when the babies had plenty of room to lunge and lurch. One
     or both did one or both. It was hard to tell. “Whoops!” I sat back and watched.
    “I can’t imagine,” No Hair said.
    “Swallow two squirrels,” I said. “It’s just like that.”
    “No thank you.” He leaned in. “Hello little Jeremys! It’s Uncle Jeremy.”
    My hands hopped all over the babies trying to cover their ears. “No Hair, stop scaring
     them.”
    Since the day we told No Hair about the babies, he’s worn me out asking me to name
     them Jeremy. Both of them. Jeremy.
    “What if we have girls, No Hair?”
    “It’s the twenty-first century, Davis. Why don’t you know what you’re having?”
    “We don’t want to know.”
    “Well, Jeremy works both ways. If you have a girl, or two girls, just spell it with
     an I.”
    “Really, No Hair? Twin girls both named Jeremy with an I? No.”
    “Why not?”
    We’d had this conversation countless times and we had it again today until I picked
     up a Probability passenger dossier and smacked him with it. Which led us back to work.
    “We’ve got the usual,” he said. “Hedge fund, dot-com, real estate, big money.”
    “I know already. I could recite the list in my sleep. Why do you need me to look at
     them again?” I’d run them through the wringer ten times already.
    “I don’t,” he said. “I want you to run backgrounds on their guests and their personal
     security. Let’s see what pops. The fifty suites have two guestrooms and