Chapter 9

The next several weeks are almost a blur. Nothing was calm or slow or laid back; time flew by. We spent three days shopping for new clothes at the malls in Jefferson City. I found a family clinic to my satisfaction and approved the prescription for birth control for Sarah. Hank made arrangements for me to meet with his attorney and subsequently with a prominent divorce attorney who began the process of marriage dissolution on my behalf. Two days after the first meeting with the attorney, his investigator was able to secure photographs of Scott and Andrea both entering and leaving his motel room with time stamps to substantiate the allegation. At the attorney's urging, I filed a suit against Scott's employer naming them as a responsible party to the alienation of Scott's affection toward his spouse. This suit, based upon a very obscure provision of a Missouri law, prompted a flurry of legal activity and communications and resulted in Scott offering a very generous financial settlement and his employer agreeing to the full five million dollar amount of the suit. The three of us are now financially secure, and after a thirty day waiting period, I will officially be divorced.

The influx of cash created many options for us, including having the children attend boarding schools in preparation for college, but both children concluded that they would be much happier here, even if it meant sacrificing some unknown element of their potential education. Hank and I continued to share a bedroom. The change in the atmosphere and passion in our bedroom activities was evident to each of us. Gone was the facade of having sex just to have sex. We made love, real love, with a passion and intensity that I had never experienced in all my years married to Scott. For the very first time, I could feel that my love was being returned, and that feeling created an upward spiral of emotional involvement. The more that I responded to his love making and passion, the greater was his desire to please me. It was a circle of effects, each one driving the other to higher levels. There were many nights when our lovemaking drained him, literally drained him of semen.

Before the thirty day period had elapsed, the children announced, jointly, at dinner one evening, that they would like to remain here in Hank's house and not venture off to some other place for school. The next day we enrolled them in the local school, innocently creating quite a stir among some of the school office employees. When I listed Hank's address as our place of residence, eyebrows were raised. Apparently the address of this area's most eligible bachelor was well known among at least this group of women. At Hank's suggestion, I chose not to elaborate on the why's and how's of our living at Hank's house. Even so, as I moved from one person to another in the school offices, I could see other women whispering and some actually pointing at me. One of the clerks was brazen enough to ask me if I was the woman whose husband lived in Arizona. Word travels fast in a small town but I had already decided to allow whatever "news" there was to become news and then fade away quietly. I answered that yes, my ex husband did live in Arizona, which brought the immediate response verifying if I was the one that got all that money in the divorce suit. I didn't say anything else. Anticipating that whatever school system the children enrolled in would eventually require the records from their previous schools, I had asked their schools to send them to Hank's house after the trouble began. I presented the school records to the new registrars and within hours, completed everything necessary to enroll the kids.