His Third Wife Read online

  Also by Grace Octavia

  What He’s Been Missing

  Should Have Known Better

  Playing Hard to Get

  Something She Can Feel

  His First Wife

  Take Her Man

  Reckless (with Cydney Rax and Niobia Bryant)

  Published by Dafina Books

  His Third Wife

  Grace Octavia

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Grace Octavia

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  “The New South”

  PART I

  “His Next Wife”

  “His First Wife”

  “Allies and Alpha Males”

  “Desperate Housewives”

  “We’re Still a Family”

  “An Ode to Mercy”

  PART II

  “Old Acquaintances”

  “A Mother’s Love”

  “Hell”

  “Enemy Territory”

  PART III

  “There Are No Good-byes”

  “His Third Wife”

  Epilogue

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  Discussion Questions

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  To my beloved Atlanta University Center.

  To my beloved Atlanta.

  To all those readers who’ve been emailing me since 2008 asking what happened to Kerry and Jamison . . .

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the entire team at Kensington for helping me keep this here show on the road. Thank you all for believing in what I have to say and how I like to say it. To my busy, patient editor, Mercedes Fernandez, who once said, “I don’t want you to lose your voice”: I hear you. I won’t.

  My Dearest Reader,

  Wow! It’s been five years since I wrote His First Wife, and let me tell you, not a month has gone by when I didn’t receive an email, letter, or phone call from readers from Weed, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, wanting to know what happened to my most chic, blue-blood Atlanta couple, Jamison and Kerry. Like I did as I wrote their emotional tale of love found, lost, and reclaimed, readers fell in love with this pair. And not because of their endless drama or insider’s peek at elite black Atlanta, but because of their intense vulnerability, rawness, and sincere dedication to love. Perhaps that’s what made me tell Jamison and Kerry’s story in the first place. Like all of you, I wanted to see reflections of the loves I’ve known. What it feels like to be lied to. How it feels to be the liar. What it’s like to move on. And, yes, why so many times we return to our lovers with open arms. Maybe we want to believe it will last forever. Maybe we know it just won’t. But . . . maybe . . . it will....

  Of course, before I’m a writer, I’m an enthusiastic reader of these stories. So, like many of you, after reading His First Wife, I too wondered, “What happened to them?” And my need to fill this desire (and answer your requests) led me to give loyal readers random “Jamison and Kerry” updates in my other Southern novels like Should Have Known Better. Even then, I still got more letters and even when I responded, I still received more questions asking, “What’s next for Jamison?”

  That’s what leads us, dearest reader, to this novel, the sequel to His First Wife. It’s my answer to those emails and my needs. It’s not just an update; it’s a visitation with old friends, a resolution, a final chapter (hum . . . maybe not). What you’ll find in the next installment in Jamison and Kerry’s tale is scandal, secrets, sincerity, and faith. These characters demanded much from my imagination. And through the writing, as I discovered and rediscovered what made them tick, I kept thinking, “Well, wouldn’t it take this kind of imagination to even dream up what actually happens in our real love lives? How it happens? How it feels? How it never lets us go?”

  I really hope you enjoy this next step in the journey with Jamison and Kerry. I look forward to reading those letters and taking those calls. :)

  Yours, of course,

  Grace Octavia

  “The New South”

  After a predictable rising sun had rolled through hopscotch maps of plantations, crawled along the tips of decaying steeples in suburban enclaves, and made its way to the ambitious stacking skyline that marked Atlanta’s city center, a body was found all akimbo in the middle of Peachtree Street. People who’d come from pollen-covered cars that had been slowed to a crawl in both directions along the venous strip, which connected all of what was being called the official “capital of the New South,” looked to the sky, like maybe the bloody brown mess had fallen from the sun’s fiery rays. One person pointed. Then two pointed. Three. Then four. A reporter arrived. And then a police officer. All pointed to the top of the Downtown Westin. The body in the street in the bloody gray suit had come from there. Had to have.

  One pointing son asked his mother, “Was that a woman up there looking down at us?” Further along in the crowd, a co-worker asked a driver, “Was that a man dressed as a woman standing at the top of the Westin?” A wife said to her husband and then later to a police officer, “It was a woman. A woman in a dress.” Her husband disagreed: “It was a man dressed as a woman. The shoulders were too broad.” Then they started arguing about there being two women up there. Well, a woman and a man dressed as a woman. But some hadn’t seen anything. Just a shadow. Maybe a bird sitting on the edge looking down at the body like prey.

  Soon it was a scene. And someone in a white cloth jumpsuit lifted what was left of the head that had been crushed by the weight of the fall, and in the pieces and fragments of a once familiar face made out a truth. This was no angel that had fallen from the sun to halt rush-hour traffic. It was the new mayor.

  That was when the talk started. When it would never stop. Because that man, the mayor who’d fallen from the top of the Westin to the black tar, was Jamison Taylor. Everything the chocolate side of the city could be proud of and the white side could use as an example of Southern progress. Born poor in the SWATS. A Morehouse man. Fraternity guy. Self-made millionaire. A heart that won the old guard. A voice that had vowed to repave the very street that had become his deathbed. A soul that wanted everything he could imagine. And he was dead. The city dressed in black for the funeral. And from the boardrooms in Buckhead to the lunch counters at the Busy Bee and Chanterelle’s in the West End, chatter was king. There was a first wife. A new wife. A mother. A son. A fat pig’s belly worth of secrets. A mess of shadows that everyone thought they could see clearly. Politics at its finest. Headlines.

  But that was just the tipping point of it all. Stories like that never begin with a body falling from a mid-level hotel.

  PART I

  “. . . to have and to hold, from this day forward . . .”

  “His Next Wife”

  Everything started when a mother came to town. Quiet and all alone, she got off a Greyhound bus across the street from a conveniently placed strip club. Had on fake pearls and a red lace-front wig. Her daughter picked her up in a shiny new Jaguar with two seats and the top down.

  After maybe thirty minutes of silent riding, the mother was standing at the window in the big house—there were pillars out front and all. She was looking away from everything beautiful behind her. Clutching her purse like she wasn’t staying. Thinking. Trying to decide how she should tell her smiling baby girl, who always wanted more than she could hold in her arms, that she ought to get on the next bus and go back to Memphis with her.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t accept the tickets I sent you. First-class flight? I thought you’d like that,” Val, her daughter, said. Maybe she
was sipping her mimosa or waiting for the maid to pour her another glass.

  “Memphis ain’t but a stone’s throw away,” the mother mumbled. Her name was Mama Fee—everyone had always called her that, even before she’d had children. “Takes more time to get on the plane and fly than it does to get on the bus and ride. And I don’t do big birds. Like to see the earth.”

  “That’s old talk. This is a new world.”

  “Is it? Is it really, Val? You tell me.”

  “Yes, Mama Fee. You still act like flying is just for white folks. Or rich folks—”

  “Ain’t said nothing like that.”

  “Well, that’s good, because it isn’t. As long as you can pay, you can play. That’s the Atlanta way.” Val chuckled and looked at Lorna, the maid holding the pitcher of mimosa to her glass, to support the comedy of her play on words with laughter. “I’m just saying, it’s 2012—not 1902!”

  “What does that matter?” Mama Fee asked. “Po’ folks still the same. Rich folks still the same.”

  Lorna was only able to produce a half smile before Val shooed her away with a tired wave. As soon as Lorna stepped over the threshold, the mother turned and looked at her daughter.

  “Seems like you shouldn’t be drinking,” she nearly whispered before turning back to the window. “Not in your condition.”

  “Condition? Please! What do you know about it?”

  “Plenty. Had you and your sisters. Doctor says it’s bad.”

  “No. Doctor says it’s good. Helps to relieve stress. A little won’t hurt the baby at all.” Val downed the last of her drink. There was an audible gulp that resonated with pangs of short nerves or anxiety. “And I need it today—with it being my wedding day and all.” She looked at the big blue diamond on her ring finger. She’d purchased it a week ago with her fiancé’s credit card and full blessing. “I need to relax.”

  Mama Fee was still looking out the window and thinking. The shiny Jaguar was resting in the middle of a circular drive that was filled with perfectly shaped creamy stones and purple pebbles that made the whole world outside the house look like a giant fish tank.

  “Maybe you should’ve waited until the baby was born,” she said. “At least until we could’ve had a proper wedding—your family come. You know? Like Patrice and Rhonda did. Still don’t see why you couldn’t invite your own sisters to your wedding.”

  “Would you stop it? I didn’t invite you hear to go drilling me about everything.”

  “I ain’t drilling you. They’re your sisters. You were in their weddings.”

  “Yeah, and they married big fat losers. Is Patrice’s husband out of jail yet?”

  “You watch your mouth,” Mama Fee said, finally turning to look at her daughter again. But she needed no confirmation that it was Val who could bring up such a thing. Her youngest child had been born spitting fire at anything that didn’t seem to pick her up in some way that she deemed acceptable. This might’ve been considered gross ambition or maybe even unapologetic drive if it weren’t for the fact that sometimes Val’s desire for uplift went beyond frustrated tongue lashings and straight to unmitigated evil—well, the kind of evil a girl from Memphis who’d barely graduated high school could spin.

  When Val was fifteen, Patrice had just finished beauty school and her prized graduation gift was a beauty box filled with emerald and sea foam and lavender and canary eye shadow. Lipsticks of every shade of red and pink. After Val had begged to sit and try just one shadow, paint her lips in one red, Patrice balked and hid the box beneath her bed. The next morning, the rainbow of shadows and lipsticks were floating in a river of bleach on the bathroom floor. Mama Fee nearly killed Val with her switch in the backyard after that incident, trying to teach the girl a lesson. But Val didn’t cry one tear.

  “Patrice’s husband is a fucking jailbird. Don’t blame me for that,” Val said nearly laughing.

  “And what about you? What about your husband?”

  “Fiancé. And what about him?”

  “Well, where is he?” Mama Fee asked, fingering a small Tiffany frame she’d found in the windowsill. It was a picture of a handsome brown man standing beside an older woman at what looked like his college graduation.

  “He had to work this morning,” Val replied.

  “On your wedding day?”

  There was a pause. And then, “You’re picking again.”

  “I’m not picking. I’m just asking. It’s an obvious question.” She held out the picture to Val. “This him?”

  “Yes. Him and his raggedy-ass mama,” Val snarled. “Hate that old bat.”

  “At least you’ve met her. I can’t say the same about her son. Don’t seem right neither. Got to read about him in all those articles you send me. Can’t tell enough about a man just by reading about him. Words don’t make a man.”

  “Damn, Mama Fee! What’s that supposed to mean? Because you’ve never met him, something’s not right? You don’t trust me?”

  “I didn’t say that either, girl. It just means I would like to have known him first—before he married my youngest daughter. Known what kind of man he is. Stuff your daddy would’ve done.”

  Both mother and daughter paused at the mention of a daddy. He’d been long gone. Had been a good man. But had disappeared one evening after leaving a bar following a fight with one of his white coworkers. Everyone had cursed him for leaving Fee alone to raise three girls. They’d never eat right again. There had been rumors of another woman, another family in Kentucky. Soon, Fee had believed these rumors, but then his body had floated to the top of a forgotten old swimming hole at the back of town. There’d been a noose tied to his neck. No genitals left on his body. No one had ever been interviewed, interrogated, or charged.

  “A rich man. A powerful man. That’s what kind of man my fiancé is. That’s what you need to know,” Val finally said in a voice so vindictive it promised some secret punishment for a private vendetta.

  “A man who works on his wedding day?” Mama Fee asked.

  “God, would you just leave that alone? Look, Jamison didn’t want anything big. He just got elected to office. I’m his former assistant. I’m pregnant. The press, they’ll run all over it. They’re still running pictures of his first wife in the newspapers here. ‘Kerry Jackson.’ Fucking press.”

  “The press?”

  “The press. Yes, the newspapers. The fucking websites. I have to think about that. We have to think about that. I’m marrying the fucking mayor of Atlanta, Mama Fee. Jamison Taylor. Not some jailbird like Patrice did.”

  “I know, baby. I heard you a million times before.”

  The sound of the beautiful stones and pebbles cracking beneath tires in the driveway announced a new arrival.

  Val jumped up from her empty champagne flute with amazing ease and stepped quickly to the mirror over the fireplace. She puckered her lips, cleaned her teeth with her tongue, smiled, and was out the front door.

  Mama Fee looked back out the window in time to see the soon-to-be son-in-law she’d never met close his car door and lean into Val’s open arms with a stiff back. He was carrying a laptop in one arm. Had a gym bag draped over the other shoulder. Was wearing sweats. Mama Fee looked from him to the picture in her hand. Alone in the silent room, she looked over her shoulder for the maid and then slid the picture into her purse.

  “You’re late, Jamison,” Val said outside. “We’re going to have to hightail it downtown if we’re going to do this today.” She paused, but he didn’t say anything. “We are doing this today. Right?”

  “Jesus. A million questions. I just got here.”

  “My mother’s here.”

  “I know,” Jamison said. “I bought the bus ticket.”

  Val stood in front of him with her feet firmly planted in the pebbles and stones like a little girl about to cry.

  “So, we’re doing it?” she repeated after recovering with a hand on her hip.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m just asking because we were supposed
to go before the judge earlier and—”

  “We’re going to Forsyth.”

  “Forsyth County? Why? That’s too far away.”

  “It’s just far enough. I can’t risk everyone knowing about this.”

  “They’re all going to know soon. Right?” Val asked, setting off a conversation they’d had most every day since she’d announced she was pregnant.

  “Yes. I just need to keep this quiet now. Until we’re married. Then I can release a statement about you and the baby. I need to control the situation. Get in front of it. I’m still dealing with Ras’s shit. And Jeremy with those hookers in Biloxi. I need some time out of the headlines.”

  “Fine. Well, where’s your mother? Where’s Tyrian?”

  “Mama said she’ll meet us at the courthouse,” Jamison explained. “She didn’t want to risk blowing my cover.”

  Val smiled at this lie. She knew Jamison’s mother didn’t like her. His mother actually told Val herself just days after Val started working as Jamison’s assistant. She’d caught Val and Jamison having sex in the bathroom at his office. She didn’t even leave. Didn’t blink at the scene of blushing flesh and scattered office attire. She stood there like a pillar, glowering until Jamison had run away like a little boy. Val tried to be more defiant. It wasn’t her mother. She excused herself out of the stall and went to the mirror to fix her lipstick. Mama Taylor walked up behind her and said two short sentences to Val’s reflection in the mirror: “I smell your shit. More like diarrhea.”

  “What about Tyrian?” Val asked Jamison again.