It was the same when they spent time with her parents, which wasn’t often enough these days. Kyle would traipse around after her father whether he was searching for wild artichokes or foraging for fruit most people never gave a second glance to. He could fill his basket with wild mushrooms before she had even picked half a dozen. It was like watching a younger version of her father and she couldn’t be prouder of him.
“It’s the way you raised me. Anyway, I’d love to go to the farm. Anything to get out of the city.” He hooked a leg over his knee and looked out the window at the lights of the office building in front of them. The night cleaners were going from office to office, turning the lights off and on as they worked randomly all over the fourth floor. “I was going to ask if I could go and stay for the school holidays anyway. If you let me go there now, I’d only miss a week and you know how we never do anything in the lead up to holidays anyway.” He held up his hand as she started to protest. “It would give you and Cole some time to yourselves to try and sort things out, Mum. I don’t want to get in the way, know what I mean?”
It made sense and it hurt Lena to know it was true. Besides, did she really want Kyle around if things got nasty? She hoped they wouldn’t, but the dread she felt before wasn’t going away. Where did he get his smarts from? Obviously wasn’t me. “Might be a good idea. I’ll ring Nona and tell her to expect you on Saturday. I’ll take the weekend off and drive you up there. It’ll be nice to have some time for just the two of us.” She ruffled his hair and dropped a kiss on the almost dry dark curls. Thank goodness he had inherited her Italian genes and not those of his father who was nothing more than a botched attempt at a grown up affair gone wrong. She’d been so gullible when she was younger. Moving to the city was the biggest mistake of her life. She hadn’t been ready for it, but Lena would never trade her son for anything, including the beautiful restaurant she had built up since then. She had some hard decisions to make and it looked as though a visit to her lawyer was the first stop. Seems as though not much had changed since that disastrous affair.
She brought her mind back to the present as Joel spoke again. “The one we got for the bank a few months ago will still hold true. I checked and valuation team said there would be no change, not in this economical climate. I took the liberty of sending his lawyer a proposal after our last phone conversation.” He took his glasses off, put them down on his desk and rubbed his eyes. “Sit down, Lena. This gets worse I’m afraid.”
“How can it possibly get any worse than it is?” She did as he asked, her hands gripping the leather of the chair, her short clipped nails digging in to give herself a sense of stability.
“He wants you out this weekend.” Joel leaned back in his chair watched her.
“What the hell? Are you kidding me?” That was how. She ran a shaking hand through her hair, and twisted a lock around her fingers as the words hummed in her head. Her mind spun, the jagged thoughts out of control and scattered all over the place. It was her restaurant. She’d been the one to build it up from nothing when Kyle was a baby. She’d started off doing catering a couple of nights a week for locals in Sydney and eventually her name had gotten around enough to keep her busy the four nights a week she had a sitter for her son.
Eventually she was convinced to set up a small restaurant in a back street in an area not popular with the masses, but they’d come. Before too long she was booked solid for weeks ahead and Lena knew she’d found her feet after a rocky start. Her mix of Australian and Italian cooking gathered a large following that only grew over time. Cole came on the scene when she decided to bring in another cook to help her out when she was so busy she could no longer cope on her own. She’d thought life was perfect.
Lena blinked and looked over the desk between them, still stunned at his statement. Not possible; it just wasn’t. “This week? But what about all my stuff? Where the hell am I supposed to go?” That was my home. What are we going to do?
“He’s made a list of things you aren’t to take as they will impact on the business.”
“Damn him. He wants to take everything from me.” She closed her eyes, gulping in large breaths to try and keep the tears at bay. How had this gone so bad so fast?
“Cole has said if you fight him on any of this, he will go for custody of Kyle. He legally adopted him when you got married so he has every right to do so. The fact that
