Pride and prejudice in s.., p.1
Meet Me in Miami, page 1
MEET ME
IN
MIAMI
Table of Contents
Title Page
Meet Me in Miami
Where we begin...
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Part 2
Peter
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Peter
About the Author
Patricia J. Parsons
Moonlight Press ǀ Toronto
Meet Me in Miami
This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or businesses is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2025 Patricia J. Parsons
ISBN 978-1-998358-03-8
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever—including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise stored in a retrieval system—without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
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This book is for Art.
My muse, my inspiration, my guide.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” ~ Søren Kierkegaard
“... when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.” ~ Marie Kondo
Where we begin...
Manaus, Brazil, The Amazon River
In every ordinary moment, there is an extraordinary illusion. It’s the illusion that what you see is real. You get up every morning and look out your window. What do you see? I don’t mean do you see skyscrapers or a meadow, the ocean or your next-door neighbour drinking coffee on his deck in his underwear. I mean, what are you really seeing?
Is what you think you see real, or is it all just an illusion? Can you be sure that it’s not some kind of fantasy? At best, a mirage? At worst, a deception? But perhaps the most puzzling question of all is this. Is anything in life real at all?
I know how crazy this sounds. It sounds just as crazy to me. The truth is that I’m an inveterate pragmatist, rarely given to pondering deeply about the meaning of life or questioning the way things are. I see what’s in front of me, and I deal with it. But here I am, considering how I could possibly have gotten to this moment and contemplating these things for the first time in my life. And perhaps you would, too, if you were standing at the railing on the deck of a cruise ship staring down into the murky water of the Amazon River in Brazil, wondering how you came to this moment—wondering how the past ten days could possibly have gotten so out of control. Yet, here I am.
I’m so far away from home in this strange place. I’m looking at an odd phenomenon in the water below me. It’s the place where you can see a clean line in the water dividing two rivers that flow alongside one another for six kilometres, never mixing—at least that’s what we’re told. Anyway, I can’t help but think the two rivers are like two people whose lives seem to run in parallel, never really overlapping. Until they do. Here in the Amazon, they call it the “meeting of the waters” because the black water of the River Negro meets the brown water of the Amazon River. One river is cool; one is warm. One is fast; one is slow. One is opaque; one is clear. Like two people who are so close and yet so different.
I’m starting to feel like I’m one of those rivers—so close to the other one and yet so different from it. At the same time, I’m wondering what would happen to that line between the two rivers if I jumped in. If, right this minute, I climbed over the railing like we’re told never to do and jumped in because it occurs to me that such an impulsive act might be just what the doctor ordered. What would happen to that clear demarcation between the two rivers then? Would the waters mix for just a moment, then flow alongside one another, parallel once again or would it make a significant difference? Where would I end up? And I suppose you might well ask, why would I even think about such a thing—jumping off a cruise ship?
Well, I recently heard someone say that mapping out your life might be the dumbest thing we do—that things happen to shape our fate in a way that’s far outside what we could have imagined. I hear a sigh and realize it’s me.
With the heavy mantle of humidity and the stultifying, unrelenting heat pressing down on my head and shoulders, I’m seriously wondering what I’m doing here. But then, how could I have known what would happen? The past ten days hadn’t gone at all as I’d hoped. This was not what I had imagined when this whole thing started. But if I know anything at all, I now know this: things don’t always turn out the way we expect them to. Perhaps life would be a lot simpler if we all just lowered our expectations. Or maybe even stopped expecting things at all. But there were still ten more days to Miami.
One
Eliza
São Paulo, Brazil
I could see the outskirts of the city coming into view as I raised the sunshade on the window beside me in seat 2D on Delta Airways flight 227, fifteen minutes from touchdown in São Paulo, Brazil. It had been a supremely comfortable ten hours since I settled into my pod as we took off from JFK, taking me on an adventure that had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
I finished sipping the dregs of the champagne I’d had with my breakfast. It was helping me to keep the nervousness and that speck of doubt I was still having at bay while I considered how this all started. It was eight weeks ago in a snowstorm on an island in the North Atlantic, at the edge of my world. So very far away from where I was at this moment. But just like with any story, you have to recognize where it really begins, and that wasn’t it.
It started even before that—three months ago, just after I welcomed my first grandchild, my granddaughter Mary-Catherine (a very un-Jewish name, I know, but that’s a long story), forcing me to recognize that being just north of fifty years old did not make me too young to be a grandmother. Although, I still can’t shake the feeling that twenty-one was too young for my daughter, Izzy, to be a mother. Anyway, it is what it is, as the saying goes.
I’d been waiting for the birth to be over before embarking on a task I’d long recognized had to happen. I had to tell Jake, my husband, that our recent separation was about to become permanent. I was going full speed ahead with the divorce we so badly needed to get on with our lives while he dragged his feet, moaning and whining. He must have learned that from his mother, Esther.
I sat back and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the landing gear as it locked into place somewhere underneath me, and I remembered the events that unfolded that day I decided I had to tell him about my decision.
My daughter Izzy—Isabel—had moved back to New York from California earlier the previous summer and into the home the three of us had shared for years on the upper west side of Manhattan, and little Mary-Catherine was born in October. On the afternoon in question, Izzy had taken tiny Mary-Catherine to meet Astrid, Izzy’s best friend. Since I had kicked him out a few months earlier, Jake was living back home with his parents in their palatial residence not more than ten blocks from us. He was coming over because I had told him we needed to talk, and I had promised him we’d revisit the separation thing after the birth of our granddaughter. I had wondered if he’d be bold enough to use his key when he arrived that afternoon, so I sat in the living room, waiting.
I was surprised when the doorbell rang. I suppose I expected Jake to act in a far more proprietary manner since, after all, as he had pointed out to me some months earlier, his parents owned this house before us. It was after that little pronouncement that I’d had to remind him that despite their previous ownership, as a result of his father’s accountant’s tax and legal liability advice (I didn’t even want to know the details at the time—perhaps I should have asked more questions), it was now solely in my name. In addition, over the years, I had made more than a significant contribution to the household, both financially and otherwise. Anyway, there was no sound of a key in the lock. I got up and went into the foyer to open the door when I heard the doorbell chime again.
There stood Jacob Cohen, a man I’d met within weeks of moving to New York City the first week in that fateful September 2001. He was practically hidden behind the most
“These are for you,” he said, thrusting the pile of white roses, baby’s breath and ferns at me. At least he remembered that white flowers were my favourites.
I took the flowers as he walked past me into the foyer, where he shook off the droplets of rain beading down his Burberry raincoat.
“Things look good here,” he said, hanging his coat in the closet as if he had just walked in from a day at work and hadn’t been absent from the premises for almost two months and counting.
“How did you expect things would look?” I said as I passed by him and made my way down the hall and into the kitchen at the back of the house to find a vase. I doubted we had one large enough. I thrust them into a copper pot that I retrieved from the large selection hanging above the island’s work surface before heading back out to get on with the afternoon’s planned activities. I had an agenda, and I had an objective that I intended to achieve.
By the time I arrived back in the living room, Jake had already poured himself a scotch from the selection on the sideboard and was sitting with his feet up on the coffee table, loosening his tie. I have no idea why he was wearing a tie on a Saturday afternoon, but perhaps there had been an emergency meeting at Bluestone Pharma, his family’s business. After all, they were currently facing at least three lawsuits and had brought one against a whistle-blowing doctor. There was always drama in the Cohen clan.
“Why don’t you just make yourself at home?” I said, sarcasm dripping from every word.
Jake ignored me and said, “Why not? It is, after all, my home.”
I could feel my jaw tightening and realized I had to get on with this and get it over with. So, I told him.
“Jake, I’m filing for divorce. This separation has been just the distance we needed for us to see that there is no future in our marriage. My attorney will be sending the papers over to your office, and you can sign them there and courier them back.”
Jake swirled his Baccarat crystal glass—one of the many his mother had given us over the years in her attempt to make me appreciate every expensive thing she worshipped—then sipped his scotch thoughtfully and leaned back with his free arm stretching across the back of the sofa. He swallowed and then looked over at me, where I was now sitting on the facing sofa. “No.” That was all he said before taking another sip. I waited. Nothing.
“No?” I said. “What do you mean, no? No isn’t an answer, nor is it an option.”
“No, Eliza. No. No, I will not let you divorce me. No, I will not sign the papers. No, I will not be Eliza Houlihan Cohen’s ex-husband. Just no.”
I could feel the fury rising. “I suppose your mother told you to come over here and say that to me, didn’t she?” As you may be beginning to understand, I loathed Esther Cohen, the family matriarch whose own husband was a high-powered business tycoon by day and a toadying husband by night.
“No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t. Just so you know, she called you a gold-digging shiksa and that I’d probably be better off without you in my life. Although, I suppose it might be a tad difficult for her to explain to her mahjong friends how her successful son could possibly be getting a divorce. Good thing she won’t have to.” He sipped his scotch meditatively once again. “I suppose that might well be the first time I’ve ever defied my mother.” He seemed so pleased with himself.
I don’t know what made me angrier: that Esther Cohen called me a shiksa when I was, at that moment, a far more ardent Jew than the man sitting in front of me or that her son, Jake, had chosen that moment to develop a spine in the face of his mother’s many loathsome opinions.
I was jolted back into the present moment by the plane’s wheels hitting the runway at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo, the first stop on what I hoped would be an adventure of a lifetime, not to mention the kind of break with reality that might make one believe the illusion, no matter how temporary. I had left the divorce papers on my desk in my office at home. Mine were signed. I knew Jake’s were not.
“Bom dia, Senhora Cohen. Bem-vindo ao Brasil!” The young man standing at the top of the jetway was holding a tablet with my name on it as I disembarked. I was momentarily dazzled at the sight of this stunningly handsome, dark-haired Romeo with a spectacularly sparkling smile. “Hello, Senhora Cohen. Welcome to Brazil!” He was wearing a navy-blue suit with a crisp, open-collared white shirt. For a moment, I thought, If I were just a decade younger ... Then I remembered why I was even in Brazil.
He introduced himself as Carlos. “I will be happy to be your guide from this moment, through immigration and on into the city. We will then go on to your hotel, where you will have a lunch meeting with the esteemed Senhor Ribeiro. I am certain you will enjoy his company.” His broad smile flashed a set of the whitest and most perfect teeth I’d ever seen this side of a Hollywood screen. Dental care must be a big thing here in Brazil.
As tired as I was from the long flight, I was enchanted by this young man. I told him I was delighted to meet him, smiled my best older woman smile, and let him guide me smoothly through immigration to the shiny black Suburban waiting in the parking garage. It reminded me of the truck-like vehicle I’d spent an odd week in with my extended family just last summer on a road trip on the island of Newfoundland. As I considered this for a moment, I realized that the trip I hadn’t even wanted to go on (who wants to spend a week with extended family members you can barely tolerate?) was where this Brazilian trip began in the first place. If I hadn’t gone to Newfoundland, I wouldn’t be here in Brazil. Anyway, that’s a long story, but it made sitting behind the driver by myself as we wended our way through the traffic in this astonishingly mega city that was home to twenty million people feel peculiar.
I had lived in New York City since 2001 after fleeing my home in Canada (fleeing from my family, to be truthful), but it seemed almost quaint now in comparison with São Paulo. I had only one day to spend in this vast metropolis before I had to be in Rio de Janeiro to get on a cruise ship. In Rio, I was meeting a man named Peter O’Brien, a man I hardly knew yet but who was the reason I was even here in Brazil. Indeed, he was the cause of the apprehension I felt as I sat there, knowing I’d be seeing him again in mere days. So, I was going to have to make the most of my single day in this fascinating city. Why, you might reasonably ask, was I in São Paulo when I was supposed to be in Rio? Good question.
The unexpected invitation to embark on this expedition to Brazil came at Christmas, two months ago, when I’d been in Newfoundland (twice in one year!) because my paternal grandmother had inconveniently died several days before the Christmas and Hannukah festivities were about to kick off. While I was there, I once again bumped into Peter, whom I’d met and spent a few days getting to know during the previous summer during that odd family trip to Newfoundland. I was newly separated from my husband, Jake, to whom I’d been married for almost twenty-five years. I suppose I was bound to find an exceedingly handsome, rugged doctor attractive. And the fact that he seemed to find me utterly fascinating was intoxicating for a fifty-year-old woman who had recently joined the ranks of the grandparent brigade. What woman in my situation wouldn’t have been flattered?
By Christmas, Jake and I had been separated for almost two months, and I was proceeding with a divorce, so when Peter suggested I join him on this bucket-list trip to Brazil and the Amazon, as unhinged as it should have been to say yes to a trip with someone I hardly knew, I hesitated for only a moment. A few weeks later, while having a regular catch-up telephone conversation with my long-time editor and friend, Margot Talbot, who had been with me through thick and thin as I developed my reputation as a sought-after cookbook author, I may have mentioned it—several times.
Margot had been bewildered, to say the least. “What about Jake?” she had said. I could hear the confusion in her voice.
What about Jake? I thought. Then I realized I’d probably not told her that Jake and I were separated. So I did.
“Separated? Eliza, hun,” she had said in her usual I-used-to-be-British way, “are you sure you know what you’re doing? Husbands aren’t disposable, you know.”
