Warning: Do not read this post if you haven’t read The Cold Wife yet and plan to.  This is a huge spoiler.

There was only one ending I could have for this book.  Justin, the hero, needed to know that Carrie loved him, even if he didn’t have any money.  This was especially important since she had to marry him because her father lost his money and wanted to see her financially secure.  While she came around to accepting Justin before she learned he went bankrupt, I wanted to her accept him even though he was poor.

I’m not sure how many people liked the ending, but it was the best possible ending for the book.  Justin would never have been as assured of her love without it, and it paved the way for him to work at the bank by the time An Inconvenient Marriage started.  An Inconvenient Marriage was the first book I wrote in the Virginia trilogy.  I wrote An Unlikely Place for Love second (because I was curious about Mrs. Walker, Sue Lewis’ employer in An Inconvenient Marriage).  After I wrote An Unlikely Place for Love, I decided to write The Cold Wife because Justin Monroe was one of my favorite characters in An Inconvenient Marriage.  While writing it, I incorporated Mr. and Mrs. Walker (Chad and Kate were the hero and heroine in An Unlikely Place for Love), and I was able to line up how Jake Mitchell got his position as the vice president of the bank (which is where he begins in An Inconvenient Marriage).

As a side note, I did show Jake Mitchell’s heartbreak in An Unlikely Place for Love.  Jake Mitchell is one of my all-time favorite characters (because I thought he was extremely complex–which I should talk about in a future post).  Even with the complaints I’ve received on An Inconvenient Marriage, it is one of my personal favorites, and it was the book that showed me I could pull off a comedy.  Anyway, I wanted to see a part of Jake’s past where he was young and just starting out as a teller in the bank (and also how he handled the situation with Joanna and his mother’s death).

Back to The Cold Wife…

Justin would never have been sympathetic toward Sue Lewis and her family’s financial hardships had he not been bankrupt.  He needed to face it first so he could be a good source of support to Jake.  And I gave Justin his money back.  He wasn’t rich by the time An Inconvenient Marriage occurred, but years later, he was.