Chapter 33
Desperate People
Andi
I woke the morning after Bridget's, feeling something I hadn't felt in days. Solid. Well, that and a throbbing in my head that called for some aspirin and water.
Sitting up, I took stock of my situation.
Things were still a mess, and I wasn't pretending otherwise.
But for the first time in days, I didn't feel like I was about to fall through the floor.
A night at Bridget's with wine and someone who'd known me forever had done what nothing else could—given me back my balance.
I made coffee in my own kitchen for once, standing at the counter in yesterday's socks while my percolator did its thing, and let myself just be still for a minute.
Outside, Southie was already going. Delivery trucks, a dog walker with too many dogs, two guys arguing about parking in the kind of way that was either going to end in a handshake or a fistfight. Normal Tuesday morning stuff.
I had the day off. Marcus was opening. I'd given myself the morning deliberately—not because I thought I'd sleep in, because I never sleep in, but because I knew I needed the kind of quiet that the shop didn't allow. The kind where you could actually hear yourself think.
I poured my coffee and sat at my kitchen table, and thought about Charisse.
She'd texted me the night before. A voice note, actually. Gavin had let her use his phone, and she'd sent me a thirty-second note. It was a little stilted in the way kids get when they're trying to be formal about something that matters to them.
Hi Andi. It's Charisse. Dad said I could send you a voice note to say sorry about how things happened at Nonna and Poppy's.
I didn't mean to make you feel sad. I wanted you to know that I think you're awesome, and I really like you, and you’re so cool.
Anyway. I hope you're not still sad. You're one of my favorite people. Okay. Bye.
Then a quick note followed, with her voice chiming in again.
Hi Andi. It's me again. Um, I mean Charisse. So, I wanted to know if we could go to the Common together. There’s like this shakes and spears in the park thing—
Gavin’s voice chimed in Shakespeare, honey.
Yeah. That’s what I said. Anyway. Do you want to go? Like, maybe next week? It sounds fun. We could totally do a picnic! Okay. Well, yeah. Just let me know. Okay. Bye. Again. Because I said bye before. But I should say it again. Because you should never hang up without saying bye. So—uh—like. Bye!
I'd listened to the messages three times before I could respond. Then I'd sent back a voice note of my own telling her she had absolutely nothing to be sorry for, that she was one of my favorite people too, and that I would absolutely love to Shakespeare and Shakes and Spears in the park with her.
She'd responded with seventeen emojis. I didn't need to understand all of them to get the message.
I sat with my coffee and looked out the window and thought that maybe this was going to be okay. I knew it wouldn't be easy and definitely not clean. But it was going to be okay.
We had a great lawyer. We had documentation. We had the right motivations. It was what we needed to handle everything.
Rebecca could file whatever she wanted. I was still here.
My phone rang at half past ten. Gavin. I picked up on the second ring.
"Hey." His voice had that careful quality I'd learned to recognize. It was the one that meant he was holding something steady that didn't want to stay that way.
I set my mug down. "What happened?"
Not a question.
"Victor got the formal filing this morning." A beat. "Rebecca's attorney submitted it late yesterday, and it came through today."
"Okay," my voice sounded calmer than I felt. "And?"
"It's...aggressive." He exhaled slowly. "More than we expected. Victor wants to meet. Today, if we can."
"I can do today."
"There's something else," He paused. "Victor's going to walk us through the full filing at the meeting. But I wanted to tell you first. Well, at least before you read it cold in his office. There are allegations in there about you specifically."
The floor did that thing again. The slight shifting.
"What kind of allegations?"
"The kind Rebecca's attorney made sound clinical and professional." His voice went tight. Then, sharper—controlled but unmistakably angry. "I read it twice. I may have thrown my phone across my office."
A breath. He steadied himself. "They’re complete fabrications."
"Gavin."
"I know. I just... I needed you to know before we walked in there. I didn't want it to blindside you in front of Victor."
I appreciated that. I did. But I also knew myself well enough to know that I needed to see it before I sat across a conference table from anyone. I needed to have my reaction somewhere private first.
"Can you send it to me? Is that okay?"
A pause. "Yeah. Give me a minute."
I had it in my email moments later. Fourteen pages with Mitchell's firm letterhead at the top and language so careful and measured it almost obscured what it was actually saying.
Almost.
I read it standing at my kitchen counter because I couldn't sit down.
The first few pages were standard. It outlined the request for custody modification petition, grounds for filing, and the existing arrangement outlined in flat legal language.
Gavin's primary custody during the school year.
Rebecca's summers and alternating weekends. Numbers and percentages, and dates.
Then page four.
The Petitioner asserts that the Respondent has introduced a third party, Andrea Doyle, into the child's life in a manner that is disruptive to the child's emotional stability and sense of routine.
By page six, I was a destabilizing presence.
By page eight, I was alienating a child from her mother.
By page ten, the grocery store had been reframed into a pattern of intimidation—"appearing at locations where the Petitioner was present," behavior characterized as threatening and designed to cause emotional distress.
By the last page, my full name had been repeated enough times that it felt less like documentation and more like an indictment.
I set my phone face-down on the counter and stood there for a second with my hands flat against the cold laminate.
I'd known this was coming. Victor had told us she'd file. Gavin had warned me that there were allegations. I'd walked into the last few weeks knowing Rebecca was building something and that it was aimed at me.
But seeing it. In writing. With my full name repeated through so many pages, like I was a problem to be solved.
That landed differently.
It wasn't the accusations themselves that got to me.
I knew they were lies. Victor knew they were lies.
The security footage knew they were lies.
What got me was the sheer audacity of it.
The cool, practiced way Rebecca had taken the truth and flipped it so completely that I was the unstable one, the threatening one, the one causing harm.
I picked my phone back up and scrolled to Gavin's name.
"I read it," I said when he picked up.
He was quiet for a beat. "Yeah."
"She called me a destabilizing presence." My voice was flat.
"I know."
"She said Charisse expressed confusion about my role." I laughed—short and humorless. "Gavin. That's a lie, right? Charisse hasn’t said anything like that to you, has she?"
"Not at all. Andi, it's all a complete fabrication."
"And she said you've been prioritizing our relationship over one-on-one time with Charisse." I pushed off the counter and started moving, the way I always did when something needed to work itself out of my body. "These are all lies! Is she delusional? What’s her game here?"
"Victor flagged all of it." His voice was careful. Steady. He'd clearly already had his reaction and come out the other side. "He said the language is emotionally driven. That it overreaches in ways that will be apparent to the judge. He used the word desperate."
Desperate. I stopped pacing. Stood in the middle of my kitchen.
A desperate person makes mistakes. And mistakes reveal what they're afraid of. The scales were tipping in our favor. Victor had it right—Rebecca was flailing. I inhaled slowly, feeling the kitchen floor become solid beneath my feet again.
"What time is the appointment with Victor?"
"Two o'clock. His office in the Financial District."
"I'll meet you there."
"Andi." His voice softened. "You okay?"
I considered the question honestly. My hands had stopped shaking somewhere in the last thirty seconds. The cold anger that had moved through me reading the document had burned itself down into something harder and quieter and considerably more useful.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm okay."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure." I reached for my coffee mug. Still warm. "She's trying to scare me off, Gavin. But all she did was show how scared she is. That's not nothing."
A beat of silence. Then, quietly, "No. It's not."
"So let's go see Victor." I set the mug down. "And let's figure out how to use it."
I got there ten minutes early. Victor's office was on the twentieth floor of a building on Federal Street.
I looked around at his office. It said competent and serious without trying to intimidate you with it.
Clean lines, good light, a conference table that had probably seen a lot of difficult conversations and absorbed all of them without comment.
Victor was already at the table when the assistant showed me in. Gavin stood when I entered, crossed to me, and pressed a kiss to my temple before I even had my coat off.
"Hey," he said quietly.
"Hey."
Victor gave me a nod, an efficient, already-thinking-ahead kind of nod. He had a copy of the filing open in front of him, tabbed and annotated in a way that told me he'd been at this since it hit his inbox.
"Ms. Doyle." He gestured to the chair beside Gavin. "Good. Let's get started."
I sat down. Pulled the filing up on my phone so I could follow along. Looked across the table at Victor's marked-up copy and the neat stack of folders beside it.
Rebecca had filed all these allegations. All it showed was her desperation dressed up in legal language. Victor had flagged every single one.
I put my phone down, folded my hands on the table, and listened.
We had work to do.