13. Declan
DECLAN
The bank statement on Mia Vance’s desk says I spent thirty-eight thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars keeping Sasha available to me for six months.
Rent, cash transfers, hotel charges when the safehouse was occupied, meals Avery thought I ate with the club, and the replacement phone Sasha smashed after our first argument all sit in neat rows beneath my name.
Three of those charges are hotel rooms. Avery asked me at that conference table where I had sex with Sasha, and I named only the safehouse and the apartment even though I already knew there were hotels.
I asked the forensic accountant to include the cash I couldn’t prove.
He used the highest amount Sasha ever claimed I gave her and added it once for every week I met her.
I’d rather repay money I may not have spent than make Avery argue over which night cost our marriage more.
Mia turns the statement toward me and keeps one finger beside the total. “The accountant will send the source documents to your wife’s attorney this afternoon. He needs access to the remaining joint accounts, the safehouse expense records, and every device you used from April second onward.”
“Avery isn’t my wife to you.” The correction comes out before I think about why it matters.
Avery is divorcing me. I know that every time I wake in the clubhouse apartment and reach across a bed that has never held her, but hearing somebody else say it makes me want to defend a marriage I destroyed.
Mia lifts her eyes from the page. “She is legally your wife until the court ends the marriage. She is also my client’s opposing party, and I won’t speak about her as if she belongs to you. Which part are you correcting?”
I look back at the total. “Nothing. Keep going.”
The temporary financial order requires both of us to preserve marital assets, disclose everything, and change no beneficiary except where the agreement names the replacement.
Avery asked to be removed from two club-linked policies she never knew existed.
The court requires her to remain on the life insurance that protects the marital estate until division.
My retirement account stays untouched. The accounts I hid from her are no longer hidden, and a stranger who charges by the hour now knows that I bought Sasha a two-hundred-dollar coffee machine while Avery reheated the same cup in our kitchen until it tasted burned enough to strip paint.
The machine isn’t on my timeline either.
I called it safehouse equipment because that sounded better than a gift.
I left the hotels off because I wanted every other answer to sound complete.
Both were choices I made with my hand flat on the paper.
I tell Mia to send the hotel dates and the receipt to Avery’s attorney today, with the word gift written beside the machine, before I find smaller words for either one.
“Your STI panel is complete,” Mia says, setting a sealed copy beside the statements. “Negative across the panel, with the repeat testing schedule attached. Her attorney receives the results, not a message from you about them.”
“I know.”
“You knew yesterday too, and you sent me a draft note asking me to tell Avery you never put her at risk.”
Mia kept it. Worse, I wrote it after a doctor took blood from me and told me everything was negative, as if a clean test could prove I hadn’t made Avery sit in an exam room pregnant and afraid of what I brought home. “I withdrew the note.”
“After I told you it was bullshit.” Mia slides the sealed results onto the outgoing stack. “You did put her at risk. The result changes the medical outcome, not what she had to do.”
“Send the panel. Nothing else.”
She adds my signed affair timeline, travel log, passwords, phone records, safehouse access dates, and the list of every account that paid for Sasha.
Each page has been read to me through the app, checked with the strip from the learning center, and signed after I understood it.
Avery used to mark the places where my name belonged with a small pencil dot.
Mia uses yellow flags. Sasha used to tap the paper with one red nail and laugh when I signed where she pointed.
Three women have sat beside documents I couldn’t read, and I gave the cruelest one the easiest access.
“The bike isn’t listed,” Mia says.
“It will be sold today.”
“You don’t have to sell it to comply. It is a premarital asset if you can establish when you built it and where the parts came from.”
“I need the money back in the marital estate before division.”
“You have cash available to cover the total. Selling the motorcycle isn’t required restitution.
” Mia caps her pen, then studies me without the patience she gives paying clients.
We knew each other before she finished law school, before Avery turned our kitchen table into the only desk where I could admit a page beat me.
Mia knows the difference between a clean solution and a man trying to hurt himself where witnesses can see.
“If you’re selling it because misery feels useful, don’t.
Avery doesn’t get those years back because you lose something your mother touched. ”
The statement lies between us. I can move money from another account and keep the bike.
I can call the sale dramatic, the same way I called Avery’s rules punishment when they first took something from me.
Then the division happens with every dollar restored and the motorcycle remains in my garage, waiting for a Sunday ride with a woman who no longer lives there.
“I paid for Sasha with marital money,” I say. “The cash account exists because my mother left me property and I sold it. If I use that account, I keep the bike and give up nothing that hurts.”
“That doesn’t make pain payment.”
“No. It means I don’t get to pick the money that costs me least. Sell it, deposit the proceeds, and let the accountant credit whatever amount is mine when the court divides the rest.”
Mia watches me long enough to make sure I won’t turn the answer into a speech about Avery.
Then she takes the bill of sale and points to the flagged lines.
“Read it. Call me if the buyer changes one word. Don’t sign in the garage because you recognize the man and feel embarrassed asking him to wait. ”
“I know how to sell a fucking motorcycle.”
“You knew how to hide a six-month affair too. I’m no longer impressed by the confidence you bring to terrible plans.”
I almost tell her to go to hell. I miss being the man nobody corrected twice. Avery liked that man when his certainty stood between her and other people. She hated him when he stood between her and the door. I take the papers instead. “Read the buyer’s name to me. The print is too small.”
Mia reads it aloud without praising me or pretending to pretend it was easy for me to ask.
The motorcycle waits in the marital garage beneath the grey cover Avery bought after catching me polishing water spots with one of her good towels.
I haven’t entered through the house since she left.
Cruz changed the locks under the temporary order, the security code now reports to Mia’s office, and the only key I have opens the outside garage door during scheduled access.
A clerk from the accountant’s office meets me there to photograph the bike, record the odometer, and witness the sale.
Avery arranged that protection through counsel.
Even alone, I don’t get a room where my word is enough.
I lift the cover and find the blue tank without dust. My mother chose the color from a paint card in a body shop that smelled like cigarettes and hot metal.
She rejected seven darker shades because she said a motorcycle shouldn’t look apologetic, then sat on an upturned milk crate while I rebuilt the engine and insulted every bolt I dropped.
The last time she rode behind me, she was too sick to hold on for more than ten miles.
Avery waited at the house with soup my mother refused to eat and the heating pad she pretended she didn’t need.
I had both women then. I treated one loss like proof the other could never happen.
Bones arrives in a pickup with the buyer, a collector from Bloomington who asks respectful questions and keeps his hands off the tank until I tell him he can touch it.
I hate him for that. I hate the clean boots beside my oil-stained floor, the enclosed trailer waiting in the drive, and the careful way he says he understands why I set the price above market.
He thinks I need to know he values the machine.
What I need is for my mother to come through the kitchen door and call me a dumb bastard for selling it.
The accountant’s clerk checks the certified funds against the bill of sale while I use the text-to-speech app on every paragraph. The buyer waits. Bones keeps his hands in his pockets. Nothing happens except that I admit I need help reading my own contract.
“You want a last ride before we load it?” Bones asks, rolling the bike toward the open door after the clerk confirms the deposit instructions.
The engine would start on the first try. I know the pull of the throttle, the place the seat fits beneath me, and the exact complaint the rear brake makes before it warms. One ride would become ten miles, then twenty, and I’d bring it back because running isn’t the same as keeping. “No. Load it.”