Chapter 12
Amarriage takes years to build and about six weeks to file, which feels like it should be the other way around, and isn't.
I stayed at Dana's that first stretch, in her spare room with the treadmill she never used, two sisters and two unused pieces of cardio equipment between us.
I let her lawyer become my lawyer, a woman named Frances who wore reading glasses on a chain and had a handshake like a car door and who, when she saw what Dana and I brought her, the documented fraud, the dental board file, the two years of texts, the practice books I'd known since the strip mall, set her coffee down and said, "Well. You've done most of my job for me."
Here is the thing about divorcing a man whose insurance fraud is under active state investigation. He cannot afford to fight you.
Spencer's whole strategy, the moment the board got involved, became survival, became keeping his license, became not going to prison.
And a man fighting for his license does not also pick a fight with the wife who handed the reporter the records and could, at any moment, sit for a deposition about exactly how much he knew and when.
Frances never had to threaten it. She just had to let it sit in the room, the way Dana lets a thing sit, and Spencer's lawyer, a tired man who clearly wished he'd taken the week off, advised his client to be reasonable.
I went to exactly one settlement meeting, because Frances said it would speed things up to have me in the room, that men move faster when the wife they underestimated is sitting across the table not saying much, and she was right.
It was in a conference room with a water pitcher nobody touched and a box of tissues nobody needed, and Spencer came in looking like he hadn't slept since the gala.
He had a new haircut he could no longer afford and a tie I'd bought him for a Christmas he'd spent texting Brielle, and he sat down across from me and tried, God help him, he tried the old face. The warm one, the keeps-me-honest one, like there was still a version of this where I'd soften.
I drank my water. I let Frances and his tired lawyer move the papers around. And at one point Spencer leaned forward, past his own attorney's quiet "Spencer, don't," and said to me directly, low, "Kel, we don't have to do it like this, we were good for a long time.”
And I looked at the man across the conference table, and I did not raise my voice, because I had learned a year ago in my own kitchen that the quiet thing is the total thing, and I said, "We were never good, Spencer. I was good. You were comfortable."
And his tired lawyer wrote something on a pad, and Frances let it sit, the way you let a thing sit, and twenty minutes later I had the house.
So Spencer was reasonable. Spencer, who had given my chair and my future and my whole brightest-smile life to another woman, was suddenly extremely interested in an amicable resolution.
I got the house. The chicken house with the wraparound porch and the squeaking counters and the bad-energy laundry room, free and clear, because the house had too much of him in it for me to want to live in but exactly enough equity for me to want to sell.
And I did, eventually, sell it, to a young couple who loved the porch, and I did not tell them about the streetlight.
I got half of what was left of the practice, which was not much, because a practice with frozen claims and a board investigation is worth roughly the price of its aquarium, but I made sure, in the settlement, that I got the aquarium.
I got Bitey.
In the negotiated dissolution of the marriage of Spencer and Kelly Jacobs, item fourteen, the two-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium and its livestock.
I took the tank, and I took the mean fish, the yellow tang who'd killed every rival Spencer ever put in his water and ruled alone, because there has never in the history of the world been a more fitting trophy.
Bitey lives in Dana's sunroom now, where he is happy, or as happy as a creature built entirely out of spite can be, which I have learned, this year, is actually pretty happy.
I visit him. I am not ashamed to say I visit a fish. I tap the glass the way you're not supposed to, and he charges it, furious, magnificent, undefeated, and I tell him he's a good boy, which he is not, which is the whole point of him.
Spencer kept his license, in the end, barely, on probation, with a fine that ate the rest of the practice and a monitoring agreement that follows him like a smell. He sold the building.
The mural got painted over by whoever moved in, the sunrise and the gold script and Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smiles, all of it under two coats of landlord beige.
Last I heard he was an associate at a discount chain two towns over, the kind in a strip mall, which I did not arrange and could not have arranged and which I think about sometimes with a feeling so peaceful it frightens me.
Spencer back in a strip mall, where we started, except this time he's an employee and there's no Kelly doing the books.
No Kelly to catch the corners before he cuts them, no Kelly at all.
And Brielle.
Brielle and Spencer did not survive it, which I'd love to tell you I planned, but I didn’t. I just understood them, because here is what happens to a loyalty like theirs the second it costs something.
The board named her in the investigation.
The texts where Spencer told his lawyer it was all her, the keystrokes were hers, did not stay private, because nothing stays private, and Brielle, who had given two years and a future and a green dress to a man who called her the face of his practice, learned the way I learned.
Except she learned faster and in public, exactly how loyal Spencer Jacobs is when the bill comes due.
He threw her to the board to save his license.
She gave a statement saying he directed everything, which was also true, and the two of them spent the back half of that summer pointing at each other in legal filings, the great love of the Residence Inn reduced to a he-said-she-said about billing codes.
Somewhere in there the loyalty I'd envied so much, the nobody-but-you, the thing that had passed my test and broken my heart, just evaporated.
Because it had never been loyalty at all.
It had just been two people who hadn't been caught yet.
The green teeth, by the way, faded in about a week. I'd designed them to. I greened her smile and not her life. Her life she and Spencer wrecked themselves, with the fraud, with the codes, with two years of mice in the walls.
All I did was hold up a light, the merciless white kind, and let the room see what was already there. The dye washed out. The story didn't.
That's the difference between cruelty and a verdict, and I have made my peace with which one I delivered, on the nights I think about the sound she made, which I still do, sometimes. The small high human sound, because I am not a monster, whatever Dana says, fondly.
Brielle left Cedar Hollow before the leaves turned. I don't know where she went and I have, I'm proud to say, never once looked.
Dana took me out the night the divorce was final, to the burger joint, on purpose, full circle, two milkshakes in the parking lot where it all got planned on a napkin I still have folded in a book at home.
We didn't say much. We didn't need to.
At one point Dana looked at me over her spoon and said, "You know what the wild part is," and I said what, and she said, "you did the whole thing.
All of it. The books, the chemistry, the timing, the reporter, the napkin.
I helped, I'll take credit for the catfish and the cloud drive, but the revenge, Kel, that was all you. I just drove the car."
"You always just drive the car."
"Somebody has to drive the car." She finished her milkshake. The same drive-thru kid was there, or one exactly like him, in the same paper hat, watching two women laugh in a parked Honda, deciding we were fine.
We were fine. For the first time in longer than I wanted to count, sitting in lot with my sister and a melting milkshake and a mean fish waiting in her sunroom and not one single thing left on the napkin to do, I was fine.
I was thirty-nine by then. Single. The owner of a house I was about to sell and an aquarium I'd never give up.
I had no idea, that night in the parking lot, that the best part of the whole story hadn't happened yet, and that it had nothing to do with revenge at all, and that it was going to walk into a hardware store I wandered into on a Tuesday because I needed a particular kind of hinge and Foster's was the only place in three towns that still stocked it.
But that's the next part.