8. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
Victoria Pryce kept a bowl of butterscotch candies on her desk, and it took me under a minute to work out that they weren’t for the clients.
They were for the children of clients. Ivy had already reached the same conclusion and was installed in the corner armchair with three of them in her lap and a coloring book that Pryce had produced from a drawer without comment, the way you do a thing you have done several hundred times.
“She’s five?” Pryce asked.
“Five and a half. She’ll correct you if you get it wrong.”
“They always do.”
Pryce sat down across from me and opened a leather folder.
She was somewhere well past sixty, in a gray suit that had been made for her and nobody else, with reading glasses shoved up into hair that had gone silver and been left that way deliberately.
Her office sat above a shop on the downtown end that sold overpriced foul-weather gear to people who would never be caught out in weather.
There was a photograph on the wall of her shaking hands with a governor, and the governor looked more nervous than she did.
“Before we start,” she said. “Who knows you’re here?”
“My sister-in-law knows I’m unhappy.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Then nobody.”
“Keep it that way for as long as you can stand to.” She uncapped a pen. “This island runs on information the way other places run on electricity. The day it becomes known, it becomes currency, and you will not be the one spending it.”
“You make it sound like a hostage situation.”
“It’s a summer colony. The distinction is smaller than people think.” She turned a page. “Whose name is on the house?”
“Both of ours.”
“Whose money bought it?”
“His.”
“Whose name is on the New York apartment?”
“Both of ours.”
“Whose money bought that?”
I looked at the photograph of the governor. “Also his.”
“Are you employed?”
“I have a doctorate.”
“That wasn’t the question either, Mrs. Kerrington, and I promise you I’m not being unkind. I ask everyone the same list in the same order because the order is what tells me where the pressure will come from.” She looked up. “Are you employed?”
“No.”
“Since when?”
“Since Ivy.”
“And you left a field you were good at.”
“I left a field I was very good at.”
“Write that down somewhere,” she said, entirely level. “Not for me. For the next time you catch yourself apologizing for the last two years.”
In the corner, Ivy had abandoned the coloring book and was arranging her butterscotch candies into a formation on the arm of the chair. She hummed while she worked, some tune from a movie, and the sound of it sat in that office like a smoke alarm nobody could reach.
“Custody,” Pryce said.
“What about it?”
“Walk me through a Tuesday.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A Tuesday in October. School year, city, nothing unusual happening. Tell me what the day looks like and who does what.”
“I wake her up. I do her hair, which takes longer than it should because she’s decided she has opinions about braids.
I make her breakfast, I walk her to school, I go home, I do the house, I pick her up, I take her to the thing she does on Tuesdays, I make dinner, I do the bath, I read her two books because she negotiates for two, I put her to bed. ”
“And your husband?”
The room got very quiet. Even Ivy stopped humming, though I don’t think she was listening, and I don’t think that made it better.
“He comes home after,” I said.
“After what?”
“After all of it.”
Pryce set her pen down. It was the first time she’d stopped writing since I sat down, and I found that I didn’t enjoy having her full attention.
“Then I want you to hear this from a stranger, because a stranger is the only person you’ll believe,” she said.
“The custody arrangement you would be fighting for in court is the one you already have. You do Tuesdays alone. You have done Tuesdays alone for two years. Nothing about a decree would change your daughter’s week by so much as a bath time. ”
“That’s supposed to be comforting?”
“It isn’t supposed to be anything. It’s the shape of your situation, and you came here to see the shape of it.
” She picked the pen back up. “It does mean that if this goes forward, you will not be fighting him for your daughter. You will be asking a judge to make official an absence you’ve already been living with.
Some women find that clarifying. Some find it worse. I have no view.”
“You have a view.”
“I have twenty-three years of views and I bill for none of them.”
I laughed. It came out wrong, closer to a cough, and I pressed my hand flat against my mouth until it stopped.
“Last question and then I’ll let you go,” Pryce said. “What do you want?”
“A divorce.”
“That’s a mechanism. I asked what you want.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out of it, and the nothing went on long enough that I watched her write a single word on her pad and turn it face-down.
“What did you write?”
“Nothing you’re ready to read.” She closed the folder. “My retainer covers the filing and it also covers whatever this turns out to be instead. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that those are frequently different documents.”
“Is that a professional opinion?”
“It’s a billing practice. My clients prefer the phrase miscellaneous corrections.” She stood, which meant we were finished. “Go home. Eat. Sleep if you can manage it. Call me when you can answer the last question, and don’t call me before.”
“One more thing.” She had her hand on the folder. “Is there anything about your circumstances that would change my advice? Health, money, anybody else involved. I ask because I have been surprised twice in my career and I disliked it both times.”
My hand had gone to my stomach without instruction. I moved it to the arm of the chair.
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”
Victoria Pryce looked at me for slightly longer than the answer required, and then wrote nothing down at all, which I understood even at the time was the more expensive option.
Ivy scrambled down from the armchair with her candies clutched to her chest and crossed the office to hold out her hand, because Bridget had taught her to shake hands with adults and she performed it now with the gravity of a head of state.
“Thank you for the candy,” she said. And then, in exactly the same tone, at exactly the same volume, “are you the lady who’s going to make my daddy live somewhere else?”
I have never wanted a floor to open the way I wanted it in that moment.
Victoria Pryce didn’t flinch, and she didn’t look at me, and she didn’t lie.
“I’m a lawyer,” she said. “I help grown-ups fill in forms. Nobody has filled in anything yet.”
“Oh.” Ivy considered that with her whole face. “That’s boring.”
“It is extremely boring. That’s the entire profession.”
On the stairs down, Ivy put her hand in mine and didn’t say anything at all, which from her was the loudest thing she could have done.
***
Ivy was melting down in the middle of Main Street, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“I don’t WANT to go back to the cabin!” She stomped her foot on the cobblestones. “I want to go to the BEACH!”
“We’ll go to the beach tomorrow, sweetheart. You’re tired. You need a nap.”
“I’m NOT tired!”
“You’re screaming in the street. That’s a sign of being tired.”
“I’M NOT SCREAMING!”
I crouched down to her level and took her hands. She was trembling, her face red and streaked with tears, her whole body vibrating with the exhaustion she refused to acknowledge.
“Ivy. Look at me.”
She looked, her lower lip quivering.
“I know you’re upset. I know this trip hasn’t been what you expected. But I need you to take a deep breath and use your words instead of your yelling voice.”
“I want Daddy.”
My heart cracked down the middle.
“I know you do, baby.”
“Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“He’s-”
“He’s right here.”
I turned, and there was Killian, standing close by with his hands in his pockets and his eyes locked on Ivy. He looked terrible. Unshaven, dark circles under his eyes, his shirt wrinkled in a way that suggested he’d slept in it.
“Daddy!” Ivy launched herself at him, and he caught her easily, lifting her up and holding her tight against his chest. She buried her face in his neck and sobbed, and he just held her, swaying slightly, murmuring words I couldn’t hear.
I stood up slowly, my legs unsteady.
“What are you doing here?”
“I texted you. Asked if I could see Ivy today.”
“I blocked your number.”
“I noticed. I got a new one.”
“That’s intrusive.”
“That’s desperate.”
Ivy pulled back from his neck and grabbed his face in both hands. “Daddy, why aren’t you at the adventure house with us?”
Killian looked at me over her head. I looked away.
“Mommy and Daddy are taking a little break,” he said carefully. “But I’m still your daddy, and I still love you more than anything in the whole world.”
“Breaks are dumb.”
“Yeah. They kind of are.”
He shifted her weight, and that’s when I saw it.
A red mark on the side of his neck, just below his jaw. Dark and distinct against his skin. The exact size and shape of a mouth.
My stomach lurched.
Not the evidence of it, first. The hurt of it.
He’d held our daughter and driven through town to find us with someone else’s mouth on his throat, and my chest folded quietly in half.
I kept my face still because Ivy was right there in his arms, watching us both, but inside I was coming apart at the seams.
The smoothie order, Cordelia’s smug smile, and now this.
“Mommy?” Ivy was looking at me. “Can we do something fun? All three of us?”
“I don’t think-”
“Please? Please please please? I’ll be so good, I promise. No more yelling. I just want to be with both of you.”
She was five. She didn’t understand what was happening between us. She just knew that her family was fractured, and she wanted it to be whole again.
I couldn’t say no to that face.
“Fine. One activity. Then we go back to the cabin.”
“Can we do mini-golf? The one with the pirate ship?”
Killian looked at me. I looked at Ivy.
“Mini-golf it is.”