Chapter 13 #2
He spoke about Ayanna’s thirty years of employment at the Iverson estate and Errol's commission fees from Halston for one custom piece of furniture in the prior month, executed at premium rates against industry standard, and he held up the invoice.
He brought up the photographs of Aurora and Demetrius Greaves at her old Third Ward apartment from the Magnolia Mirror blog as well as the fact that Halston had pulled Imari out of the private school in Houston, near where the Larkins lived, and reenrolled her at the Episcopal day school in Pinewood Hollow, forty-five miles from her grandparents' residence.
He did not raise his voice once.
Aurora's hand was tight on Halston's under the table.
Whittaker put down the photographs and looked at the judge.
“Your honor. We do not allege that the respondents are unkind to this child.
We do not allege that they have mistreated her.
We allege that this marriage was contracted in the State of Texas for the sole and exclusive purpose of stripping my clients, the child's biological grandparents, of their right to raise their granddaughter, and that the State of Texas should not permit a billion-dollar industrial family to use the legal machinery of marriage as a convenience to wall my clients out of this child's life. We ask the court to suspend the adoption proceedings, grant temporary custody to my clients, and reopen the conditions of the will.”
He sat down.
Judge Pomfret turned her head a quarter inch.
“Counsel for the respondents.”
Mason stood up.
He laid out the timeline, the will, the small mountain of documentation Maeve and Cyrus had left in their sealed file about Geraldine Larkin's conduct toward their daughter and toward Maeve.
He did not read the contents of the file aloud.
He simply lodged it, with Judge Pomfret's permission, with the court.
Whittaker's mouth thinned when Mason did so.
Mason called Halston to the stand.
Halston rose. Aurora watched her husband walk the six paces between the respondent's table and the witness stand. He took the oath, sat, and laid his right hand, the thin white scar across the palm, flat on the small wooden ledge in front of him.
Mason asked the questions, and Halston answered them the way they had rehearsed: short, plain, unhurried. For the first half hour the case did exactly what Mason had told them it would. The judge listened. Whittaker took notes.
Then Mason said, very evenly, "Mr. Iverson. Tell the court what your relationship to Aurora Akande was, before the death of the Larkins."
Halston did not answer for a half second. He turned his head, very slightly, and looked at Aurora across the courtroom. She nodded. He turned back.
"Your honor," he said, "may I answer that one in my own words. Not the short version."
Judge Pomfret looked at him over her glasses. "It is your own attorney asking, Mr. Iverson. You may answer it any way you can answer it truthfully."
He sat very straight in the witness chair.
"I have loved Aurora Akande since I was twelve years old."
The courtroom went still.
"I have loved her since the summer her mother brought her up to the Iverson estate to work an afternoon.
She was eight. I was nine. I taught her to skip stones on the dock of my family's boathouse on Galveston Bay, and I have not, in the twenty-five years since that afternoon, gone a full week without thinking about her face.
I asked her to be my girlfriend when I was twelve.
I tried to ask her to marry me when I was nineteen—"
Whittaker was halfway out of his chair. "Objection, your honor. The witness is making a speech. Relevance."
Judge Pomfret did not look at him. "Overruled. Mr. Whittaker, your petition asks me to find that these two people never intended a real marriage. This witness's intentions are the single most relevant thing in my courtroom. Sit down. Mr. Iverson, you are still under oath. Go on."
Halston went on.
"I did not, as a young man, behave with discipline.
I behaved with fear, and with confusion.
My father did not approve of the relationship, and the day before I left for Stanford he told me a lie about her that I believed for fifteen years.
I came back into her life two months ago because Maeve Larkin wrote my goddaughter's custody into a will that required us to marry.
I did not know, when I signed those papers, that my father had lied to me.
I know now. I have learned, these last weeks, that the version of Aurora Akande my father handed me as a young man was untrue in every respect — and that the woman I have loved against my own will my entire adult life is, in every way, the woman I remembered her to be.
I would have married her, your honor, if Maeve and Cyrus had never gotten on that plane.
I would have spent the next forty years finding a reason.
The will only gave me an excuse to do in two months what would otherwise have taken me twenty years. "
Aurora's eyes were full. Halston did not look at her. He looked at the judge.
"I do not deny that this marriage was, in its first hours, contracted to satisfy a will.
I do deny that it is false. I am told a marriage is only fraudulent if the two people in it never meant to truly be married.
Your honor, I have spent two months meaning it with everything I have.
She has moved her into my home. I intend to be married to this woman for the rest of my life.
But I am aware, your honor, that this court did not bring me here to ask whether I love my wife.
You brought me here to decide what happens to Imari Larkin. So I want to talk about her.
"Imari Larkin lost her mother and her father in a single afternoon.
She is eight years old. I was her godfather before I was anything else, and I have watched her, these two months, do the bravest and most ordinary things a grieving child can do.
She has nightmares. She comes down the hall at two in the morning, and one of us takes her back and sits with her until she sleeps.
"She will not sleep without a stuffed axolotl named Archie, and when we travel, Archie travels, buckled into his own seat, because that is the rule and we keep it.
She has a wooden hummingbird Erroll carved for her that goes on her pillow every night, on the left side, never the right. She calls my wife Aunt Rory.
"I know that her favorite food is macaroni and cheese, the baked kind with the crust on top, and that she will eat it four nights a week if you let her and negotiate hard for a fifth.
I know she has pink unicorn pajamas she has nearly grown out of and will not give up, and that on the nights she wears them she sleeps better, and so nobody in my house has said one word about the fact that they are too small.
I know she reads two chapters of her book before lights-out and bargains for a third.
I know which of her teeth came out last month.
I know she is frightened of the deep end of the pool and getting braver about it by inches.
I did not know a lot of that two months ago.
I know all of it now, because I am the one who is there. "
"Her grandparents love her. I do not stand here and say they do not.
But they are asking this court to take her out of the only home where she has slept through the night since the funeral, away from the woman her own mother chose for her.
Maeve Larkin knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote that will.
She did not pick me and my wife by accident.
She picked the two people on this earth she trusted with her daughter.
I am asking this court to honor the choice that child's mother made for her.
"I intend to be Imari's father. I am asking you to let me do it inside the law.
But I will be her father either way — quietly, every single night, at two in the morning when the nightmares come — because she needs someone to be, and because Cyrus Larkin was my best friend for twenty-six years, and I have spent every one of these two months trying to be the man he would have wanted standing in his place.
I have already lost this family once to a lie.
I am not going to stop fighting for what he and Maeve wanted, I owe it to them to fight, I owe it to Imari. "
In the front row of the gallery, Errol, without looking at his wife, slid his hand across the space between them and took Ayanna's hand.
It was the first time in three weeks her parents had touched each other in front of her.
Aurora saw it and did not let herself react — but her father's grip was very tight on her mother's small brown fingers, and her mother had begun to weep quietly into the collar of her pale purple blouse.
The Akande marriage, Aurora understood, had begun to heal in an eighth-floor courtroom with the morning sun coming through the high windows.
"Pass the witness," Mason said, and sat down.
Whittaker rose slowly, buttoning his tan jacket, in no hurry at all.
"Mr. Iverson. That was very moving." He let it sit a beat. "I would like to talk about dates."