Chapter Thirty-One
Calloway and Stern is on the ninth floor of a glass building in Akron with its name on the outside of it.
There is a conference room with a table you could land a plane on and a view of the highway, and they put out water in glass bottles with a paper band around the neck, and a plate of shortbread that nobody touched for two and a half hours.
Roz came in with the red folder and a gas station coffee.
I had asked her in the elevator whether I should have worn something else.
“You look like a woman who works for a living,” she said. “That’s the correct thing to look like. Don’t touch the shortbread.”
Wade sat across from me for the first time since the twenty-third of October.
He had lost weight. Not in a good way, in the way men lose it, out of the face first. He had a folio in front of him and he did not open it once in two and a half hours.
Preston Calloway did what he does for about forty minutes and then he put a two-page term sheet on the table and slid it across, and I read it with Roz reading over my shoulder, and it took me about ninety seconds to understand that he was offering me everything.
Everything.
Wade would withdraw his request to be designated residential parent.
He would agree that I be designated the residential parent and legal custodian of both children.
Standard parenting time for him, the same schedule we already had.
Child support at the guideline number, which is what the order already said.
He would sign an agreed parenting plan naming me as residential parent and legal custodian.
No trial. No June. It ends in the room.
There were three things on the second page.
One: the parties would jointly move the court to seal the transcript and the audio, and to strike all references to them from the pleadings.
Two: I would waive the attorney fee award.
Three: I would agree not to reference or disclose the recording to any third party, including any employer, agency, or media outlet.
I read that second page four times.
“Can I have the room,” I said.
They gave us the room. Roz shut the door and sat down on the edge of the table.
“Talk.”
“It’s everything.”
“It’s everything,” she agreed. “And I’m going to be straight with you, because this is the part of the job where lawyers get it wrong on purpose.
That is a good offer. It is a genuinely good offer and I would be doing you a disservice if I told you otherwise, and if you took it I would draft it today and I would not think one thing less of you. ”
“But.”
“But nothing in there is a finding.”
She let that be quiet for a second.
“An agreed entry means the court adopts what the two of you worked out. There’s no ruling.
There’s no finding of fact about anything that man did in October, or in a truck in December, or in that kitchen.
The file gets sealed and the docket says resolved by agreement and that’s the whole historical record.
“It’s a truce. It’s not a wall.”
“What’s the difference in two years?”
“In two years, if he files something, we start over with a clean-looking man and a sealed file I’m not allowed to reference.
” She spun her coffee cup a quarter turn.
“In two years with a finding, I hand a judge four pages that say a magistrate already looked at this and here’s what he decided, and it takes me eleven minutes instead of eight months. ”
“And the sealing.”
“The sealing is what he’s actually buying.
” She said it flatly. “That’s the whole term sheet.
Everything above it is the price he’s paying for it.
Understand what that document is right now.
It’s a public court file. Anybody can walk into the clerk’s office on Delmar with four dollars and get a copy.
A reporter. A city councilman. His own deputy chief. ”
“Has anybody?”
“Not that I know of, and it’s been in there since December, and I promise you he has thought about that every single day.”
I sat in a chair in a glass building and looked at the highway.
“There’s a third thing,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“He’s not asking me to give up a piece of paper.”
Roz waited.
“He’s asking me to agree that it didn’t happen.”
We went back in.
I said no. I said it myself, out loud, across that table, because Roz asked me in the hallway whether I wanted her to say it and I said I’d do it.
“No to which part,” Calloway said, pleasantly, with his pen up.
“No to the second page. The rest of it you can have exactly as written and I’ll sign it this afternoon.”
Calloway looked at Wade.
And Wade looked at me, and spoke to me directly for the first time since December.
“Nora.”
“Yes.”
“You get everything you asked for. Every single thing. You keep the kids, you keep the schedule, you keep the money.” He had both hands flat on the folio he hadn’t opened.
“And all I’m asking for is that a bad ten minutes on the worst night of both our lives doesn’t sit in a public building for the rest of my career. ”
It was, and I mean this, the most human sentence that man had said in eleven years.
I have thought about it a great deal since, and I think he meant most of it, and I think that is exactly the thing about him that took me a decade to see. He is capable of meaning something for as long as it is useful.
“You said it,” I said.
“I know what I said.”
“You said it, and you weren’t drunk enough not to know, and you’d been planning it since March. And then in December you sat in a truck with a nine-year-old and did the thing you said you’d do.”
“I made a mistake in December.”
“Then it can go in a public building,” I said. “That’s what public buildings are for.”
Calloway put his pen down.
“We’ll take that back to our client,” he said, which is a thing lawyers say when the client is sitting right there.
In the elevator Roz said nothing for four floors.
Then, somewhere around five: “You understand you just turned down a certainty.”
“Yes.”
“Trial’s in June. Trials go sideways. Kearns could have a bad morning. Reiss could get called and hedge on the stand the way he hedged on page eleven. Anything can happen in a courtroom and most of it has happened to me.”
“I know.”
The doors opened on the lobby.
“For the record,” Roz said, “I’d have taken the deal at your age and I’d have been wrong.”
I drove home on 8 with the windows down because it was the first warm day.
Then I went up my outside stairs and hung my coat on the hook and stood in my kitchen for a while.
And then I went to the hall closet by the furnace and took down the brown accordion folder that had come out of a house in a duffel bag at one thirty in the morning on the twenty-third of October, and which I had never once opened.
I put it on the kitchen table and sat down in front of it.
There are three envelopes in it. Two of them are the operative summaries from the surgeries, which I have read, because I was in the waiting room both times and a nurse handed them to me.
The third one I had never opened, because in the parking garage of a medical building in 2017 a man had taken hold of my elbow and told me nobody, and I had said nobody, and then I had gone and put an envelope on a shelf and left it there for seven and a half years.
I opened it.
It’s two pages. There’s a letterhead and a date and a patient name and a date of birth. There’s a paragraph of history that mentions the gunshot wound and both surgeries in about nine words each, the way medicine does.
And there’s a line near the bottom of the first page.
Given the degree of injury and the findings on repeat analysis, natural conception is highly unlikely and should be considered effectively excluded.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Twenty-two words.
I sat at my kitchen table and read the sentence I had been carrying since I was twenty-six years old, which I had never actually seen, which I had built an entire adult life around, which had cost me my thirties and my career and two hundred and twenty Sundays of being told what was wrong with me.
Twenty-two words, in a font nobody chose, on a page with a fax header across the top.
I read it once.
Then I put it back in the envelope, and I put the envelope back in the folder, and I put the folder back on the shelf above the furnace, and I shut the door on it.
It was the most powerful thing I owned.
I was never going to use it.
It took me until that night in April to understand that those were not two facts.
The observed session with Dr. Pruitt was on the twenty-second.
He brought the patch.