13. Delilah
DELILAH
You end up with a lot of free time after you destroy your entire family in a single night.
Three full days pass in blissful idleness.
On Christmas Day, I sleep until two in the afternoon on the office cot, eat a sleeve of saltines, binge Love Island, and take a lengthy nap in the early evening, just because I can.
I’m highly useful on the 26th. I clean the walk-in from top to bottom. I pull every shelf, scrub every gasket, mop every inch of floor, and throw out a container of pastry cream from October that has developed signs of alien lifeforms.
I then eat a sleeve of saltines, binge more Love Island, and take yet another lengthy nap.
The 27th is basically the same. A few overdue chores, and then a few overdue hours of doing whatever the hell I want. The midnight doughnuts taste almost as good on day three as they did when they first came out of the frying oil with Kane.
It’s actually mind-boggling how weird this solitude feels. My phone has been off since I walked out of my mother’s living room. I turned it off and stashed it in the glove box like a gun I didn’t want in the house.
Why wouldn’t I? Nothing good can come from answering it. I have no interest in talking to my mom, or Vivian, or Connor, or any of the billion family members who will pretend to be “checking up on me” when in reality they want to know what the hell I was thinking.
So: off, dark, silent.
Gotta protect your peace, as the girlies say these days.
On the downside, it does mean that the only voice I’ve had for three days is my own.
And that’s been going in circles.
Some of those circles are quite ugly. Objectively speaking, my life as I once knew it is kaput. Marriage? Family? House? Gone, gone, gone. If I let myself drift too far in that direction, it gets a little depressing.
A few of the other circles are quite violent. I got my revenge on Connor and Vivian; I aired the receipts.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not still prone to the occasional fantasy of dangling them upside down from the Empire State Building for a while.
So those are some of the rabbit holes I’ve been going down.
And then, every single time when I least expect it, the rabbit hole bends and goes someplace it has no business going.
Green eyes.
Snow in a doorway.
A frosted thumb on my cheek and then in his mouth.
Goodnight, Lilah.
That’s the other downside of the no-phone policy: Kane can’t reach me there.
Nor has he come by here. For three days, I haven’t heard a word from him. No call, no visit, no hooded men on the corners or ominous black sedans idling out front. I keep telling myself that’s a relief.
But even the nutcases on Love Island would call me delusional for saying that.
By the afternoon of the 27th, I’ve run out of chores, which is how I know the vacation is over. Also, the holiday weekend has come to a close, and life is sort of starting to resume outside these walls.
That’s for the best—an idle Delilah is a dangerous creature. The less thinking I do, the better.
Also, I’m out of saltines.
So it’s time for me to re-emerge from my hibernation.
I’m stubbornly keeping my phone off for now, though. I use the ancient, Y2K-era desktop in my office to look up lawyers in the area. If I’m going to get properly divorced, I need someone who knows how to do the paperwork.
But therein lies the problem.
Pickings are extremely slim.
The ones who look good are out of my budget, and the ones who are in my budget do not look good.
I wouldn’t trust—I have to squint at the screen to read the name—Sonny “Fast Boy” Grubb to litigate my way out of a parking ticket, much less a marriage. Eddie “The Law Leech” Castro is not any more promising.
The only option that’s even remotely plausible is a pinch-faced woman named Skye Brewer. She’s at least in professional attire and doesn’t have Photoshopped flames rising out of her ears.
That’ll have to do.
Her office is downtown, on the ninth floor of an alarmingly tilted building where the elevator has a hand-lettered sign taped inside it that says PLEASE DO NOT HOLD DOORS, THEY’LL CRUSH YOU AND ENJOY DOING SO.
Seems like we’re off to a great start.
Her waiting room has four beach chairs, three of which have gaping holes in the ass region, and a sad ficus that has given up all hope of ever seeing the sun again.
The secretary at the desk, a woman so old that it feels almost criminal for her to still be working, takes my name and says Mrs. Brewer will be with me in a minute.
I sit in the only usable seat with my work bag on my knees like a kid outside the principal’s office.
Inside that bag, I’ve brought the goodies: four stapled pages, blood-smeared at one corner, and a double-sealed freezer bag with a burned scrap of paper in it.
I’m still undecided on if I’m going to bring up the loan thing yet. Somehow, it feels like a betrayal of Kane. He did ask me to keep him a secret, after all.
Which is batshit, obviously. He’s a loan shark. A criminal. A self-professed mob boss. And he said he’d be taking me as “repayment” for Connor’s sins.
So why the hell would I side with him?!
I don’t know. I might’ve fully lost my mind. Jury’s still out.
“Ms. Dorsey?”
The voice coming from the doorway is high-pitched and velvety-soft, like if a kitten could speak. I look up to see the woman on whom my fate seems to rest.
Skye Brewer is shorter than I thought. If she’s five feet tall, then I’m a size zero. Her hair is so blond it’s almost white, with a sharp nose and tightly pursed lips. But she doesn’t seem immediately incompetent, so I rise and follow her down the hall.
She’s got the most crowded office I’ve ever seen.
Massive stacks of folders, binders, and books.
With her being so tiny and the secretary working her desk being so deaf, I’m lowkey terrified that she is going to get crushed by a falling pile of paperwork and they won’t find her body for a very long time.
She points her chewed-up pencil at a chair that’s mostly buried. “You, there. Just move those.”
It takes both hands to excavate something I can use as a seat. I set the stack on the floor next to a box labeled brEWER — DISCOVERY — DO NOT MIX, which contains a half-full pitcher of apple juice and several boxes of crayons.
“Coffee?” she asks.
I shudder to think of how unclean her coffee machine must be. “No thank you.”
“Hm.” She scoots around and sits behind her desk. Squinting at her computer screen, which makes the one in my office look sleek and modern, she hums, “Dorsey, Dorsey, Dorsey… Divorce, yes?”
“Divorce is part of it.”
“Then let’s hear about the rest of it.” She pulls a legal pad out from under a binder. “Go ahead.”
I take a deep breath.
And then I begin.
“My name is Delilah Dorsey. I’ve been married for ten years to Connor Boyd.
He’s been sleeping with my sister, Vivian Dorsey, since at least October of last year.
I have video, hotel receipts, and fourteen months of their text messages.
That’s all backed up in two places that aren’t the cloud he can get into. ”
Her pencil stops moving.
“That’s the easy bit. The harder bit is that, on October 8th of this year, my husband borrowed four million dollars from a company called V Haven Holdings, LLC.
He pledged my bakery at 4412 Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park as collateral.
I bought it three years ago, I own it outright, and there’s nobody else on the deed.
” I put down the four stapled pages, the blood-smeared corner facing up.
“This is the year-end statement they mailed to my shop. It calls me the guarantor and says they intend to enforce against the collateral on January 15th.”
She looks at the pages with her jaw dropping by degrees.
“And this,” I say, setting the freezer bag down next to her elbow, “is what I pulled out of my kitchen sink on the 23rd. He was burning documents when I came home. This corner was pressed flat against the side of the basin, so the water never got to it. But it’s proof that he forged my signature.”
Skye looks up at me in shock. “You bagged it?”
I shrug. “I watch a lot of true crime.”
She sets down the stapled pages and picks up the freezer bag by two corners, holding it up toward her window to better catch the light.
The bag’s got that letterhead in it. V HAVEN HOLDINGS, LLC, the first word mostly burned off.
PROMISSORY. The undersigned. And the signature over the line marked BORROWER.
Delilah A. Dorsey.
“It’s definitely a forgery, though,” I continue. “That’s not my signature. The loop on the D closes at the wrong angle. And the dash over the i in Delilah goes the wrong way. I go up to the right. Whoever did that went down.”
“Show me yours.”
I write my name for her on the corner of her legal pad. Then I write it again, just to prove my point.
She sets the bag beside the pad and looks at both of them for a long time. Long enough that I hear the deaf secretary out front answer a phone with a screeching, full-volume “LAW OFFICE.”
“Huh,” Skye says.
“Is that a good huh?”
“For you? No.” She taps the bag with the end of her pencil. “It’s a good forgery. Somebody had a real sample in front of them when they did it. But it’s a forgery. I can tell.”
“But can a jury?”
“Juries are fickle. But we can get a good subject matter expert to testify.” She sets the pencil down and raps her fingernails on her desk while she thinks.
“I know a few good analysts in the city who do handwriting for a living and don’t embarrass themselves on cross.
Any one of them would look at that and your samples and say what you just said, under oath, in front of a judge. I’d bet money on it.”
I’m starting to feel something dangerously close to hope.
“Okay,” I say breathlessly. “What about the pledge? He put up my building. I never signed anything. I never even heard of these people until Christmas Eve.”