Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
LAUREN
I slink back against the padded booth seat to avoid the beer-soaked breath of the guy sitting next to me. I’m pretty sure his name is Brad, and while his friend is flirting with my sister, Brad does not seem to be taking the hint that I’m not interested.
Telling him I was recently widowed elicited an “I’m so sorry,” but didn’t deter him at all. So I rub at the side of my face with my left hand, making sure my ring catches the light. Maybe if I blind him with it, he’ll back off.
I kick Paige under the table and she glances over at me, giving me a small smile, and I try not to be aggravated in return.
She’s been helping me all week—caring for my girls, catching up on her own work during their nap times, playing with them while I make phone calls, schedule appointments, and run errands as I navigate the part of death no one tells you about: the paperwork nightmare.
I get it. Paige is single, and a cute guy is paying attention to her. But this was supposed to be our last dinner together before she goes back to Boston.
My phone lights up on the table, and I snatch it up like it’s an emergency.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to Brad as I scoot out of my seat and stand. All three sets of eyes look up at me. “I’ve got to take this call.”
I answer the phone on the second ring, even though my mother-in-law is the last person on the planet I want to speak to. I’d give anything to hear her son’s voice on the other end of the phone one last time. Hers, not so much.
But I’m so desperate to get away from Brad that I don’t even consider letting it go to voice mail.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Lauren.” My mother-in-law’s greeting is followed by silence. I treat perfect strangers with more warmth than she’s ever shown me.
“Hi, Barb. How are you?” I hold the phone against my ear as I make my way through the busy restaurant, hoping the hallway that leads to the bathroom will be quieter.
“Are you . . . out?”
“It’s my sister’s last night here, so I’ve taken her out to dinner.”
“Oh, well, that must be nice . . . going out.” There is no mistaking the judgment in her voice, and the guilt washes over me at the implication that I shouldn’t be out doing something fun—or something that should be fun, if it weren’t for the idiots that decided to just come sit at our table with us—when her son is gone and can’t do the same.
I don’t respond, because if four years as part of her family has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t disagree with Barb Emerson.
“I’m calling because I overheard you talking to your friends the other day about the possibility of moving to Boston.”
I hope she can’t hear the deep gulp that resounds in my throat.
I’d honestly expected to hear from her about that immediately, and I’d started to relax when she didn’t call the next day, or any day since.
I can’t know for certain whether it was intentional, but it certainly feels like she waited almost a week to call just so she could catch me off guard. “Um hmm.”
“I’m not sure what game you’re playing.”
I wait for her to follow it up with more details, but she leaves it at that.
“What do you mean?” I work hard to keep my voice light and friendly, despite the fact that she’s only ever treated me like I’m trash.
I’m not sure what she’s mad about this time, but I’m guessing it’s the idea of me moving her grandchildren across the country.
She loves the idea of grandkids, but God forbid she actually show up more than once every few months and spend any time with them.
Aside from the funeral, we haven’t seen her once since Josh died.
“I mean that we own half that house, and I don’t want you to think for a second that you are going to sell it and skip town with the money.”
My back hits the wood-paneled wall as my knees almost buckle under me. It’s like my body can’t do anything—not even hold my own weight—while I try to make sense of her words.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Which part of what I said requires explaining?”
I swallow down the scream that’s rising in my throat. “The part about you owning half my house.”
“Well, of course,” she says, and I can just picture her blond bob swinging as she juts her chin out. “Obviously, since you and Josh didn’t want a mortgage and we loaned you half the cost of the property and the house you built on it, we therefore own half the house.”
Is she making this up? “What do you mean, we didn’t want a mortgage? Josh said we didn’t need one.”
“Well, with you not working and Josh having to support you and a growing family,” she says, doing nothing to hide her snide tone, “we needed to help out so you could have the house of your dreams.”
The house of my dreams, my ass. I was perfectly happy with our condo downtown and loved living in the same building as Jackson and Sierra. Josh was the one who wanted the big house in the mountains.
I hesitate for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts, before asking, “So how much did you loan him, exactly?”
“A million dollars. He was able to come up with the rest from what he’d earned skiing, and since then from sponsorships. It’s too bad you had no income and couldn’t have helped out . . .”
I’d had a very successful career before I met Josh, and I gave it up and moved to Park City to marry him. She has always acted like I was some sort of gold digger. I wanted to start working when I moved here, but Josh always had a reason I should wait to get a job.
First, it was that I was too busy planning the wedding.
Then he wanted to extend our honeymoon phase and have me travel with him throughout Europe during ski season.
It was a wonderfully romantic notion, but it would also have been quite isolating if Jackson hadn’t been his physical therapist and we hadn’t formed a quick and close friendship traveling together that winter.
Then, it was that we wanted kids, and it didn’t make sense to get a job that I’d just have to quit when a child came along, because we both wanted me to be able to stay home with the baby.
I didn’t know it was going to take us so long to get pregnant.
It wasn’t like I ever planned to be a stay-at-home wife.
“. . . then we wouldn’t have to be involved in this now,” she finally continues.
I’m afraid to ask—afraid to know—what my mother-in-law thinks “being involved” looks like.
I stand up from where I was half-slumped against the wall and take a fortifying breath. “Can you please send me any paperwork you and Josh signed when you gave him the money? This is the first I’m hearing about it.”
She scoffs.
“I assume you didn’t just hand over a million dollars without some sort of paperwork in place,” I say, straightening to my full height.
I’ve never before stood up to her. She’s spent the last several years picking apart every single thing about me, and I’ve held my tongue through it all because she’s Josh’s mother.
That stops now.
“Of course our lawyer drew up paperwork,” she says.
“Great, I look forward to seeing it. You have my email. Have a good evening,” I tell her. And when I end the call, I don’t even feel a little bit bad about hanging up on her.
I find our waitress on my way back to the table, and ask her to bring me the bill immediately. When I make it back to the table, the cute guy is still there talking to Paige, but thankfully Brad is gone.
“Paige, we’ve got to go,” I tell her. She looks up, ready to object, but when she sees my face she just nods and turns toward the guy, giving him her number.
“What happened?” she asks as soon as he’s gone.
I slide into the booth across the table from her chair. “That was Barb.”
“Josh’s mom?” she asks, as if there could be any other Barb calling me. But given how much my mother-in-law dislikes me, Paige’s surprise at the impromptu call isn’t unwarranted.
“Yeah,” I say as the waitress arrives with the check. I pull out my card and hand it to her without even looking at the bill. I don’t care what it says; I just want to get out of here.
“What did she want?” Paige asks once the waitress is gone.
“To tell me that she owns half my house.”
“The fuck?” The words are practically silent, expelled on an exhale that never seems to end—it’s like this news deflates Paige as much as it deflates me.
“I guess it’s a good thing I’m meeting with the financial adviser tomorrow. I need to see if I can afford to buy her out. . .” I consider the alternative. “Or whether I have to sell my house to pay her back.”
“You were thinking about selling your house anyway, weren’t you?” Paige asks.
“Yeah, but I thought that money would be used to buy us a new house, and maybe that we could live off the rest of it for a while.”
“Even if you only walk away with half the value of your house,” Paige says, as she reaches across the table and squeezes my hand in hers, “you’re going to be okay. That’s still an awful lot of money.”
“I know. And I still need to figure out the life insurance, and all that.” I sigh. “We’re going to be fine. I just . . . I wasn’t expecting this.”
“And somehow,” Paige says, “I bet you’re still not surprised.”
“Oh, I’m surprised. And confused. Why would Josh want to build this huge house that we couldn’t afford?
And now that I think about it, why couldn’t we afford it?
I know what our investment portfolios looked like, especially after we sold the condo.
He should have already paid his parents back, and I don’t understand why he didn’t .
. . or why I didn’t know about any of this. ”
“I meant that you probably weren’t surprised that less than a week after burying her son, Barb’s already trying to screw you over.”
Even in my shocked state, that does get a chuckle out of me. “When it comes to her, nothing should surprise me.”
“C’mon,” Paige says as I sign the receipt the waitress has set in front of me. “Let’s get you home. We can talk about this more and strategize for that meeting with the financial adviser tomorrow.”
She wraps her arm around me as we walk out of the restaurant, and I rest my head on her shoulder wishing she didn’t have to leave. I’m doing what my friends asked and trying to give it time before making a big decision, but moving to Boston is sounding better and better every day.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Paige asks, her voice so quiet she’s practically speaking under her breath. I hate the way she’s looking at me like I’m a fragile piece of china and someone’s about to drop me.
I glance around the financial planner’s office, where we’re sitting as we wait for him to go get some documents off the printer. I’m not at all sure that I’m okay, and I wonder if I ever will be again.
“He just told me that my husband has had almost no income for the last few years since he retired from racing, and has been slowly selling off what’s in our investment accounts to live off.
What the hell happened to his endorsements?
” I fume, as if Paige could answer that for me.
I bite my lower lip to stop it from trembling. I will not cry in this office.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize he’d lied to you about anything, much less something so—” she stops speaking as Henry, the financial adviser, returns with a small stack of papers in his hand.
“I’ve printed out the balance on all the investment accounts,” he says, “along with any transactions in the last two years, so you can see when Josh sold off investments and how much he made from each transaction.”
“Thanks,” I say, taking the papers Henry’s holding out. I tuck them under one arm, then stand and reach out to shake his hand. “I’ll let you know what we decide to do with the accounts.”
I don’t know if I even breathe until we’re back in my car. And then all the adrenaline that’s been holding me together feels like it leaves my system, and I collapse back against the passenger seat, close my eyes, and let the tears flow.
Paige pulls out of our parking spot and is driving through town when I finally open my eyes and glance down at my lap.
“What the hell?!”
“What?” she asks, slamming on the brakes way harder than necessary to stop for the red light ahead.
“Look at this,” I say, holding the papers out. “Look at the address these statements are being delivered to.”
“Josh Emerson, PO Box 27834,” she reads.
“We don’t have a PO Box.”
The air leaves her with a hiss. “Shit.”
“Well, this explains a thing or two about how Josh kept all of this from me. No wonder I didn’t come across any of the financial stuff in the mail.”
“Do you want to go check it out?”
“Do we have time? Don’t you need to head to Salt Lake City in like an hour to catch your flight home?”
She looks at me like I suggested she run naked through the streets. “Like I’d leave you in this moment, right after you just discovered all this . . .”
“Okay, yeah. Let me just text Morgan and see if she can stay with the girls a little longer.”
We head to the post office, and I feel like I’m on autopilot—my emotions frozen and unable to process everything I’ve learned—as I explain the situation and show them a copy of the trust naming me as the beneficiary of all assets, along with Josh’s death certificate.
I fill out the paperwork to transfer ownership, and they give me a stack of mail, which I flip through quickly as I wait for them to get me a new key for the PO Box.
And the thing that catches my eye is an unmarked envelope like you’d get from a bank, with something stamped in red peeking out through the clear address window.
I somehow manage to wait until we’re back in the car before I tear the envelope open. Then I look over at Paige, eyes wide in terror as I hold up the statement for a mortgage I didn’t know we had on our home so she can see the big red “Past Due” stamp on it.