A Thousand Words
LILA
My husband looks really hot in a suit.
It’s the one silver lining to this extremely stressful day. I try to focus on that instead of spinning my wedding ring around and around endlessly, my mouth feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton.
I feel like I’m about to be caught in the biggest lie of my life.
Like the judge is going to take one look at me, clock me as a fraud and fake, and call for the bailiff to lead me away in cuffs.
Of course I know I’m not about to be literally thrown into lockup for lying to my family about the nature of my marriage. But it sure feels like it.
Slade tucks an errand strand of pink hair away from my forehead. “We’ve got this,” he tells me quietly. “There’s nothing they can do to us.”
“They can win their appeal.”
“They’re not having this marriage annulled.”
He sounds so firm, so confident. I have no idea where he’s getting it, considering it’s a very real possibility. This marriage did start off as fake, and even if it became something way more complicated, who’s to say the judge won’t see it their way?
“Even if they don’t win that part,” I say, “they might still be able to get the trust fund money back.”
He shrugs. “Who cares if they do?”
“You know I already gave it away. Every cent of it.”
He reaches over and takes my folded hands off my lap and holds them in one of his. “Sweetheart. Is that what you’re so worried about? We have the money.”
I pull back. “You do. I don’t.”
He leans in and kisses me. Soft and deliberate, right here in the courthouse hallway, and I feel the ice in my heart melt slightly against my will.
“Haven’t you figured out how this works yet, baby?” His lips brush mine as he says it. “Your money is your money. My money is also your money.”
I laugh despite my nerves. “You’re crazy.”
He offers no comment on that, but his eyes gleam as he looks me up and down. “I like this sexy businesswoman look you’ve got going on. That tight little skirt. Makes me want to shove it up your hips and bend you over.”
“Slade,” I hiss, as a very buttoned-up lawyer type with a briefcase passes by.
My husband might be wearing a bespoke suit and a Patek Philippe watch worth more than a car, but he’s still a rough and tumble cowboy underneath it all.
He chuckles, low and dark as his lips brush against my ear. “I think I saw a storage room on the way here. C’mon. Let me fuck my gorgeous wife.” He kisses my neck. “It’ll take the edge off.”
I smile, shaking my head. He’s just trying to distract me from my nerves. But then he shifts in his seat and I get a look at the bulge in his immaculate suit pants.
My eyes go wide. “You’re actually serious.”
He winks before discreetly adjusting himself. My gruff, brooding husband who is currently sporting a half-chub in a courthouse we’re in because we’re being accused of marriage fraud, actually winks at me.
He murmurs, “Keep those heels on.”
The door opens. Their lawyer steps out and looks at us without expression. “They’re ready.”
The mediation room is bigger than I expected.
A rectangular table, a dozen chairs, a window overlooking a parking lot with a view of the mountains beyond it if you crane your neck.
The judge is already seated at the head.
He’s a man in his sixties with heavy-framed glasses that do nothing to cushion the impact of his hard, icy eyes.
My parents are on the other side of the table.
My father looks like all the oil paintings of our ancestors: austere and grim, certain that the world will be bent to his dominion.
My mother sits beside him in her pearls and perfect bun.
Her blue eyes flash in surprise at the sight of Slade in his bespoke suit.
No doubt she’s thinking he looks respectable for the first time in her eyes.
Celia’s leaning back in her chair, twirling a bottle of water in her hands like she’s waiting for a show to begin. Peter sits at the end, jaw tight, next to our family lawyer, Aldrich, who has a yellow legal pad covered in handwriting out before him.
Slade pulls my chair out before I can reach for it.
After I take a seat, he sits beside me and puts his hand on my knee under the table and leaves it there.
Aldrich opens. The language is full of legalese: fraudulent inducement, misrepresentation, coercion, timeline of events. He lays it out clearly, I’ll give him that. Makes their case sound reasonable. Makes it sound like concerned family stepping in on behalf of their poor, naive daughter.
I hate all of them for it. For making me seem foolish. For making themselves seem like benevolent, loving protectors.
Even if my marriage started out as fake, what they’re spewing here is nothing but a torrent of lies.
Aldrich slides a sheet of paper toward the judge. “Your Honor, we'd also direct the court's attention to a witness statement. The county clerk who processed the marriage license, a Ms. Kaylee Cole, was interviewed as part of our investigation.”
My stomach drops. I'd almost forgotten her. The clerk who looked at that marriage license she stamped and then glared at me like I’d personally stolen something from her.
Aldrich takes a small sip from the glass of water in front of him.
“Ms. Cole recounts a specific exchange between the petitioner’s daughter and Mr. Rhodes at the time the license was issued,” he continues, reading from his notes.
“She states that Mrs. Rhodes said she could ‘change it back’, referring to her surname, ‘after’ something she did not finish saying.
At which point Mr. Rhodes placed a finger over her mouth and told her, and I quote directly, ‘Not here. You don't know who's listening.’”
The judge’s eyebrows rise slightly.
My gut twists inside me.
“Ms. Cole found the interaction suspicious enough to remember it clearly months later,” Aldrich says.
“Two people discussing reversing a marriage at the very moment they entered into it. Hushing one another in a government building. We submit this is consistent with a couple who knew the arrangement was temporary.”
I feel sick. Because that did happen. Every word of it.
Slade’s hand tightens on my knee under the table. But when I glance at him, he doesn’t look worried at all.
The judge looks at Slade. “Mr. Rhodes? Do you dispute the clerk’s account?”
“Nope,” Slade says easily. “Happened just like that.”
A ripple of surprise around the table. Aldrich blinks.
“Lila asked if she could change her name back at any point,” Slade goes on.
“I told her not to talk about that in the courthouse, because there’s a clerk standing three feet away and eavesdropping.
One nursing a grudge from high school. And I didn’t feel like having my private business spread all over Marble Falls.
” He leans back. “Turns out I was right to worry. Took her all of a couple months to run her mouth to a lawyer.”
“A grudge,” the judge repeats, adjusting his glasses.
“Small town, Your Honor. People hold grudges longer than a mafioso. See, Kaylee Cole asked me to a dance our sophomore year. I turned her down. She didn’t take it kindly then, and apparently the wound to her pride has festered.
” He shrugs. “Maybe ask her how objective she's feeling about my marriage.”
The judge's mouth twitches. He makes a note. “Mr. Rhodes. You have no counsel to represent you?”
“Don’t need it,” he says. “Ain’t gonna pay a man a thousand bucks an hour to tell these people that our marriage is none of their business. I can do that myself. “
The judge clears his throat in warning, but his eyes are gleaming with something that looks like amusement beneath his glasses. “I understand you have some material to present.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Slade pulls out a manila folder and pushes it over to the judge. Then he requests for the bailiff to dim the lights in the room, pulls out his phone and a small handheld projector, and beams an image onto the blank white wall.
It’s me on the mudroom floor at six in the morning with a puppy against my chest, laughing at something Slade said that I can’t remember now but clearly found hilarious.
“Never was good with words,” Slade says. “So let these pictures be worth a thousand each.”
He taps to change the picture.
Now it’s the Thanksgiving table at Rosemont, the family photo of the whole huge group of us. Another tap. Another picture from the same day, this one me leaning over Slade as he holds Jonah and the twin babies and Lucky at his feet.
“Lila and I have built a life together,” Slade says. “She’s a Rhodes now. Woven into every part of my family as tight as any of us born to it.”
There’s another photo that Daryl took of us, Slade and I sitting on his truckbed at sunset, our arms draped over Lucky who sits happily in the middle.
Slade’s eyes meet mine as he says, “I fell in love with her fast and hard and completely.”
Next is the triptych from the photobooth, me kissing his cheek and then the two of us lost to the moment kissing each other.
“I’ll dare any one of you,” Slade says, “to look at those pictures and tell me that’s not a love story. Tell me that Lila hasn’t found her home here. Her happiness. You look into my eyes and tell me I don’t love my wife.”
My eyes are burning.
The judge is going through the manila envelope at the same time. There are even more photos printed out there, dozens of them, spread out across the table now.
I press my lips together and stare at the pictures, the evidence of our life, the beauty and the joy in all of them.
There are cute photos, like the one Daryl snapped of Slade bottle-feeding the puppy while I rest my head on his shoulder, Lucky’s head on my lap.
There are silly moments, like the selfie I took of us biting either end of an eclair I’d made.
Or the photos from my Halloween birthday party, all of us Rhodes’s in costume, mugging for the camera.
Then there are straight-up beautiful ones, like the one he set up on a tripod to capture the two of us on horseback, holding hands, our boots bumping against each other as the sun sets.
There’s the wedding photo that Slade keeps on his nightstand, his dramatic, passionate kiss against the backdrop of Wild Rose.
I tell myself not to cry in this room. Not in front of them.
The tears tumble down my cheeks anyway as Slade holds my hand.
There’s silence in the room as the lights go back up.
Finally, the judge clears his throat. Still sounding a little hoarse, he says, “Mr. Rhodes. Your income last year.”
“Fourteen million,” Slade says.
The judge checks something on his legal pad. “Approximately three times the value of the trust in question.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“And the petitioners’ position is that your motivation for entering this marriage was financial gain.”
Slade cuts a cool glare at my family. “So they say, Your Honor.”
The judge looks at the photographs again. Then at my parents’ lawyer. Then he sits back in his chair, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Peter leans forward. “He has other motivations,” he says.
My father puts a hand on his arm.
Peter shakes it off. “He has—”
“Peter,” my mother says sharply.
The judge looks at Peter through his glasses like someone eyeing an insect through a magnifying glass. “Such as?”
Peter’s jaw works. He looks at the table. “It’s not something to be said aloud in polite company.”
The judge gives him a long-suffering look. “This is a court of law, not a debutante ball.”
Peter blurts, “He talked about how she looked. About… about breeding her. It’s… he’s…”
The judge folds his arms, waiting for Peter to finish the sentence. When he appears unable to do so, the judge sighs heavily.
“Let me see if I understand your assertion. You allege Mr. Rhodes wanted to marry his wife because he was attracted to her and wanted to have children with her. And this is a suspicious motive because?”
Peter opens his mouth. Closes it.
The judge lets the silence run. Then he looks back at his notes.
“Mr. Rhodes,” he says. “I’d like to see your prenuptial agreement.”
“There isn’t one,” Slade says.
The judge looks at him, those eyebrows practically up to his hairline. “There is no prenuptial agreement.”
“No, Your Honor.”
“So in the event of a divorce, Mrs. Rhodes would be entitled to half of your total net worth, which is somewhere in the realm of…”
“Mid-eight figures.”
I blink at him. I knew he was loaded, but that’s… a lot of money.
“My brothers and I made some good investments,” Slade explains quietly to me.
“So your wife would walk away with half,” the judge says.
Slade looks at me tenderly. “No. She would walk away with everything.”
The judge looks at the photographs again. Then at my parents’ lawyer. Then he sits back in his chair.
“Here is what I see,” he says. “I see a substantial body of photographic and video evidence of two people building a life together. I see a man who earns fourteen million dollars a year and has no prenuptial agreement, which means in the event of dissolution his wife walks away with… whatever she wants, apparently.” He sets the pen down.
“I see a woman who gave away five million dollars to food banks and animal shelters, which is not the behavior of someone running a financial scheme.” He folds his hands. “What I do not see is fraud.”
Aldrich leans forward. “Your honor, if we could direct your attention to the timeline—”
“I’ve seen the timeline,” he says. “People fall in love quickly. It happens.” He looks around the table.
“What I have in front of me are either the two best actors I have ever encountered in thirty years on the bench, or a husband and wife, deeply in love, who are making a life together.” He closes the folder.
“Either way, it is not a matter for this court.”
He looks at my parents.
“Your petition is denied,” he says. “I’d strongly suggest you use the flight home to consider whether this was the best use of everyone’s time and goodwill.” A pause. “And I’d suggest you think carefully before bringing something like this before a court again.”
He stands.
We stand.
Just like that, it’s over.