Chapter 3
The flowers came Tuesday.
Not a bouquet. A van, from a place in Portland that did hotel lobbies, and two men carrying arrangements up the outside stairs one at a time because they wouldn't fit two at a time. White, mostly. Enormous.
Erin stood in her own doorway and watched them fill her landing.
"Where do you want them, ma'am?"
"How many are there?"
The man checked his tablet. "Six."
"Take them to Penobscot Bay," she said. "The hospital in Rockport. Give them to the front desk and tell them to put them wherever they want."
He looked at her the way people do when a script goes off the rails.
"There a card you want moved over, or—"
"No card," Erin said. "There isn't one. He wouldn't have written one. It would have been called in by somebody in Boston, and she'd have asked him what to put, and he'd have said she'll know."
The man decided not to have an opinion. They carried them back down.
She stood there a minute after the van pulled out. The landing smelled like a funeral. It took two days to go away.
Wednesday there was a car in the street.
Not him. A car — a gray one, new, with dealer plates, parked in front of the bookstore with a young man standing next to it holding a folder like it was a birthday present.
Erin came down in her coat with Wyatt's hand in hers because they were going to look at the school.
"Mrs. Lockwood?"
"Brooks," she said, and kept walking.
He got in front of her, politely. "It's — I'm sorry, I've got a delivery. It's yours, it's registered, everything's done. There's a set of keys and the paperwork and I just need a signature, and honestly ma'am you'd be doing me a favor, I've been out here since eight."
Erin looked at the car. It was a nice car. It was, in fact, exactly the car she'd have picked, which was the worst thing about it — because it meant he had thought about it, or had told someone enough about her that they could.
"Whose name is it in?"
"Yours."
"Then I can do what I like with it."
"Yes ma'am."
"Good." She held her hand out for the folder, took it, and gave it back.
"Take it to the dealership in Thomaston and sell it, and tell whoever sent you to have the money wired to Colleen Hendricks in Portland.
She'll know what to do with it. And don't come here again — not you personally, you seem fine. I mean don't let anyone send you."
Wyatt tugged her hand. "Can we see inside it?"
"No, bud."
"Why?"
"Because it isn't ours."
"He said it was yours."
Erin crouched down on the sidewalk in front of a stranger and a car and put her hand on the side of her son's head.
"Somebody can give you a thing," she said, "and it still isn't yours.
Because they're not really giving it to you.
They're using it to say something. And if you take it, you've agreed to what they said, even if nobody said anything out loud.
" She watched him not follow that. "It's like when Aunt Van gives you the big present at Christmas. "
"The train."
"The train."
Wyatt considered this with total seriousness. "I like the train."
"I know you do." She stood up. "That's why it works."
The plane was the one that made her angry.
It came as a text from a number she didn't have, at nine at night, from a woman named Pam who ran the aviation side and had always been decent to her.
Mrs. L — instructed to let you know the aircraft is at your disposal, no notice required, no destination restrictions, indefinitely. Just call me direct. — Pam
Erin sat with that for a long time.
Flowers were a reflex. The car was a man asking a question. But the plane meant he had sat down at some point in the last four days and thought: what does she actually want. And the answer he had arrived at, after five years of marriage, was that his wife might like to leave the country.
He wasn't wrong, exactly. That was the maddening part. There had been a stretch in the third year when she'd have taken it.
She typed thank you, no and deleted it. Typed please don't contact me again and deleted that too, because Pam had done nothing.
In the end she wrote: Thanks Pam. Please put in writing to whoever instructed you that I've declined.
In writing. Colleen was ruining her.
Thursday, Colleen filed.
Thursday afternoon, Vanessa called.
Erin had blocked the office and the house and Vanessa's cell, and Vanessa called from a number in Portland that Erin didn't recognize, and Erin answered because she thought it was the school.
"Erin. Don't hang up."
She didn't hang up. She should have. She has thought about that since and concluded she stayed on because some part of her wanted to hear what the offer would sound like this time, five years on.
"You have three minutes," Erin said.
"I don't need three." Vanessa's voice was exactly as it always was — pleasant, unhurried, the same on a Tuesday as at a funeral.
"First. This is not a threat and I want you to hear it that way, because if you hear it any other way you'll act badly and it'll cost you.
Nobody is going to fight you about Wyatt.
Nobody. Not me, not Graham, not anyone acting for us. Do you understand?"
"I heard you."
"Say it back."
"You said nobody's going to fight me about my son."
"Good." Papers. Vanessa always had papers, even on the phone; you could hear them, and Erin thought for the first time that maybe that was on purpose.
"Second. He signed something this morning that I advised him not to sign and that I would advise any client not to sign, and I am telling you about it because he won't and because you deserve to have it from someone who isn't trying to move you. "
"I'm not interested."
"You will be. Third." A small pause, the only one in the whole call. "Erin. This does not have to be a public thing. It becomes a public thing on Thursdays and Fridays, in that order, and once it starts you cannot stop it and neither can we. There is a version of this that is quiet."
There it is, Erin thought.
Not a threat. Vanessa didn't make threats — she made forecasts, and then let the weather do the work.
"Van," she said.
"Yes."
"Three days before the wedding you told him she'd take it. That they always take it."
The silence on the line was a full second and a half long, and Erin, who had been married into that family for five years, had never once heard Vanessa Lockwood take a beat.
"I'm going to hang up now," Erin said. "You have a good weekend."
She did hang up. Then she sat down on the floor of her kitchen with her back against the cabinet, because her legs had gone, and stayed there until she heard Wyatt's chair scrape in the other room.
Friday it was money.
Not a check. Nobody in that world sends a check. It arrived as a call from a man at a bank in Boston who said good morning Mrs. Lockwood and then said a number and then said the word unconditional three times in ninety seconds.
Erin said, "Send it back."
There was a silence with genuine confusion in it.
"Ma'am, it's — this isn't a settlement offer, this is an unconditional transfer, there's nothing attached to it, it isn't contingent on—"
"I understand what it is. Send it back."
"I'm not sure I can. It's not — it's an instruction from the account holder, I don't have a mechanism to—"
"Then find one," Erin said. "You people always find one."
She hung up and called Colleen and Colleen laughed at her, once, sharply.
"Don't send it back."
"Colleen."
"Don't send it back, don't touch it, don't spend a dollar of it, and don't say one word about it to anybody.
Let it sit exactly where it is." Colleen's chair creaked.
"You know what that is? That's a man doing something on Friday morning that he cannot undo on Monday, in writing, in front of his own counsel, against her advice.
Every day it sits there untouched it's better for you.
It's the single best document in this file and he made it himself. "
"I don't want it."
"I know. You've made that abundantly clear and I've written it down." A pause. "Erin. Can I say a thing?"
"You will anyway."
"Four days in and he hasn't done one single ugly thing.
No leverage, no threats, nothing about the boy, nothing through the press.
That is genuinely rare and I want you to know it's rare, because I've done this for twenty-six years and I've seen maybe six of them.
" Paper. "And now I'm going to say the other half, and I want you to write it down: it means nothing yet.
Men are excellent for the first three weeks. Call me when he's tired."
Shannon came Saturday with four bags of groceries she hadn't been asked for and put them away in Erin's kitchen without asking where anything went, on the theory that in a kitchen this small there was only one place anything could go, which was correct.
"So the whole town knows," she said.
"I assumed."
"Dot at the market told me. Dot at the market told me sympathetically, which is worse." Shannon slammed a cabinet. "She said, and I want you to have this exactly, she said, the poor thing, and her only just finding out."
Erin laughed. It came out wrong.
"What," Shannon said.
"Nothing."
"No, what."
Erin looked at her — this woman who had known her before the summer, who had told her in a parking lot six years ago that a man like that will be very good at the beginning, who had been at the wedding in a dress she couldn't afford and had held Erin's hand through the whole ceremony from the second row.
"Sit down," Erin said.
"I don't like this."
"Sit down."
Shannon sat down.
Erin told her. Not the money — not yet, not that, she wasn't ready and she wasn't sure why. But the stairs. The study. The number of days. The five years.
When she finished, Shannon sat there with her hands flat on the table and didn't say anything for long enough that Erin was frightened.
"Say something."
"I'm choosing," Shannon said. "Between two things."
"Say the mean one."