Chapter 3 #2
"The mean one is you let him." She looked up. Her eyes were red and her voice wasn't. "Five years, Erin. I sat across from you at so many dinners and you never — I asked you. I asked you straight out, twice, and you looked at me and said it was fine."
"I know."
"You let me think I was being unfair to him."
"I know."
"That's not him doing that. That's you."
"I know," Erin said. "You want an apology or an explanation? Because I've got one of them."
Shannon wiped her face with the heel of her hand, angrily, like it was an inconvenience.
"The other thing," she said, "the not-mean one, is that you carried that around for five years without one single person to hand any of it to.
And that's — " She stopped. Started again.
"That's the worst thing I've ever heard, actually.
That's worse than the ex. I'd have taken some of it. You never gave me any."
Erin found she couldn't answer that.
"So which is it," Shannon said.
"Both," Erin said. "They're both true."
"Yeah." Shannon got up and went back to the groceries. "Well. Welcome to town. There's a chowder thing at the church on the twelfth and everyone's going to look at you and you're going to go anyway."
On Monday Colleen drove up from Portland instead of calling, which she had not done before and did not do lightly, and that was how Erin knew.
They sat at the kitchen table. Colleen took a folder out of her bag and did not open it.
"Before I show you this I'm going to tell you what it is, because I'd rather you have the shape of it before you have the numbers.
" She folded her hands. "On Friday morning Graham Lockwood executed an irrevocable trust in your name.
Forty million dollars. It is done, it is filed, and there is no instrument on this earth that lets him take it back — not divorce, not remarriage, not you moving to Portugal with somebody else, not your death, in which case it goes to Wyatt.
It is the most one-sided document I have ever read and I have read a great many. "
Erin didn't say anything.
"There's a second page. It's a letter of instruction to his own attorneys." Colleen opened the folder now and turned it around. "Four lines. I'd like you to read them yourself."
Erin read them.
You will not oppose any request she makes. You will not raise the prenuptial agreement in any forum. You will not take a position on custody. If she asks for something and you believe it is against my interest, you will give it to her and tell me afterward.
Underneath, in pen, in his handwriting, which she would have known anywhere:
This is not to be communicated to her as a gesture. If she asks who arranged it, the answer is that it was always hers.
Erin put the page down on the table and turned it face down, which is a thing she had watched him do a thousand times and had never once done herself.
"Vanessa said he signed something she told him not to sign."
"Vanessa would have told him not to sign it.
Vanessa's job is to tell him not to sign it.
" Colleen's voice was very even. "Erin, I want to be extremely clear about my advice, because it hasn't changed and it isn't going to.
Take it. Say nothing. Give him nothing back for it, including a thank you.
It is not a payment for anything, he has not asked for anything, and if you write him one line about it he will read the line for the rest of his life. "
"You think it's real."
"I think the document is real. I have no opinion whatsoever about the man." She closed the folder. "Those are different questions and you should keep them different for as long as you possibly can."
Erin looked at the face-down page.
Here was the thing. She had built a version of him in her head five years ago on a staircase and had lived inside it since, and it was a good, sturdy, load-bearing version, and everything she had done for five years had been braced against it.
A man who married her out of obligation and could not put a door shut.
That man does not sign away forty million dollars on a Friday morning against his sister's advice and then instruct his lawyers to lie about who did it.
That man does something like it. He does something that looks like it and has a hook in it somewhere. She turned the page back over and read the four lines again looking for the hook.
There wasn't one.
She would find, over the next several days, that this made her angrier than the flowers, the car, the plane and the wire put together.
Because it did not fit. Because she had needed him to be exactly one thing in order to get out of that house on five hours of sleep with a child on her hip, and he had waited until she was out to be something else.
"Colleen," she said. "If a man does the right thing after you've left, does it count?"
Colleen picked up her bag.
"That's above my pay grade and below your lawyer's," she said. "But since you asked. Twenty-six years, and the ones who do it after are about even with the ones who do it during. Which is to say: yes, it counts. And no, it doesn't mean he'll do the next one."
After she'd gone, Erin sat at the table with the divorce paperwork she'd been meaning to sign since Thursday, and a pen, and forty minutes.
She did not sign it.
She could not have told anyone why, and it did not feel like hope. It felt like a woman who had gotten the arithmetic wrong somewhere and would not put her name to anything until she found out where.
The paragraph ran the following Thursday, exactly as Vanessa had forecast, in a Boston column that covered money and the people who had it.
It was four sentences long. It named him and it did not name her — she was his wife of five years — and it used the phrase living apart and the phrase understood to be amicable, and the last sentence mentioned, with no connective tissue at all, that Blair Chadwick had been at a Lockwood table at a benefit in the spring.
Four sentences. No accusation anywhere in it. Nothing you could sue.
Erin read it standing up at the counter at half past six in the morning and understood two things at once.
The first was that somebody had fed it. Not Graham — Graham would have been called for comment and would have said nothing, and the paragraph had the smooth shape of an item that had been handled.
The second was that whoever fed it had put Blair's name in the last line on purpose, and had done it to be helpful.
She put the phone down.
Then she opened her laptop, and she did not open the ledger, and she did not open the file marked with the fifth book that had been sitting untouched since May.
She opened her mail and she wrote four words to Bev Kaplan.
Take it out wide.
Then, before she could think about it, she added one more line, and it was the first genuinely reckless thing she had done in five years:
And put my name on the deal memo. Not on the book. Just so somebody's written it down once.
She hit send at 6:41 in the morning.
Bev, who did not take calls before four, called her at 6:44.