Chapter 6
The conference room was on the fourth floor in Portland and had a view of a parking structure.
Erin got there twenty minutes early because Colleen had told her to, and Colleen was already in the room with her coat still on, laying things out along the table in an order that clearly meant something to her.
"Where do I sit?"
"Here. Back to the window." Colleen didn't look up. "They come in and they're squinting. It's small and it's stupid and it works about forty percent of the time."
Erin sat.
"Now. Before they get here." Colleen finally straightened up.
"Today is a disclosure conference. Nobody signs anything, nobody agrees to anything, nobody says a word about reconciliation, and if anybody raises it we adjourn.
What actually happens today is that both sides put their financial position on the table and we all find out what we're dividing. "
"There's nothing to divide. He's given me everything and I don't want any of it."
"Yes. That's his half." Colleen sat down. "Now let's talk about yours."
Erin looked at her.
"Erin. I've been very careful about this for seven weeks because you have been carrying it a long time and it's yours to carry.
" Colleen folded her hands on the table.
"But in about eighteen minutes I am going to hand a piece of paper across this table with Ninebark Media on it, because I am required to, because it is the law, and because if I do not do it today it comes out later and looks like concealment, which is the one thing that could actually hurt you in this. "
"I know."
"I need to know that you know." She leaned in slightly. "Because I've watched a hundred people say they were ready for a document to be read out loud and about nine of them actually were."
Erin looked at the parking structure.
Seven weeks. She had rehearsed it in every conceivable form — she was a professional at rehearsing scenes, it was literally what she did for a living. She'd written it twice and cut it twice. She had imagined his face in maybe forty configurations.
"I'm ready," she said.
"All right." Colleen sat back. "Then one last thing and I'll shut up. When it lands, you're going to want to look at him. Don't perform anything. Don't be gracious and don't be hard. Just be a woman in a chair."
"Why?"
"Because that's the only version of this he can't do anything with."
They came in at ten past.
Graham's counsel first — a man named Rennick who Erin had met twice at things and who did not meet her eye, and a younger woman with a laptop bag. Then Vanessa, who was not sitting in as counsel and everybody knew it, and who said "Erin" perfectly pleasantly.
Then Graham.
She had not seen him in seven weeks.
Shannon had said he's lost weight and he looks like hell, and Shannon had been reporting from a parking lot at a distance of forty feet, and Shannon had undersold it.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the thing. He was in a suit, he was shaved, his hair was cut; from across a lobby you would have seen a rich man in his late thirties on an ordinary Tuesday.
It was in the shirt collar. It was in the way the jacket sat off his shoulders slightly, the way a jacket does when it was cut for a man about ten pounds heavier.
He looked at her once, on the way to his chair, for about a second.
He didn't smile and he didn't do the sad thing with his eyes and he didn't say her name. He looked at her the way you look at something to check it's still there, and then he sat down and put his hands on the table and left them there.
Erin's whole body went hot and then very cold, in about four seconds, and none of it showed anywhere, because she had had five years of practice in rooms exactly like this one.
"Right," Rennick said. "Shall we."
It took an hour and it was the most boring thing Erin had ever sat through, which was, she understood afterward, entirely by design.
Rennick went first, at length. The trust. The instruction letter.
The prenuptial agreement, which he stated for the record his client would not be invoking in any forum for any purpose.
A schedule of properties. A schedule of holdings that took a solid quarter hour to read aloud and which Erin stopped hearing about ninety seconds in.
Then a list of things being transferred that nobody had asked for. The Camden house. A boat she had used four times.
Colleen made small marks in a margin and said "noted" a great deal.
Graham said nothing at all for the entire hour. Not one word. He sat with his hands flat on the table and he listened to a man describe his own dismantling in a voice like a train announcement, and twice Erin saw his right hand move very slightly toward his left wrist and stop.
He had never in his life sat in a room for an hour without speaking.
Somebody had told him not to. And — this was the part she could not put down — he had done it.
For seven weeks he had done every single thing he had been told, and she recognized the shape of that, because it was exactly what she had done for five years, and she knew precisely how much it cost per hour.
At ten past eleven Rennick finished and squared his papers.
"That's our position. It's not conditional on anything and it isn't an opening number, there's no second envelope. It is what it is."
"Understood," Colleen said. "Thank you." She reached down beside her chair.
Erin looked at the parking structure.
"For the record, my client also has assets to disclose."
There was a small pause of the kind you get when a room has to change gear.
Rennick's pen stopped. "I'm sorry?"
"My client has assets to disclose." Colleen slid a stapled document across the polished table, and it made a sound, and she slid a second copy after it. "Ninebark Media, LLC. A Maine limited liability company. Sole member is my client. It was formed in April six years ago."
Erin heard the date land.
Rennick took the document. His associate leaned in.
Vanessa said, "Six years ago."
"That's right."
"Before the wedding."
"Eighteen months before the wedding," Colleen said pleasantly. "Page two is the schedule of income by year. Page four is the current statement. Page five is a list of the intellectual property held by the company and the contracts attached to it, including one executed last month."
Erin did not watch Rennick read it.
She did what Colleen had told her to do, which was sit in a chair.
Graham did not reach for the copy in front of him.
He hadn't moved. Rennick was turning pages with his eyebrows going up and his associate had stopped typing entirely, and Vanessa had picked up her copy and was reading it very fast with no expression at all, and Graham sat looking at the closed document in front of him.
Then he opened it.
Erin watched her husband read a piece of paper.
Page one, the formation. His face did nothing.
Page two — and she knew exactly which line was on page two, the second one down, the year of the wedding — and the muscle at the side of his jaw moved once, and that was all.
Page three. Page four.
He stopped on page four for a long time.
Nineteen million and change. She knew the number to the dollar and had never once said it out loud to another human being.
He read it. He read it again — she could see his eyes go back up to the top of the column, which is a thing you only do when you don't believe the total.
And then he turned to page five, and he read the list of five titles, four published and one under contract, and the name beside them.
Winters, Elle (pseud.). All rights held by Ninebark Media LLC. Beneficial owner: Erin M. Brooks.
Graham put the document down on the table and put both hands flat on either side of it, and lowered his head, and Erin thought for one appalling second that he was going to be sick.
He wasn't. He stayed like that for about five seconds.
Then he lifted his head and looked at her, and there was nothing performed anywhere on his face, and she understood that the room had just stopped containing four other people.
"Erin," he said.
"Don't," said Vanessa and Rennick, at the same time, in nearly the same voice.
"Erin. The kitchen. In January."
The floor of Erin's stomach dropped out.
Because she had not said it. It was not in the document.
It was not in any filing, it had never been said to Colleen, it had never been said to Shannon; there was no living person who could have told him, and there was no reason on earth for a man reading a balance sheet to arrive at a Tuesday night three months into a marriage.
Except that he had. Instantly. Out of a list of five book titles he had gone straight to it, in under two seconds, in front of his lawyer.
Which meant he had remembered it.
Which meant that at some point in the last five years — maybe that same night, maybe a year later, maybe last Tuesday in a parking lot in Rockport at twenty past three with forty minutes to fill — he had gone back and found that moment on his own and understood what it was.
And had said nothing. For five years.
"Mr. Lockwood," Rennick said. "I'd like a moment with my client."
"How long have you—" Graham stopped himself. Started again, and his voice was doing something she had heard exactly twice, once on a dock and once in a hospital room. "Did you write in the house?"
Colleen put her hand flat on the table. "Erin."
But Erin was already answering, and she heard how flat it came out, and she did not soften it.
"Every night," she said. "For five years. At the table in the yellow room, between two and five, with the small lamp."
"The small lamp," he said.
"Because the big one shows under the door."
Graham looked at her.