Chapter 9
"Are you sitting down."
"I'm standing at a counter."
"Sit down."
Erin sat down.
"They've filed a motion to modify custody," Colleen said.
"It was entered in Knox County this afternoon.
I have it in front of me. I'm going to read you the operative paragraph and then I'm going to tell you what I think and you are going to let me finish before you say anything at all. Can you do that?"
"Read it."
Colleen read it.
It ran to about a hundred and forty words and it was, Erin thought afterward, a genuinely beautiful piece of writing, in the way that a trap is beautiful.
It did not accuse her of anything. It expressed concern.
It noted the child's recent emergency hospitalization and observed — accurately — that the child had presented in a retail premises rather than a home, in the care of a parent who was at that time engaged in the operation of a commercial enterprise.
It noted the recent and significant change in the mother's professional circumstances, including a publishing contract executed in October and an anticipated publication schedule requiring travel.
It noted that the mother's residence was above a place of business.
And then it requested — pending nothing, urgently, as an interim measure — that the child's primary residence be established at the family home in Camden, where continuity of care and medical proximity could be assured.
"That's it," Colleen said. "That's the whole thing."
Erin sat at her kitchen table.
"Continuity of care," she said.
"Yes."
"He was in a bookstore. He was in a bookstore because he came down after school like he does every day, and the man who owns it drove us to the hospital in his truck."
"I know."
"I spelled his middle name on the form. I spelled it right.
" Erin heard her own voice going up and could not get hold of it.
"I was in that room for forty-one hours.
He was in the chair and I was in the — Colleen, he was there.
He sat in that room for two days and watched me do it and then he went home and filed this? "
"No," Colleen said.
"What?"
"That's the part I told you to let me finish for." Paper moved on the other end. "The motion is signed by Rennick's office, which means nothing, that's just who files things. But the certificate of service and the drafting attribution are on page six, and the initials on page six are V.L."
Erin did not say anything.
"It's your sister-in-law," Colleen said.
"She drafted it. She drafted it fast, and she drafted it well, and — this is the part I want you to hear — she drafted it out of everything that happened in that hospital.
The store, the surgery, the contract, the travel.
She could not have written a word of this before April. Somebody gave her the material."
"He gave her the material."
"Somebody did. I don't know who and neither do you.
" Colleen's voice was very level. "It could have been him, over a dinner, without the faintest idea what she'd do with it.
It could have been Rennick's file. It could have been the hospital paperwork, which she is not entitled to and which I would very much like to know how she saw.
" A pause. "Erin, I've been at this a long time.
This has the smell of something done for a man rather than by him.
But I want to be honest with you: that distinction matters to a court and it is not at all clear to me that it should matter to you. "
Erin called him at ten past five.
She did not plan it. She did not think about it. She picked up the phone and dialed the number she had never blocked, and it was the first time she had called Graham Lockwood voluntarily since a hospital corridor in April, and before that since a Tuesday in September.
He answered on the first ring, and there was something in his voice she recognized instantly and did not have a name for until much later, which was that he had been waiting for this call for about an hour.
"Erin."
"Did you know."
A pause. About one second.
That one second was the whole book.
"I found out at three o'clock," he said. "It was filed at two-forty."
"Did. You. Know."
"Not before. On my life, not before." His voice was flat and fast. "Erin, listen to me — "
"Twenty minutes," she said. "It was filed at two-forty and you found out at three and it's now ten past five. What have you done in two hours and ten minutes?"
"I've been — " He stopped. She heard him make himself slow down. "I've been on the phone with Rennick trying to establish who authorized it, because it went out under his firm's name and he says he did not draft it and I believe him. And I have a call with Vanessa at six."
"A call."
"Yes."
"You have a call," Erin said. "At six."
"Erin — "
"Do you understand what she's asking for?
Do you understand that a judge in Knox County is going to read the words continuity of care and look at a photograph of that house and then look at an apartment over a bookstore, and my son's whole life is going to come down to whether some man in Rockland thinks a woman who writes books can be trusted with — "
"Yes," Graham said. "I understand exactly."
"Then withdraw it."
Silence.
"Withdraw it, Graham."
"I want to," he said. "I want to and I'm going to and I need — " and there it was, and she heard it coming three words out, the way you hear a car that is not going to stop — "I need you to give me until Friday."
Erin closed her eyes.
"Until Friday."
"Because it isn't as simple as calling a lawyer, and if I do it the fast way it will look like — " He was talking quickly now, and reasonably, and every single word of it was probably true.
"If I withdraw it over her head in twenty-four hours in the middle of the divorce it is going to be read by everyone as an admission that we had grounds and got cold feet, and it will sit in the file forever, and if this ever goes in front of a judge for any reason for the next thirteen years that motion is going to be — Erin, I'm trying to make it not exist. I'm not trying to make it quiet, I'm trying to make it not exist, and to do that I have to do about four things in an order and it takes until Friday.
Three days. That's what I'm asking for."
Erin sat at her kitchen table in an apartment above a bookstore.
And what she felt was not rage. She has been very clear with herself about that. What she felt, in a completely still place under everything else, was recognition.
Because this was the voice. Not the man in the chair at two in the morning. This was the voice from the study door — reasonable, unhurried, in possession of the full picture, explaining to somebody why the thing they wanted was not going to happen this week.
Let me handle it. Let me handle it quietly. Give me until Friday.
"Graham," she said. "Where is she now?"
"What?"
"Vanessa. Right now, at ten past five on a Tuesday. Where is she?"
He didn't answer.
"She's at the house," Erin said. "She's at the Point, because it's Tuesday, and she has dinner at the house on Tuesdays, and she has had dinner at that house every Tuesday for five years.
" She was not shouting. Her voice had gone down half a step and gotten very quiet, and she was distantly aware that she sounded exactly like his sister.
"You could be there in twenty minutes. You could get in a car right now and be standing in that dining room before the plates go down and you could take it off her in front of your mother. "
"And that would cost — "
"I know what it would cost." Erin stood up. "That's what I'm asking for. That's the entire thing I'm asking for. I have never once in six years asked you to pay for anything."
Nothing on the line.
"Three days," he said quietly.
"No."
"Erin — "
"No," she said. "Not three days. Not three hours.
You have watched a woman do this to me for five years and every single time you have asked me to wait until it was convenient to fix, and I waited, and I waited so well that everybody in your family thinks I'm agreeable.
" Her hand was shaking and her voice was not.
"She has my son's name in a court file, Graham.
She got it out of a hospital room I let you into.
"And you," she said, "are going to have a call at six."
She hung up.
Then she stood in her kitchen for a while.
The shaking got worse before it got better, which she had learned about herself in September.
At half past five she called Colleen and said, in a voice she barely recognized, "Stop negotiating. Everything. Take the whole thing to trial."
"Erin — "
"I don't want the trust. I don't want the Camden house or the boat or the schedule of holdings or one dollar of any of it, and I want you to put that in writing tomorrow, and I want a hearing date, and I want the ledgers filed. All four."
There was a long silence.
"You understand what that does," Colleen said.
"Yes."
"It makes it public. Not the money — the marriage.
Every entry, every date, every name in those books goes into a file that anyone can walk in and read, and it will be in a Boston column within a week, and it will follow that boy around for the rest of his life.
" Colleen was not arguing. She was reading out the terms, the way she did.
"And it costs you an eight-figure settlement you have already been given for nothing. "
"I don't want it for nothing. That's the point of it. He gave it to me instead of doing anything."
"That is not a legal position."
"I know what it isn't." Erin put her hand flat on the counter. "Do it anyway."
"No," Colleen said.
"Colleen."