Chapter 15
The Knox County courthouse on the sixteenth of October took nineteen minutes.
Colleen had said twenty and had been apologetic about the estimate.
There was a judge who had done this a great many times, and a clerk, and a woman ahead of them whose matter took forty minutes and involved two lawyers who plainly hated each other.
Erin sat on a bench in the corridor and listened to it through the door and thought about how she had spent a year braced for something that was, in the end, a Tuesday morning in a county building with radiators that clanked.
Rennick was there for the other side. He stood up, said four sentences, and confirmed that his client had executed the decree on the eighth and had no matters outstanding and would not be appearing.
The judge looked at the file for about ninety seconds.
Then he said the thing judges say, and made a note, and it was over.
Colleen put her hand very briefly on Erin's shoulder in the corridor and said, "There. That's the worst-designed twenty minutes in American life and now you never have to do it again," and then went to talk to a clerk about something else, because she had another matter at eleven.
Erin walked out onto the steps at a quarter past ten in the morning and stood in the cold.
She was thirty-six years old and not married, for the first time in just short of six years.
She had expected to feel it.
That was the honest failure of the day. She had, in a place she had never examined, expected the moment on the steps — the exhale, the thing settling, some version of the ledger closing.
What she got was the parking lot, and a woman getting out of a car with a folder, and her own hands cold in her pockets.
She drove to Rockland. She picked Wyatt up at three. She made dinner badly, and read two chapters of a book about a submarine, and at nine o'clock she sat down at the table and opened the file with two lines in it and did not add a third.
At about ten she got up and looked at the calendar on the refrigerator, where October the sixteenth was written in her own handwriting, and she took a pen and crossed it out, which she had been looking forward to for four months.
She stood there with the pen in her hand.
He signed it on the eighth, she thought.
Eight days early. Not on the morning of, not in the room, not by messenger on the fifteenth with a note. Eight days early and through his lawyer, with no covering line and no acknowledgment expected or required.
The column ran on the Thursday, and it was not four sentences this time.
It was twelve hundred words, and it had a photograph of the Point house taken from the water, and it named the book.
brOOKS, it said, which was a choice — not Lockwood, not the former Mrs. Lockwood, and Erin understood within a paragraph that somebody at that end had done their homework and had decided the story was better if she was a person.
It named Ninebark. It named the March date and the publisher and the number the two-book deal had gone for, which was not public and which somebody had given them.
It observed that the author had lived at the property pictured for five years and had published four previous novels under another name during that period, reportedly without the knowledge of her husband's family.
And then it did the thing they do, which was quote an unnamed person close to the family saying that everyone was hoping the book would be handled with discretion, given that there is a child.
Erin read it standing up at half past six in the morning and had to hold the counter.
Bev called at seven, which was four hours before Bev was awake.
"Before you say anything. It wasn't him."
"Bev—"
"Listen to me, because I've been up since five doing this.
The deal number came out of a subsidiary rights conversation in Frankfurt in August and I know precisely which of three people it went through and it is being dealt with.
The rest of it is public record and forty minutes with a search engine.
" Paper, furiously. "And here is the part you need.
His office was called for comment on Tuesday. Twice."
Erin closed her eyes.
"And?"
"No comment on any matter concerning Ms. Brooks, now or at any future date.
" Bev read it out flat. "That's it. That's the whole statement, and it's the only statement, and they went back a second time on Wednesday morning offering him the chance to characterize the marriage and he gave them the identical sentence. "
"That's not—"
"Erin, they offered him the story," Bev said.
"You understand? That's what that Wednesday call is.
They were giving him a free go at being the reasonable one — the man who supports his wife's career and hopes people will be kind, the man with a child to think of.
Half an hour of his time and he comes out of March looking like a gentleman and you come out looking like a woman who cashed in a marriage. "
The refrigerator hummed.
"And he gave them fourteen words," Bev said. "Twice. Sweetheart, I have been doing this for thirty-one years and I have never once seen a man in that position keep his mouth shut when it was free to open it."
The other thing came the same day and Erin only learned it because Owen mentioned it, and Owen only mentioned it because he thought it was funny.
A woman had come into the shop on Wednesday afternoon — not local, very pleasant — and had asked whether he might be getting any early copies of the Brooks book, and had said she'd pay well over for one, and had been quite persistent about it in a friendly way.
"Told her March like everybody," Owen said, restacking something. "She left me a card in case."
"Have you got it?"
He gave her the card.
It was a name Erin did not know at a firm in Boston that was not Rennick's, and she sat with it at her table for twenty minutes and then did the only sensible thing, which was call Colleen.
Colleen rang back at four.
"It's a firm the Chadwicks use," she said.
"Not the Lockwoods. Not anybody acting for Graham — I've checked it three ways and I'd stake the practice on it.
" A pause. "Erin, I want to say something and then I'll get off.
Somebody in that world is trying to see that book early, and it isn't him, and it is the single easiest thing in the world for a man in his position to quietly want it seen and never lift a finger himself. "
"And?"
"And on the second of October he had Rennick decline a proof in writing," Colleen said, "which I now know because Rennick's associate mentioned it to me in a corridor as though it were an odd thing to have been asked to do.
Which it is." Another pause. "He's holding.
That's my report. Two days after the decree, with a column running, with someone else's lawyer sniffing round a bookshop in Rockland, he is holding, and he has not sent you one word about any of it. "
The letter came on the Friday.
It came to the shop, not to her — addressed to E. Brooks, c/o Dalton Books, Main St, Rockland, in his handwriting, which was not an accident; it meant he did not know for certain whether he still had permission to reach her directly and had decided not to find out by trying.
Owen brought it up at six with the day's mail and a box he had invented a reason for.
"There's this," he said, and did not linger.
Erin sat down at her own table and opened it.
It was one page. He had written it by hand and had not made a fair copy — she could see one place where he had gone over a word, and it was not a man being careless. It was a man refusing to let himself draft it four times.
Erin.
I signed on the eighth so that you would not have to sit in a room on the sixteenth and watch me sign it.
I have thought about that a great deal and I am fairly sure it was the right way round, but I am writing it down in case it looked like something else, because I have spent six years letting you work out my reasons on your own and I am trying to stop.
I want to say one thing and then I am going to say the other thing, and the second one is the point, so please get to the end.
The first is that I am not going to ask you again.
Not this year and not next year. Not on a doorstep at Christmas, not at the boy's birthday, not in ten years at somebody's funeral when we are both a bit sad and it would be easy.
I am not going to be a man you have to keep declining.
You have had six years of that from the other side and I have watched what it did, and I am not going to hand you a version of it with my name on it.
So: it is finished, and I am the one saying so, out loud, in writing, on paper you can keep. You are free. Not free the way a lawyer means it — free the way you should have been on the ninth of October six years ago, when I knew exactly what my family was and married you anyway without telling you.
Here is the second thing.
I understand now that all of it comes down to this: I could not end anything.
Not with Blair, not with Vanessa, not with the version of myself who was owed things.
I let all of it stand open because ending a thing costs a bad hour and I have never in my life had to have a bad hour.
And you finished a wedding, on four hours' notice, at a desk with three hundred place cards on it, at thirty, on your own.
So this is my bad hour. I have owed somebody a clean ending since I was thirty-three and I have never once managed it, and I would rather the first one I ever manage be given to you than to anyone else, even though — and I want to be honest, since I am apparently doing that now — it is the last thing on this earth I want.
Do not write back. Not out of anger and not out of kindness; kindness would be worse.
If you ever want anything at all, from a lift to a lung, you have my number and I will be there inside three hours and I will not read anything into it, and that is a promise from a man who has finally worked out what a promise is for.