Chapter 4
Geneva Novak answers her own phone.
I respect this immediately. If I am about to pay someone enough money to buy a used sedan, I like hearing her voice before an assistant asks why I am calling.
"Elliot says you're the forensic expert he trusts when the numbers are ugly," she says.
"Elliot says many accurate things."
She does not laugh. Points for Geneva.
"He also says this is personal," she says. "Do you want a consult or representation?"
"Representation. I need to file before my husband understands what I have."
"Can you be in my office in an hour?"
"Yes."
The answer comes out before I check traffic, calendar, dignity, or whether I look as wrecked as I feel.
"Bring the phone if you can do so safely," she says. "Bring copies of anything you've already preserved. Do not keep working from shared Wi-Fi. Do not confront him unless we plan it. Do not threaten him with evidence before I see the chain."
"I know."
"I know you know," she says. "I say it to everyone."
"And Ms. Hale?"
"Audra."
"Audra. If Elliot told you I hate bullshit, he understated it."
I like her before I meet her.
Grant texts while I am in the cab.
Grant: Flight moved earlier. Home by noon. Want lunch?
I stare at the message, amazed all over again by the nerve of ordinary things.
Want lunch.
As if we are a normal couple. As if he did not build a second domestic calendar with a woman who calls me "her" and waits for my bed to become available.
I type: Can't. Work.
Then I delete it.
Work has covered too much for him.
I type: Not today.
Grant: Everything okay?
I look out the window at traffic inching past a florist with buckets of peonies on the sidewalk. Grant bought peonies for Sasha last month. The second phone told me that. White, no pink, because pink was "too bridal" and Sasha wanted their place to feel like a promise without being obvious.
Their place.
I type: Busy.
That one I send.
Geneva's office is on Park Avenue, all glass and wool carpet and chairs designed to remind clients that comfort is for people who did not marry liars. She is in her early fifties, silver hair cut blunt at her jaw, black suit, no visible jewelry except a watch expensive enough to intimidate clients.
She reads my preliminary notes without interrupting.
Then she looks at the second phone.
"He used your anniversary for his main passcodes," she says, "and hers for this one?"
"Yes."
"That is almost too stupid to bill against."
"Please bill against it anyway."
Her mouth twitches.
Geneva spends the next forty minutes turning my disaster into categories.
Preservation. Temporary orders. Exclusive occupancy possibility. Dissipation. Tax implications. Business reimbursements. Discovery. Phone extraction. Settlement posture.
These words should feel cold.
They do not.
They tell me where to step.
Geneva gives me the rules in the voice of a woman who has seen grief turn expensive. Do not empty accounts. Do not destroy property. Do not post anything online, send the phone contents to the girlfriend, call her employer, or tell mutual friends before we decide whether silence is worth more.
"I know."
"Good. Then we can skip the speech I give to clients who learned evidence from television."
"I appreciate that."
Geneva closes my notebook.
"You have enough to file. You may have enough to make his mistakes very expensive. The question is whether you want speed, privacy, money, the house, or blood."
I think of Grant's voice telling Sasha he misses her in the elevator. I think of my kitchen. My bed. The sofa he hated until someone else bought it in a different color. I think of every year I explained him to myself, he's tired, he's stressed, he's not naturally demonstrative.
"The house," I say. "The money he spent back. Privacy where it protects me. Public consequence where it costs the lie."
Geneva studies me. "No blood?"
"Blood is messy and hard to deposit."
When I leave, Elliot is waiting in the lobby.
Not inside Geneva's office. Not in the meeting. Not where he would blur lines or look like a man taking charge.
The lobby.
He stands near the windows with two coffees in a cardboard tray and his suit jacket over one arm.
"I guessed black," he says.
"Risky."
"I have watched you drink coffee through depositions."
"That sounds less romantic than you probably intended."
"I didn't intend romance."
The lie is mild. Civilized. Almost polite.
I take the coffee.
His eyes dip to my hand, then return to my face.
"How bad?" he asks.
"Bad enough that Geneva had a list before I finished talking."
"She separated it into legal problems, financial problems, and Grant problems."
"The annoying part is that I can do the same thing, and it still hurts."
"I know," Elliot says.
There it is again.
Not surprise. Not praise. Not the tone Grant used when my competence made his life easier.
Elliot treats my competence as a fact. Reliable. Already counted.
"Stop doing that," I say.
"Doing what?"
"Being certain in ways that make me want to trust you."
He goes still.
"Do you want me to stop?"
That should be an easy question.
It is not.
"No," I say, and hate how low it comes out.
He nods, once.
No smile. No victory.
He simply hears me.
I take the coffee and walk out before that becomes more dangerous than the phone.