Chapter 5
Regina Halsey's office was above a shoe repair on Broad Street and had a radiator that banged like a man in a barrel.
"I'll be direct with you," she said, "because you're paying me by the hour and you seem like someone who'd rather have it fast. I've been doing this nineteen years. What your husband's firm sent me on Tuesday, I've never once seen."
"Is it bad?"
"That's the trouble. It isn't."
Regina was fifty and had a plain gray bob and a way of stacking paper into perfect towers while she talked. She turned the first tower around.
"They've withdrawn every position they took last week. All of it. Then they've done this." She tapped. "This is a transfer into a trust in your name that he can't reach, can't reverse, and can't put conditions on. It's already executed. It happened Monday."
"Monday."
"Monday morning." Regina looked up. "There's no confidentiality clause.
There's no clause about public statements.
There's no clause about the press, which — Mrs. Sutton, I'd have put one in.
If you were my client and you were him, I'd have insisted on one and I'd have made it the price of the whole thing. "
Nicole sat very still, which she noticed, and disliked, because it was his.
"What does it mean?"
"Legally? It means whatever you say about him for the rest of your life costs you nothing." Regina squared the tower. "Practically it means he's handed you a loaded weapon and taken his hands off it. I've written to ask whether there's been an error."
"And?"
"They replied in four words. There is no error."
Monday morning. She had walked into that building on Monday morning. She'd been sitting at a desk on four thinking she was making the first move of her life, and four floors up a man had already given away the only leverage he had.
"Don't sign anything today," Regina said. "I mean that. People sign things when they're moved."
"I'm not moved."
Regina put her pen down and looked at her over the glasses, and did not say a single word, which was somehow the most expensive minute of the whole hour.
Then she said, "Can I ask you the question I ask everybody?"
"Go on."
"What do you want?"
"I want a divorce."
"That's the product." Regina waved it off.
"Anyone can get you that, it's an administrative act.
I'm asking what you want out the other side.
Because people come in here and say I want him to suffer or I want the house or I want it over by June, and those are all real answers, and the answer determines what I do for the next eight months. "
Nicole opened her mouth.
She was forty-six years old. She had been asked what she wanted perhaps four times since she was thirty, and three of those had been about restaurants.
"I don't know," she said.
"Good."
"Is it?"
"It's honest, which is rarer." Regina squared another tower.
"I'll tell you what I've noticed, since you're paying for the hour.
Everything you've told me today has been about a company.
Not one word about a man. You've been in this office fifty minutes and you have not once told me what you want him to feel. "
"That's because it doesn't matter what he feels."
"Mm," said Regina Halsey, in the tone of a woman who has heard four hundred people say that.
On Wednesday she got into an elevator on the fourth floor and her husband was in it.
There was one other person, a young man from finance with a laptop bag, who took one look at the two of them and became extremely interested in the floor indicator.
"Morning," Gordon said.
"Morning."
Six floors. She'd forgotten how slow the elevator was.
She had complained about it fourteen years ago and been told the shaft couldn't take a faster car, which was true, and which she now knew was also true of the shaft at Haymarket, and her brain served her that piece of information at exactly that moment because brains are stupid.
He smelled like the same soap.
That was the thing nobody prepared you for.
Not the anger — she had plenty of anger and it was portable, she could carry it anywhere.
It was standing eighteen inches from a man whose soap you have bought for twenty-four years, in a steel box, at nine in the morning, and having your body do something entirely separate from your opinion.
"The parish schedule," he said.
"What about it?"
"Beckett's office called me directly. She wants you at the site walks."
"Fine."
"I told her it wasn't my call."
Nicole turned her head. "Whose call is it?"
"Yours," he said, to the doors.
The young man from finance got out on five and did not need to.
"Gordon."
"Yes."
"Don't do that in front of people."
"Do what? I said it was your call, it's—"
"You said it for me," she said. The doors closed on an empty floor. "She called you because she thinks you decide. And you had a chance to say she doesn't work for me and instead you said a nice thing about me, which sounds identical and is completely different."
He stood very still.
"I don't know how to do this," he said.
"No," Nicole said. "You don't."
The doors opened on six. She let him get out first, because there was no version of walking out beside him that wasn't a photograph.
She heard about the lunch on Thursday, in a pharmacy on Charles Street, standing in line to pick up a prescription she'd had filled at the same place for nine years because she'd never bothered to move it.
"Nicole!"
Dawn Sutton was married to Gordon's cousin and had the particular energy of a woman who has been holding news since Sunday.
"Oh my God," Dawn said, "how are you," and had Nicole's forearm in both hands.
"I'm all right."
"You're not." Dawn squeezed. Then she leaned in, and her voice dropped into the register that means the actual reason. "Were you not there?"
"Where."
"At Vera's."
"No," Nicole said. "I wasn't invited to Vera's."
"Well." Dawn's eyes were enormous. "Well, then you don't know."
The line moved. Nicole didn't.
"It was meant to be a lunch," Dawn said.
"Sunday. Just family, sort out how it was all going to be handled, you know how she is, she'd already decided what everyone was going to say.
And she started — you know the way she does it, sweet as pie — she started on how it was a shame but of course these things happen when people marry out of their circumstances. "
Something went cold down Nicole's spine.
"And Gordon put his fork down," Dawn said, "and he said, Say the next part."
"He said what?"
"Say the next part." Dawn had clearly been practicing it.
"And Vera said something about not being spoken to like that in her own home, and he said — Nicole, in front of fourteen people, he said, No.
You've been saying it for twenty-four years and I've been letting you, and today you're going to finish the sentence out loud so everyone can hear what it sounds like. "
The pharmacist called a name. Nobody moved.
"She didn't finish it," Dawn said. "She sat there. And he stood up and put his napkin on the table and said, That's what I thought, and he left. He left his own mother's lunch. Roger says he's never seen anything like it in forty years."
"Dawn."
"And then — " Dawn was gathering steam.
"Dawn. Did he say anything about me?"
Dawn stopped.
"No," she said, and she sounded almost disappointed. "That's the odd bit. He never said your name once."
Vera called that evening, which Nicole had known she would from the moment Dawn let go of her arm.
"Nicole. I hope I'm not interrupting."
"You're not."
"I wanted to see how you are, in yourself."
"I'm fine, Vera."
"Good." A pause, exactly as long as it needed to be. "I don't suppose you've spoken to my son."
"No."
"No." Vera let out a small breath. "He has been extremely difficult. I had people on Sunday — family — and I'm afraid he made a scene."
"Did he."
"He was very hard. And in front of Roger and Karen, which of course they'll never mention and never forget.
" The voice stayed perfectly level. Vera Sutton had never raised her voice in her life and had ruined more afternoons than a hurricane.
"I said something quite innocuous and he chose to take it as an insult to you. "
"Was it one?"
The pause there was different.
"I've always thought," Vera said, "that you and I understood each other."
"I've always thought that too," Nicole said. "That's the problem."
She got off the phone and stood in the rented kitchen and found she had a hand pressed flat against her sternum, like a woman checking whether something was still in there.
Twenty-four years.
She had sat through Vera at Christmases with two hundred people's worth of grace.
She had sat through it's brave and is that what they wear now and of course you wouldn't know the family.
She had made a policy of it. She had told herself it was dignity and now she thought it might have been a kind of long cowardice with better clothes.
And in one Sunday lunch, a week after she left him, her husband had done the thing she had spent a quarter century not doing.
Without telling her.
That was what she kept coming back to as the week went on. He hadn't called. He hadn't sent Trevor. There had been no version of it where he arrived on Farnsworth Street with the story in his hands like a dog with a bird.
He'd blown up his family on a Sunday and gone to work on Monday and given away his leverage before nine a.m., and she'd found out about both from a pharmacy line and a lawyer.
Bridget came Friday with takeout and a face already set against it.
"No," she said, with her mouth full.
"I haven't said anything."
"You've got a face on. It's the face where you're doing arithmetic in his favor.
" Bridget pointed with a fork, which was how she conducted most of her arguments.
"Rich men's paperwork, Nic. That's all this is.
He's got lawyers and a PR man and about nine people whose whole job is to make him look like the good one, and now there's a trust, and you're sitting there going, oh, but he did it on a Monday. "
"He gave up the only thing he had."