Chapter 3 #3
“That’s Nancy,” Stephanie said.
“Who’s Nancy?”
“Nancy Glickman. She’s the best divorce lawyer in Philadelphia. She scares judges.” Stephanie went to the door. “She’s also my aunt’s old law partner, and she owes me for her nephew’s drunk driving case. I called her this morning. Don’t argue with me.”
Caroline didn’t argue.
Nancy Glickman was sixty years old and five feet tall, with a white bob and big square glasses and a leather bag the size of a suitcase.
She had brought a bottle of wine, and she opened it herself with a corkscrew from her bag, and she sat down on Stephanie’s coffee table in her good wool coat as if she had sat on a thousand coffee tables.
“I watched the video,” Nancy said. “I’m sorry. That was a lousy thing to have happen in front of your whole town.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do. That’s not my job.” She poured three glasses. “My job is to tell you what you can do, so that when you decide, you decide with your eyes open. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Nancy asked questions. She asked how long they’d been married.
She asked about the house, the accounts, whether there was a prenup.
She did not ask about the kiss. She asked about the store, and she listened very carefully when Caroline told her about the rescue three years ago, and the controlling stake, and the board, and the chair at the head of the table that her father used to sit in.
“So the store isn’t part of your marriage,” Nancy said at last. “Not exactly. His stake in Hadley’s belongs to him. Your family’s shares belong to your family’s trust. If you divorce him, he doesn’t lose the store. He’s still the chairman.”
“I know.”
“You’d be divorcing your husband and still working for him.”
“I know,” Caroline said. “I’ve been working for him for three years. I just didn’t say it out loud.”
Stephanie reached over and squeezed her knee.
“You can file any time you want,” Nancy said.
“Monday, if you like. I’ll have the papers drawn by Tuesday.
Or you can wait. People wait for all kinds of reasons.
Kids. Holidays. Money. Sometimes they just want one more month of not having it be real.
” She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her scarf. “What do you want, Caroline?”
Nobody had asked her that in a very long time.
Caroline sat on Stephanie’s couch and thought about it. She thought about the gold star, and two hundred people clapping. She thought about Brittany saying let me carry the floor. She thought about her father’s crooked bow tie.
“I want to get through Christmas,” she said. “I want to run my season. And I want him to understand that my family’s store is not something he gets to hide behind.”
Nancy put her glasses back on.
“Then here’s what I’d do,” she said. “I’d file after Christmas. The day after. And until then, I’d tell him the rules.”
* * *
Caroline called him from Stephanie’s fire escape at nine-thirty.
It was freezing out there. The fire escape looked down on a little yard full of dead tomato plants and a string of Christmas lights somebody had given up on.
Stephanie had handed her a blanket and shut the window behind her.
Caroline stood in the cold with the blanket around her shoulders and her breath going up in clouds.
He answered on the first ring.
“Caroline.” He sounded as if he’d been sitting with the phone in his hand. “Thank God. Are you okay? That speech this morning—I’ve never seen anything like it. I stood up there and I—”
“I’m going to file for divorce,” she said.
The line went completely silent.
She waited. Down in the yard, a cat walked along the top of the fence, very carefully, and dropped out of sight.
“After Christmas,” she said. “The day after. I’ve talked to a lawyer. I wanted you to hear it from me and not from some website.”
“Caroline.” His voice was barely there. “Please. Don’t. Can we just—can I see you? Can we talk about this? Not on the phone. Please.”
“Not now.”
“Then when?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled the blanket tighter. “Here’s what I do know. Until Christmas, there are some rules.”
He didn’t say anything. His breathing was the only sound on the line.
“You don’t send your people onto my floor,” she said. “You don’t send Barry. You don’t send photographers. You don’t put out any more statements with my name in them, or my family’s name, or the store’s name. You don’t call my father to get to me.”
“Okay.”
“And you don’t send her.” Her voice shook on the word, and she let it. “Not to the store. Not to my office. Not ever again.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. She won’t—okay.”
“Hadley’s isn’t your shield, Connor. You don’t get to stand behind my family’s name while you clean this up. I don’t care how much of it you own.”
“I don’t—” he started, and stopped himself before he could finish it. I don’t own it to hide behind it. But he did own it.
“I understand,” he said finally.
“Good,” Caroline said. “Merry Christmas, Connor.”
She hung up, and stood on the fire escape in the cold, and shook until Stephanie came out and brought her inside.