Chapter Five
Aaron
The first thing I do wrong is the flowers.
Two hundred stems of white peonies, because the florist says peonies mean apology, and I am a man who outsources meaning. I send them to Haven House on a Tuesday, nine days after my wife took my children and drove north.
They come back on Thursday. Not returned. Repurposed.
Willa sends me a photo: every pew of the little chapel in Bellweather Cove, full of my apology, and underneath it, in my daughter’s handwriting, a note.
Mom says sorry isn’t a centerpiece.
I stand in my kitchen holding that photo for a long time. The labeled bins by the door sit empty, and I can’t make myself move them, because moving them means deciding they aren’t coming back, and I’m not built to decide that.
The second thing I do wrong is the necklace. Sapphires, her birthstone, insured for an ungodly amount. It comes back with the tape unbroken. She didn’t even open it.
The third thing is the car. A Volvo, delivered to the lake house with a bow the size of a wreath, because her sedan has 140,000 miles on it and I figured this would be it: the grand gesture to win her back.
Dana, my assistant, sets the return paperwork on my desk with the careful face of a woman defusing something.
“Mr. Colt, with respect, maybe this isn’t the way to go about it.”
I fire her at 4:00 and un-fire her at 4:20, because she’s the only person in the building who isn’t trying to kiss my ass.
*
The kids call on Sunday nights. Court of appeals, 6:30 sharp.
Theo goes first. He’s five. He tells me about a rock that looks like a dinosaur tooth, and then he asks, “Dad, are you in trouble?” and I say, “Yeah, buddy. I am,” and he accepts this the way kids accept anything their parents say.
Then Willa gets on. Willa is eight, and she does not accept everything.
“Dad. At the party. When Grandma was on stage.”
I know where this is going. I’ve been dreading it all week, and I still have nothing.
“Did you say Mom’s name?”
“No, baby. I didn’t.”
“Did you say it was her building?”
“No.”
A pause that lasts the rest of my life.
“Then I have to go,” she says, terribly polite. “Theo needs his bath.”
*
My mother arrives in my office uninvited, in pearls, on the first of the month.
“You’ve embarrassed this family,” she says, before hello. “Three weeks, Aaron. No statement, no damage control, and your wife is playing pioneer woman for the society pages.”
“She’s not playing at anything. And I’m not doing damage control, I’m doing damage inventory.” I look at her, really look, maybe for the first time in years. “You told Cassandra what room I was in.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic.”
“You seated my wife like a coat check. You erased her name from her own project, and then you stood on a stage and diagnosed her in front of all those people.”
“I managed an unfortunate situation.” Beatrice says it like the check has already cleared. “That girl was never going to be easy, Aaron. I gave you every chance to handle her quietly. You wouldn’t, so I did.”
Handle her.
There it is, out loud, in my own office. My wife of ten years, discussed like an irregular invoice. And the worst part is how familiar it sounds. I learned the vocabulary somewhere.
“Get out,” I say.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Take the foundation out of my building by Friday. And Mother. If you ever say her name again, it had better be followed by an apology.”
*
My therapist’s name is Dr. Feld, and her office has just two chairs, which I find vaguely offensive.
“Why are you here?” she asks.
“My wife left.”
“Why?”
“Her project was stolen, her reputation was dismantled in public, my sister is a thief, my mother is a saboteur, and the woman my mother picked out for me staged a photograph to blow up my marriage.”
Dr. Feld waits, and the silence has a billable rate, so eventually I fill it.
“And I sat down,” I say. “At the gala. She was standing there in this red dress, and everyone was looking at her, and I ran the numbers, and I sat down.”
“What numbers?”
“The venue. The contract. The exposure.” I hear myself. “There weren’t actual numbers. There was my mother on a stage and a feeling that standing up would cost more than sitting.”
“And now?”
I think about the empty bins. The sticky note. Choose the one who stays, in my own handwriting, which she has now read. She has seen the exact price I put on her loyalty.
“Now I understand that I treated the most expensive thing in my life like a fixed cost,” I say. “And fixed costs don’t send invoices. They just leave.”
Dr. Feld finally writes something down.
“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said,” she tells me. “Come back Thursday. And Aaron. Stop buying her things. You’re not apologizing to your wife. You’re tendering an offer.”
It takes Elliot’s security contact one phone call to get the hotel corridor log, and my IT team three days to trace the email account that was almost my wife’s. Jacinta Colt with two t’s, registered through a vendor on the Vale events payroll.
I lay it all in front of Cassandra in the lobby bar of her family’s hotel.
“You stood in a corridor and waited for a frame, a photo. You built a fake email to move a meeting. You fed my mother the word overwhelmed, and you texted my wife from a burner number. Here is the part where you tell me why I shouldn’t hand this file to every journalist in Chicago.”
Cassandra stirs her drink. Unbothered. That’s her whole gift, being unbothered by people.
“Because of the venue,” she says. “Because of the Vale development deal, which I believe is worth, what, forty million over five years? Because I gave you the chance to tell your wife the truth that night, Aaron, and you deleted it.” She smiles. “I staged a photograph. You staged a marriage.”
I should be angrier. Mostly I’m tired.
“Keep the venue,” I say, and I slide a second folder across the bar, the termination notice, signed.
“Keep the deal. I released the security log and the email registration this morning, along with a statement naming the actual designer of the Renewal Centre. My wife. By name. Three years of work. Erased by my family, enabled by me.”
For the first time, Cassandra Vale looks bothered.
“That statement will gut you,” she says. “The board. The foundation. My family’s account. You understand what this costs?”
“Forty-one million, roughly.” I stand up and put cash on the bar for a drink I didn’t have. “I’ve been paying smaller installments for ten years. It’s time I bought something outright.”
“She’ll never take you back,” Cassandra calls after me. “You know that. You’re doing this for nothing.”
Here’s the thing Dr. Feld has been charging me by the hour to learn.
“I’m not doing it for her,” I say. “I’m doing it because it’s true. She doesn’t have to come back for it to stay true.”
Dana asks me that afternoon if she should send the coverage to Mrs. Colt. Every outlet has it. The designer, named. The staged photo, exposed. The Vale account, terminated.
“No,” I say. “No packages. She’ll see it or she won’t.”
“That’s very healthy of you, sir.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
Jacinta
The article finds me at the lake.
Willa brings me the tablet at the breakfast table, where Theo is eating cereal dry from the box, because Haven House has no systems yet and my daughter is interim management.
“Mom. You’re in the news.”
I read it standing up. My name, in print, attached to my building. The security log. The fake email address, traced and named. A quote from my husband that I read: It was her work. It was always her work. The erasure happened on my watch, and I was the one who should have stopped it.
Forty-one million dollars, the business page says the Vale deal was worth. Terminated.
I wait for the call all day. The call where Aaron tells me what he did, what it cost, what he’s owed for it. I know that call. I’ve been married to that call for ten years.
But it doesn’t come.
At nine, Willa finds me on the porch, still holding the tablet, watching the lake do its dark arithmetic.
“Are we going back?” she asks. Careful. My daughter, the bookkeeper of my heart.
“No, baby,” I say. “Not for a headline.”
But I don’t close it, either. I think about invoices and fixed costs and a man who finally bought something outright and didn’t mail me the receipt.
Credit is a noun.
It’s a start.
I’m waiting on the verb.