Chapter Nineteen
MOORE
It takes four minutes in the judge's office. Cormac is there. Carla Hutchins is there. Aviance is there, and she is wearing a pale blue dress and her hair down and she looks composed and present and nothing like someone who is performing resilience.
She just is okay.
I know the difference.
The settlement is signed. The asset division is confirmed.
The dissipation claim — the money I spent on Vanna from joint funds — is accounted for and awarded, in addition to the standard marital share, to Aviance.
It is a number that represents both a financial loss and a long overdue acknowledgment that what I spent was not mine alone to spend.
Aviance doesn't look at me during the signing.
Not cruelly. Not deliberately. She just — has other things to look at. Her attorney, the documents, the window.
At the end, when we're all standing up, she glances at me once.
I want her to see something in my face that means what I mean, but I know that's still a form of wanting something from her, so I just nod.
She nods back.
Then she turns to Carla Hutchins and says something in a low voice that makes Carla smile, and they walk out together, and I stand in the hallway for a moment after she's gone.
"You okay?" Cormac says.
"I'm fine."
I am fine. Not happy — I don't think I'm entitled to happiness about this, not yet, not for a while. But I am, for the first time since I sat alone in my house reading four pages of timestamps and realizing what I'd been doing.
I go home to my rental apartment.
I sit at the kitchen table.
I call my mother.
She answers on the second ring, the way she always does, and I say: "Hey. I have some time. I thought maybe I'd come for a visit."
And she says: "Come on. I'll make the thing you like."
I book the train.
It's a start.