Chapter 22 The Other Man
Summer
There's a manila envelope on my doormat when I come home from Reclamation, no postmarks and completely blank. There is a small white note paper-clipped to the top. The handwriting on the note is one I'd recognize in a coma. Colt.
Colt is here. He is in Chicago.
I stand in my doorway with my gym bag on my shoulder, my keys in my hand and I look at the envelope for a long time before I bring it inside.
I take it to the kitchen table. Sit down with it.
Stare at it. The note is two lines. White cardstock.
His handwriting. The same hand that signed our marriage certificate and wrote the inscription in the leather notebook on our first anniversary.
Summer. You should know all of it. I won't ask for anything else. Wherever you end up with this, I will respect it. I will love you always. Yours, Colt.
I read it three times. He came to my door. He set this on the mat and walked away.
***
Two hundred and forty-three pages. Cover sheet through appendix. I read it like I outline thrillers. Chronologically. Pencil in hand. Margin notes when something seizes my chest.
The headhunter email Sonny wrote a year and a half ago, looking for a female candidate, twenty-five to thirty, for an account executive position.
Must be intelligent, ambitious, and presentable.
The role requires close collaboration with my son, who is being groomed for CEO.
The ideal candidate will be someone he respects professionally and finds personally compelling. Discretion is paramount.
I read that last sentence three times. Personally compelling.
Discretion is paramount. He wrote that. To manipulate his son.
To manipulate me. He has sat across from me a hundred times in his dining room and his garden and the box at the Charleston Symphony, smiling in my face, asking how the writing was going. He is a snake.
The compensation package. One hundred forty thousand a year base salary.
Three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year with a bonus.
Two hundred from Sonny's shell companies.
I do the math on a yellow legal pad in the corner of the report.
That's twenty-eight thousand a month to break my marriage.
Didn't know that was something that could be quantified, yet here we are.
The phased strategy. Integration. Isolation.
Escalation. Deleted calendar entries including my birthday, family dinners, and nights out scrubbed from Colt's phone.
The strategic dinner party seating to separate me from Colt and control the narrative.
Cheyenne getting walked into the spot beside my husband while I was put at the wrong end of the table to talk to Carol about teapots.
If the optics appeared that Cheyenne was already Colt's partner, me disappearing wouldn't make as many waves.
What takes me down is page seventy-six.
Confirmed via sworn affidavit from bartender at The Butcher Block on Queen Street, Charleston, SC: subject Cheyenne Aldrich tipped the bartender one hundred dollars on multiple occasions to deliver pre-ordered drinks directly to subject Colt Bennet during four dinners over a six-week period preceding the night in question.
Pattern consistent with progressive dose testing.
The bartender believed at the time that the requests were of a sexual or recreational nature and didn't ask questions.
Four dinners.
I set the pencil down. I put both hands flat on the table.
The Wednesday I walked past The Butcher Block on my way to the market, saw them through the window, went in and sat down at their table. The night he kissed me on the cheek instead of the mouth. The night his cover story didn't match hers. That was one of the four.
He was being dosed by that viper.
I have been carrying that night for months.
I have built his entire guilt around it.
How he couldn't meet my eyes. The candles on the table.
The intimate setting. How he kept blaming Cheyenne for picking the restaurant like he was reaching for somebody else's fault to stand in front of his own.
How their stories didn't add up. I thought I was watching a man falling in love with another woman.
I was watching a man being slow-poisoned in front of me.
I sit at the table. I don't cry. The crying is for later, in the shower, like every night for two months.
I didn't have all the facts that he was being poisoned in front of my eyes.
However he chose to go there with her. He chose to tell me not to wait up that he was working and grabbing dinner in the office.
I don't know how to sit with the two sides of this.
The violation of his body, and his violating our marriage.
He chose her every night before. In pieces.
In attention. In laughter. In intimate moments.
In letting me disappear into the background.
In the soft hours that should have been mine.
The emotional affair was his. Every minute of it and he chose it.
And then someone took the choice away from him entirely. With a glass of bourbon and a paid bartender and a sleight-of-hand he couldn't have caught even if he had been looking for it.
I read the rest.
The night of Tidewater celebration. The full dosing, the posed pictures to make it appear that Colt and Cheyenne were together.
The photographers in the bars and by the limo.
The hotel. The Belmond Charleston Place.
The room reserved at four thirty in the afternoon, before the celebration started.
The photographer paid to stay in the lobby.
The hallway camera catching Cheyenne supporting Colt down the corridor because he couldn't stand on his own.
The part where it says, in clean legal English, that he is going to live the rest of his life not knowing what was done to his body that night.
I press the heel of my hand against my mouth. Hold it there.
The embezzlement. Eight years. Twelve million dollars. Shell companies and Cayman accounts and Sonny Bennet running a fraud his son was being groomed to inherit and cover.
The part where the PI explains why I was removed from Colt's life. I read it twice. Subject Summer King-Bennet was the primary impediment to the principal's long-term strategy. Subject was making subject Colt Bennet into a man not amenable to manipulation.
I read it a third time.
I was removed because I was making my husband into a man his father couldn't use.
The Bennets spent five years telling me I didn't belong. Too common. Too loud. Too much. The truth was the opposite. I was making Colt whole, and a whole son is harder to move around a chessboard. The fraud needed a malleable CEO. I was in the way of that.
I close the report. Set it on the table. Walk to the window.
I am married to a man who was sold out by his own father.
I press my forehead against the cold window glass.
I want to call him, but I don't.
***
I sit with the report for two days.
I read it again. I read parts a third time. I cry in the shower. I open my laptop and stare at the cursor and close my laptop. I walk to the lake and stand there for two hours and walk home with my fingers numb and my brain quieter than it has been in months.
I think about Colt in a hotel room not knowing how he got there.
I think about Colt at our kitchen island, six months before all of this, making me coffee and asking how the writing was going.
I think about the man I married, and the man who showed up at my bookstore with sunflowers, and the man in eight photos.
All of them are him.
The truth isn't simpler than the photos.
It is more complicated than the photos. He chose her every night before the celebration.
And then on the night of the celebration, somebody took the choice away from him entirely.
The first part he did to me. The second part was done to him.
The drugging doesn't erase what he chose.
What he chose doesn't erase the drugging.
I hold the two of them at the same time.
I put the envelope under my arm and I go to Vibes.
I need to say it out loud to someone who isn't Colt, not Autumn, not my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. I need to hear what it sounds like in a room.
I need Sam.
***
Sam
After the show, Summer comes back to my office with a manila envelope in her hand and a face that tells me she has been sitting with something heavy for a few days.
She sits across from me on the couch. Pulls her knees up. Sets the envelope on the cushion between us like it needs to be handled carefully.
"I need to tell you what's in this."
"Okay."
"Take a minute. Get a drink. You're going to want one."
I pour two whiskeys. Hand her one. She doesn't drink it. I sit on the other end of the couch. Wait.
"Colt's in Chicago. He left this at my door three days ago. He didn't knock. He didn't ask to see me. He didn't ask for a response. He left me a note on top. You should know all of it. I won't ask for anything else."
I take that in. Nod once.
"What's in it?"
"A private investigator's report. Three months of investigation. His father hired Cheyenne to have me removed from our marriage."
I stare at her.
She lays it out. The headhunter email. The compensation. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year. The phased strategy. The deleted calendar entries.
Then the celebration.
"Cheyenne dosed his drinks at The Butcher Block that night. Three drinks. The third one was the one that did it. There is a bartender willing to swear to it. She tipped him a hundred dollars and told him to deliver the bourbons directly to Colt."
She isn't crying. Her voice is flat. The kind of flat that comes after the tears are done for the day.