Chapter 10: See You in Court
He rang at one in the morning, drunk enough to apologise and sober enough to want something, which is the exact overlap I had been expecting for about six days.
I was awake anyway, at the lake house, working through the preservation inventory with a cold cup of tea.
His number came up as eleven digits. I had taken his name off it that week and discovered that I still knew the number by heart, which annoyed me.
Nora. Listen before you hang up.
I listened. I want to be honest that part of me wanted to hear it.
He said he had made mistakes. He said fifteen years wasn't nothing. He said Sabrina had lied in front of everyone, that Martin had panicked, that the review committee had never once heard his side of it.
It heard eighty-seven pages of his side. His firm wrote them.
We can fix this, he said. You and me. No lawyers. No trust. Just us, like at the beginning.
The beginning.
Where's Sabrina tonight? I said.
Nothing on the line for four or five seconds.
She's not important, he said. She never was.
He offered me that as a comfort. He genuinely did. And somewhere across the city a twenty-eight-year-old woman was finding out how quickly Grant Wexler can rewrite a leading role into an extra, which I could have told her in September.
When you gave me that envelope, I said. Did it feel powerful?
What?
Between the oysters and the steak. Telling me to take my time with dessert. I've wondered about it for nine days. Did you enjoy it?
Nora, come home. We'll work this out.
I sat up and put my feet on the floor.
Grant. Listen carefully, because I'm only going to say it once.
All right, he said, very quietly. I'm listening.
See you in court.
I ended the call.
He rang twice more. I forwarded the log to Owen and slept until nine, better than I had slept in a fortnight.
At eleven the next morning Owen had him served at the flat above the dry cleaner: my answer, my counterclaim, and my verified financial disclosure. Dale was there, as a friend, which is what inexpensive counsel calls itself right up until the invoice.
Dale rang Owen twenty minutes later. Owen put him on speaker while I was signing the trust's receipt for the transferred files.
Tell me Schedule Three is a typographical error, Dale said, instead of hello.
It's verified, Owen said.
Then Grant, thin and furious, from further back in the room: Why does a divorce response list an entire trust?
Because your petition claimed interests in trust property, Owen said. Mrs. Hale has disclosed enough to answer every claim you made and not one line more.
Page one: Alder Street and the lake house, both premarital trust assets, marital interest nil.
Page two: the accounts, and the supplementary privileges that ended when the authorisation behind them ended.
Page three: a summary of the trust's holdings at current independently appraised value.
Nine figures.
Operating companies. Commercial property. A conservative investment book. And cash reserves my father built up across three recessions because he had watched his own father lose a business in one.
Grant had lived inside the income from those assets for fifteen years and had filed the source of it under decorative family history.
Dale whistled.
Not a comedy whistle. A low, involuntary escape of air from a man who has spent twenty years believing that numbers stay where they're printed.
Grant, he said. Did you know?
I knew her family had money.
This isn't family money, Dale said. This is an institution.
A page turned at their end.
Why has she put all this in front of a judge?
Because you asked a judge to divide it, Dale said. She's answering the case you filed.
She never talked about it, Grant said. And I never asked.
That is, as far as I know, the only sentence he has spoken about our marriage without decorating it first, and he said it to his lawyer rather than to me.
Dale went on turning pages. Owen and I sat and listened to every one of them.
Then he stopped.
Whatever counsel you hire next, he said, is going to tell you what I'm telling you now. Your filing has put property you don't own, client records you controlled, and a trust you never troubled to understand, all three, into discovery.
Grant didn't answer. I heard his chair go backward on the floorboards.
He had spent fifteen years reading my silence as evidence that there was nothing to know.
You are not the petitioner in this divorce any more, Dale said. You're the evidence.