Chapter 17: What She Called Hiding
The first time I sat in a courtroom with my husband, he looked at me the way you look at the person you're pressing charges against.
The date came in the post on the sort of paper that ends marriages. A Thursday in October. Courtroom 4B, which is small and beige and has a radiator that ticks.
Owen was there before me, reading something unrelated, as though it were an ordinary Thursday and he had simply come in out of the rain.
Grant wore the grey suit. I used to lay that suit out for him on days that mattered, and I sat there working out whether he had chosen it deliberately or whether it was simply the one that still fit.
He had good counsel and a bad case, and by eleven o'clock both were visible from the back row.
Paula Merritt stood when the judge nodded to her, and I'll say this for her: she did not waste one minute of that room's time.
Your Honour, she said, this is a case about concealment.
For fifteen years my client believed he was building a shared life. In fact every significant asset sat inside a trust he never saw, controlled by a wife who never told him it existed.
She used hidden four times. She used secret twice. She built a picture of a woman who had spent fifteen years quietly moving the furniture around in the dark while her husband slept, and she built it well, and there was a moment where I almost admired the craft of it.
Then Judge Alvarado took her glasses off, which I would learn is how that particular judge punctuates.
Ms. Merritt. When was this trust formed?
Eleven months before the marriage, Your Honour.
Premarital, then.
There is the question of commingling, Your Honour. A long pattern of use. The marital home—
Counsellor. Did your client disclose this trust in his filing?
The first pause of the morning.
No, Your Honour.
Did the respondent disclose it in hers?
A longer one, because by then pauses were most of what Paula had left.
She did, Your Honour.
Then nothing was hidden, the judge said. It was declared. Your client simply never asked, and this court is not a detective agency retained to do a husband's asking for him.
I watched Grant fold his hands on the table. The same hands that had pushed an envelope across a tablecloth at me between the oysters and the steak.
Paula tried one more handle, because she is good, and the good ones try every handle in the room.
Your Honour. If the trust is to be excluded from the marital estate, we're entitled to test the characterisation. A sworn summary is a summary.
Test it how?
Records. Billing. Contracts. The full payment history between the trust and any marital source of income — including my client's firm.
The judge turned to our table.
Mr. Blackwood. Any objection to producing the trust's records?
And this is the moment I had come to that courtroom to watch, although I didn't know it until it was happening.
Owen stood up, buttoned his jacket, and did something I have seen him do perhaps four times in fifteen years.
He smiled.
No objection, Your Honour, he said. The respondent welcomes it. Complete records. Every year. Every page.
Paula blinked.
Lawyers at that level train themselves out of blinking, so one blink from Paula Merritt is more or less a signed statement. She had asked for a torch and been offered every light in the building, and somewhere behind that very good face an alarm had started ringing.
The judge signed the order there and then. Complete trust records to both parties inside thirty days. All contracts, all billing, all approvals.
Grant leaned over and whispered something urgent to his lawyer, and she answered without moving her lips, and even from where I sat it was legible.
I don't know yet.
In the marble corridor afterwards Owen walked beside me with his face arranged for public consumption.
Why did you smile, I said.
Because, he said, still looking straight ahead, she has just persuaded a judge to order both sides to reconcile the client's copies against the firm's complete internal record.
Every renewal packet the trust had ever received was a summary prepared by the firm.
Neither of us knew yet what sat underneath fifteen years of summaries.