Chapter 6: The Lake House Kept Its Light On
Grant rang while I was carrying my father's contract box in from the car, which meant I answered it with the box on my hip and the front door open and the lake making its noise behind me.
Cancel the review, he said.
Hello to you too.
Martin's taken the Hale account off my profile. My assistant is routing every client call through Marcus. Cancel the review.
It's in two days, I said. I'm recused. I can't cancel it, I can't score it, and I can't rescue you from it.
You control the trust.
Control isn't the same as permission. Ask Dale to explain that one slowly.
This is my career, Nora.
No. This is a vendor review. Your career is what's reacting badly in the vicinity of it.
He dropped his voice.
Sabrina won't answer me. You humiliated her at that hotel and now she thinks the firm's collapsing.
I put the box down on the kitchen table.
Did you hear that sentence before you said it, I asked, or after?
Don't.
I didn't serve papers between the oysters.
He hung up.
Owen forwarded the firm's compliance confirmation an hour later. Two urgent Hale matters reassigned. And Grant's biography on the Wexler Voss website no longer described him as relationship partner to the trust.
He sent me a screenshot of the page that evening. No message with it, then a second text, capitals again.
MAKE MARTIN PUT IT BACK.
I saved it and didn't reply. The biography changed because his access changed. My marriage isn't mentioned anywhere on that website and never has been.
Helen arrived at six with two suitcases, three bottles, and opinions about my new address.
You're actually living in the revenge house, she said.
It isn't a revenge house.
It has changed locks and a private dock.
It's mine, I said. It was always mine.
That's what I said.
She unpacked while I went round the windows. In the upstairs closet I found Grant's fishing jacket, still on its hanger from a weekend he abandoned on the Saturday morning after discovering the lake has no signal. He drove three hours back to town to take a call he could have taken on Monday.
I folded it into a delivery box and sent it to the Ninth Street apartment.
After Helen went to bed I opened Victor's contract box at the kitchen table, which is where it belongs, because that is the table he taught me at.
I was twelve. He gave me a warehouse lease and a red pencil and told me to find what was wrong with it, and when I turned to the first page he stopped me.
Read the back first, he said. Page one is what they want. The back is what they'll do.
The pencil is still in the box. It's worn flat on one side because I held it wrong for about four years and he never corrected me, on the grounds that it was my pencil.
Underneath it was the original board resolution putting substantial vendors on a fixed review cycle. Victor signed it years before Wexler Voss entered its current term, and he wrote a note in the margin in his own hand about why the dates had to be set in advance and never moved: so that no trustee, ever, could be accused of choosing when to look.
The Wexler date is typed in black on the schedule.
Nine days after my fifteenth anniversary.
That's the entire explanation, and it is going to be the explanation in eight days when Dale asks for it: a date older than the divorce, a conflict notice filed at nine oh two, new work frozen, and independent reviewers walking toward a deadline nobody in my house set.
At seven the rooftop photograph came down.
At seven twelve she posted a sunset with nobody in it, captioned Protecting my peace.
Helen sent me a screenshot and six crying-laughing faces. I sent back nothing, which I consider a personal achievement.
At eight thirty Grant left a voicemail.
Nora. Tell her the cards were a technicality. Tell her the apartment's temporary. She thinks I lied to her about the houses.
A second one came after the courier delivered the jacket.
Don't send my things here. The super left the box in the hallway. Sabrina saw it.
Behind him, at a distance, a woman asked whether he was planning to keep the apartment after the review.
He covered the receiver a half-second too late.
His wife had become a technicality. His flat had become temporary. His girlfriend had become unavailable. All three inside a fortnight, and not one of them by my hand.
At seven the next morning the phone went again.
Vera doesn't say hello. My mother-in-law regards warmth as an unsecured loan.
My son tells me you've lost your mind.
That diagnosis is outside your training.
I'm coming to the lake house at three, she said. You will reinstate his cards, you will return his home, and you will stop this review.
She hung up before I could tell her which of those three things she was entitled to ask for.
None of them, as it happens.
But in the desk drawer, underneath Owen's estate letter, there was one piece of paper in that house with Vera Wexler's signature on it — and at three o'clock she was going to walk in the door and remind me it existed.