I set the pen down and went back to clearing the plates.
But my mind had already moved somewhere else. Not to what I had lost, not to the fear of what might come next. To what I knew. To the things I had been watching for the past year with the careful peripheral attention of a woman who has learned that the central performance is rarely where the real information is. Charges that did not correspond to anything I recognized. Trips that did not line up with the stories I was told. Emails that had come through our shared accounts before Scott moved everything to separate systems, which he had done with the kind of quiet efficiency that in retrospect was its own kind of answer. I had seen these things and had not acted on them, not because I was unaware of what they might mean, but because I had not been ready. I was ready now.
I called Marcia Klein the next morning. I had saved her number months ago under a different name, a precaution I had taken on instinct without examining why too closely at the time. Her office was off Meridian Street in Indianapolis. She answered on the second ring, and I told her I thought I needed a lawyer, and she asked whether I thought I did or whether I knew, and I told her I had signed divorce papers the night before, and after a short pause she told me to come in that day.
Her office was the kind of space that accumulates rather than decorates, bookshelves dense with legal volumes, a framed degree that looked like it had been there so long it had become part of the wall, a coffee cup replaced by a travel mug of Earl Grey that I would learn was a constant. She read through the copy of the papers I had brought without changing her expression, page by page, methodical. When she finished she set them down and looked at me.
“You signed this without negotiating,” she said.
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You understand what this is,” she said. It was not really a question.
“A draft,” I said. “Not a court order.”
Something shifted in her attention, a small recalibration. “Go on,” she said.
“It’s what he wants the deal to be,” I said. “It’s not what the court has approved. And I think he’s counting on me not knowing the difference.”
Marcia tapped the papers once, lightly, with two fingers. “Men like your husband don’t usually make clean exits,” she said. “They make fast ones.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
She held my gaze for a moment. “This doesn’t work unless there’s something to find,” she said.
“There is,” I said.
She nodded once, with the minimal, precise quality of someone who does not waste motion. “Then we don’t rush,” she said. “We let him think he’s already won.”
