Chapter 6 - What Rachel Knew, and What She Chose Not to Know
Rachel asked to meet me on Tuesday at a coffee shop across from Melissa's office. I nearly refused. My children had finally stopped asking me to explain Daniel, and I didn't want to spend another hour explaining him to his mistress.
Then she wrote: I have emails about the lake house. I should have shown you sooner.
Melissa agreed to attend. I arrived first and chose a table where I could see the door. I ordered tea and told myself I was there for information, not an apology. Those were two different kinds of hunger, and I was finished confusing them.
Rachel came in carrying a brown envelope. Without the red dress and the hotel lights, she looked younger and more tired. She didn't extend a hand.
“I know you don't want to see me,” she said.
“That's correct.”
She sat down anyway. Melissa opened her notebook.
Rachel had done freelance branding work for Daniel's consulting company. She had prepared a glossy brochure showing the blue house and adjacent shoreline as a potential boutique retreat. Daniel told her I wanted to sell and was delaying the final paperwork until the divorce settlement. When Rachel saw photographs of the property, she assumed he had access because he was my husband.
“Those are explanations,” I said. “They aren't a reason to use somebody's home in a brochure without asking the owner.”
“I know.”
“Did you know we were still married when the affair began?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know he was telling our children we'd simply grown apart?”
She shook her head. “No. But I knew he wasn't being honest with you. I chose not to look at what that meant.”
I appreciated the absence of a speech about how love had made her helpless. It didn't excuse her; it meant we could get to the facts.
Rachel slid three printed emails toward Melissa. In the first, Daniel asked her to send Laurel Landing the brochure. In the second, he wrote that I was “on board in principle” and that formal consent would follow. In the third, he'd attached an image of a signature and asked Rachel to insert it into the preliminary owner acknowledgment.
“Did you insert it?” Melissa asked.
“I did. He said it came from a consent form Claire had already signed. I never saw that consent form.”
“You should have asked,” I said.
“Yes.”
Rachel looked at the floor. “I didn't realize until last weekend that he was trying to pressure you into signing something you hadn't agreed to.”
“Why last weekend?”
She took out her phone and showed us a message Daniel had sent the day before arriving at the Hawthorne: If Claire sees us together, she'll finally understand I'm moving on. If she makes a scene, I'll have witnesses. Either way, she signs Monday.
Melissa asked Rachel to preserve the original messages and transmit them through counsel. Rachel agreed. The phone stayed in her hand, faceup, as if she needed to keep herself from looking away again.
“There's one more thing,” she said. “He told me the consulting money was paying for a new studio we could open together after his divorce. But when I asked why he needed another twenty-eight thousand, he said a deposit had to be covered before the developer took him to court.”
“The money came from our joint savings,” I said.
Rachel's mouth fell open. “He told me it was his business reserve.”
“You didn't ask whose account it came from?”
“No.”
Melissa gave her a direct look. “What we need now are documents. Not impressions of his tone.”
Rachel nodded. She had bank records of her own showing that Daniel had paid for design work with company funds, but she did not have access to our accounts. Melissa explained what she would request through the case and told Rachel to retain her own attorney if her work was being drawn into a dispute.
When we finished, Rachel remained seated.
“I won't ask you to forgive me,” she said. “I need to apologize anyway. I liked believing his version because it gave me what I wanted.”
I looked at her for a long moment.
“An apology doesn't repair twenty-seven years,” I said. “It doesn't need to be the beginning of a friendship, either.”
“I understand.”
I left without hugging her. Before I reached the door, she said she would tell her own clients that the blue-house brochure was withdrawn. I turned back long enough to say, 'Do it in writing.' She nodded. I had spent too many years accepting people's intentions as if they were actions. When I got to the sidewalk, I realized I had wanted her to say something that would make the betrayal understandable. There wasn't a sentence in the world that could do it. I could let that wish go without excusing either of them.
Outside, rain hammered the sidewalk. I stood beneath the awning and called Nora. She answered from her classroom during a planning period.
“I'm meeting with a financial adviser after work,” I told her. “I need to make sure the household bills are covered until this is resolved.”
“Do you need money?”
“No, sweetheart. I need a spreadsheet and about six hours of sleep.”
“I can make the spreadsheet.”
“You teach seventh graders. Haven't you suffered enough?”
She laughed. We spent the next ten minutes talking about a student who had submitted an essay comparing the school cafeteria to a prison ship. The conversation reminded me that I was still a mother, a librarian, and a person who could laugh about something other than a man.
That evening, Daniel sent a message through the communication channel Melissa had asked us to use. It said he was filing a request in our divorce case because I was “obstructing reasonable settlement discussions” and leaving him with debts we supposedly shared.
He also attached a sworn statement claiming that I had known about the Laurel Landing agreement for months.
May you like
I had never seen the statement before.
But beneath it was the same signature, right down to the tiny dot of ink.
