Part 2
I put the cap back on the pen. “No.”
Matthew held the phone between us a moment longer, then turned off the screen. He gathered his copy of the agreement and told me that his lawyer would be in touch. I took my copy upstairs before he could mistake leaving it on the table for leaving the decision to him.
In our bedroom, I called Nina Flores. We had been friends since high school, although for the last several years most of our conversations had happened while I drove between jobs. She answered with her mouth full.
“If this is about Saturday, I already bought the tickets.”
We were supposed to see a play. I had nearly forgotten.
“Matthew’s leaving. He wants me to sign something.”
There was a small clatter at her end. “Have you?”
“No.”
“Good. Put it away. Is he there?”
“Downstairs.”
She asked whether I felt safe, whether I could get to my money, and whether I had somewhere to sleep if I didn’t want to stay. I told her I wasn’t frightened of him hurting me. What frightened me was how thoroughly he had prepared a life that didn’t require my knowing about it.
“Come to the office tomorrow,” she said. “Ten o’clock. Bring what he gave you.”
“Can you do this? The case, I mean.”
“We can discuss that tomorrow. Tonight I’m your friend, and I’d like you to eat something.”
I couldn’t imagine eating. After we hung up, I went looking for the old envelope.
It was in a plastic file box at the back of our bedroom closet. We had carried that box through three apartments before buying the condo, and each time Matthew asked whether we still needed it. I said yes because it contained our tax returns, the paid-off car loan, and the records of a life we had kept afloat without much room for mistakes.
The envelope was labeled SCHOOL, in my handwriting. Inside were receipts, loan papers, and a sheet of lined notebook paper folded into thirds. I knew what the sheet said before I opened it, but I sat on the carpet to read it anyway.
Matthew had written it during his second year of medical school. His father had lost a long-standing construction contract and couldn’t send money he’d promised toward the next tuition bill. Most of the bill was covered, but the remaining amount was more than we could find between our checking accounts.
I had steady employment and decent credit. Matthew had student debt and almost no income. I borrowed eighteen thousand six hundred dollars from my credit union; the money went to the school. Afterward, Matthew insisted on writing down what he would repay.
I’d told him we were married. He’d said that made it more important to put it in writing, because I was the one signing for the loan. He wanted me to have something more reliable than another promise made when we were scared.
The note named the amount, the loan, and the tuition payment. He promised to reimburse me when his income allowed it, and then added, in smaller letters, a sentence about my return to school. He’d signed and dated it below that promise.
Reading the promise about school made me put the paper down. I could manage the amount and the date. I couldn’t yet manage proof that he had once understood exactly what I was waiting for.
Matthew came upstairs while I was putting the file box back. He stopped at the closet door.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting my papers.”
He looked at the envelope in my hand. “I’d rather you didn’t turn this into something ugly.”
“You should have spoken to me before you hired a lawyer.”
I slept in the guest room with the envelope under a folded sweater. Around midnight, I heard him go downstairs for water. My body still tried to get up and ask if he needed anything; I stayed in bed until the footsteps stopped.
The next morning, I had to ask Marcy to cover part of my shift. She was the store’s other opening cashier, a woman who carried peppermints in her apron and could fix a receipt printer with one hand while continuing an argument with a customer.
“I can take the rest of this morning,” she said. “But don’t put me down for Saturday. My granddaughter’s got a concert.”
I nearly said that I wouldn’t need much time. Instead, I told her what had happened. Marcy set down the roll of register paper she was carrying and listened without asking about Claire or the apartment.
“Have you got someone helping you?”
“Nina. She’s a lawyer.”
“All right. I’ll tell the manager you’ve got an appointment.”
She didn’t tell me to be strong. Before I left, she took the carton of milk from my hand and rang up the customer I’d been serving. I went to Nina’s office with my coat still buttoned crookedly.
Her office occupied two rooms above a dentist, and I could hear a drill through the floor while she read Matthew’s offer. She had represented divorcing couples for years, but I’d never seen her do it with someone I knew. She took a yellow pad from a drawer and asked me questions without supplying the answers she hoped I would give.
Who owned the condo? When had we bought it? Which accounts could I access? What did I earn now, and what had I stopped doing when Matthew began to earn more?
“I can’t afford a long fight,” I said.
“Neither can most people who come in here. That doesn’t tell us yet whether you need one.”
She explained her fees. I could pay an initial amount from my savings, and she could defer the rest until our property was divided. She wouldn’t promise a particular result, and she wouldn’t let me agree to something that afternoon simply because Matthew had made waiting sound dangerous.
Then I gave her the old envelope. She unfolded the notebook page, read it twice, and asked me what had happened to the loan.
“I paid it off. Five years. His residency pay covered more of the regular bills by then, but the payments kept coming out of my checking account.”
“Did he reimburse you separately?”
“No. When I asked about it, he said there wasn’t any point moving money around. We were a family.”
Nina laid the note beside his lawyer’s description of independently financed education and asked whether I could get the credit union records and confirmation from the school.
“This matters,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the court automatically hands you that amount again. We have to account for the marriage, including what both of you paid. But he can’t truthfully say you did nothing.”
We opened the statements from the joint investment account. Matthew had managed it since we bought the condo, showing me the balance now and then and telling me we were finally catching up. I had continued to pay the utilities and groceries from my wages because I liked being able to take care of those things without asking.
One withdrawal was fifty-two thousand dollars. It had happened in August, three months before the packing tape appeared on our furniture. The receiving company was Wren Clinical Recruiting.
I looked at the entry until Nina said my name. The date was the same month Matthew told me we should put off my classes because the market had been rough.
“He said we needed to rebuild our savings.”
“Did you agree to this transfer?”
I shook my head.
“Did you know he’d invested in her company?”
“I don’t know that he has. I know what you know. There’s a payment.”
Nina nodded and wrote that down. She would ask his attorney for records showing what the money purchased and whether Matthew held any interest in the company. The bank statement alone couldn’t tell us.
I felt sick at how quickly I had accepted that we couldn’t afford something for me. I had counted the extra dinner shifts I would need, while he had moved more than a year’s worth of my wages without mentioning it.
Nina closed the laptop. Her next client would arrive in twenty minutes, and I still had to get back to work.
“I need you to think about whether you want me to represent you,” she said. “The records may make settlement easier. They may make him angrier. I won’t tell you this will feel good.”
I watched her put a fresh sheet on the pad. For fourteen years, I had agreed to things because I could imagine how much they would help Matthew. Now I tried to imagine what signing his offer would do to me.
I took my checkbook out of my purse and wrote the retainer. Then I pushed his unsigned agreement toward her.
“Please answer this for me,” I said. “Tell him I won’t sign it.”
Nina took the agreement and reached for her desk phone. By the time I returned to the store, she had spoken with his attorney, and Matthew had sent three messages asking me to call him. The last said he would stop putting money into our joint checking account if I intended to make this adversarial…
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