Chapter 10: What She Said at the Door
Linda called me directly on Thursday morning.
Not Daniel.
Me.
I almost didn't answer.
My thumb hovered over the screen for three full seconds before I picked up.
"Emma." Her voice was different.
Smaller.
It took me a moment to place it, and then I did: it was the voice of someone who had run out of moves.
"Linda."
A long pause.
"I'd like to come and see you," she said.
"Not to argue.
I just — I want to talk."
"Carol needs to be present."
A shorter pause this time.
"All right."
We arranged it for Saturday afternoon.
My mother's house.
Carol drove in from the city and arrived early, set her bag on the table, and accepted a cup of tea from my mother with the ease of someone who had done this many times before.
Daniel came too.
He sat beside me.
He didn't reach for my hand, but he was there.
Linda arrived at two o'clock exactly.
She looked smaller than she had at the pavilion.
Not physically — she was the same height, the same posture, the same careful clothes.
But something had gone out of her.
The particular energy of a person who believes they are always right is a kind of fuel, and hers had run low.
She sat across from me at my mother's kitchen table.
Carol sat to my left.
Daniel sat to my right.
My mother made herself scarce in the garden.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Linda looked at me — really looked at me, in a way she hadn't done in four years — and said: "I want to apologize."
I waited.
"What I did at the shower was wrong." She said it carefully, like someone reading from a prepared text, and then something shifted and she said it again differently: "It was wrong.
I was — I was so angry about the gender, and I had been drinking, and I took it out on you in a way that was — it was unforgivable."
"It was," I agreed.
She flinched slightly.
"The letter to your employer," she continued.
"The posts.
The — the screenshots." Her voice dropped on the last word.
"I was frightened.
I thought I was losing Daniel and I thought you had planned all of it and I—" She stopped.
"It doesn't matter what I thought.
What I did was wrong."
Carol made a small note on her pad.
"Linda," I said.
"I need to ask you something directly."
She looked at me.
"Did you know, before the shower, that Daniel had signed a prenuptial agreement?"
A pause.
"I suspected," she said quietly.
"I overheard a conversation.
Years ago.
Between Daniel and his cousin Marcus.
I didn't know the details.
But I suspected the property wasn't his."
"And you never asked him."
"No."
"Why not?"
She looked at her hands on the table.
"Because if I asked, he would have confirmed it.
And then I would have had to stop telling people what I'd been telling them."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"I built a story," she said.
"About my son.
About what he'd achieved.
About the life he'd given you." She looked up.
"I needed that story.
I needed people to see him a certain way.
And when the cake said girl, I thought — I thought everything was falling apart.
The story, the family I'd imagined, all of it." She shook her head.
"I know that's not an excuse."
"It isn't," I said.
"But it's the first honest thing you've said to me in four years."
She absorbed that.
Daniel was very still beside me.
"What happens now?" Linda asked.
I looked at Carol.
Carol gave me a small nod.
"Carol is going to outline what we need from you," I said.
"In writing.
A formal retraction of the posts, a letter to Robert Yuen correcting the record, and a signed acknowledgment of the property situation as it actually stands." I paused.
"If you do those things, we won't pursue anything further."
Linda looked at the table.
"And Daniel?" she said quietly.
"That's between you and Daniel," I said.
"I'm not part of that conversation."
She nodded slowly.
She signed Carol's document at that table, with my mother's pen, while the afternoon light came through the kitchen window and the garden outside was very green and very still.
When it was done, she stood.
She looked at me one more time.
"I hope she's healthy," she said.
"Your daughter."
It was the first time she had called her that.
"She is," I said.
Linda picked up her bag.
She walked to the door.
She paused with her hand on the frame.
"I don't expect you to forgive me," she said.
"I just wanted you to know that I understand what I did."
Then she walked out.
The door closed behind her.
Daniel let out a long, slow breath beside me.
Carol capped her pen.
May you like
My mother came in from the garden, looked at the table, looked at my face, and said nothing.
She simply put the kettle on.
