Chapter 9: What Remains
Patricia arrived at the hotel at ten forty-seven.
I had called her from the hallway while Daniel sat at the table alone, Reena having excused herself to the bathroom twelve minutes earlier and not yet returned.
"Where are you?" Patricia said, when she answered.
"Still here.
I need you to bring the full file."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight."
Forty minutes later she walked through the ballroom doors in a gray coat with a leather satchel over one shoulder, looking entirely unbothered by the fact that this was a Saturday night and she was arriving at the tail end of a wedding reception.
She had been my attorney for nineteen years.
Very little bothered her.
She looked at me.
At Daniel.
At the largely emptied ballroom.
"How did it go?" she said.
"Thoroughly," I said.
She set the satchel on the table and began to remove folders.
Daniel looked at the folders the way a man looks at a door he already knows is locked.
"These are your copies," Patricia said to him, sliding a set across the table.
"The originals are filed.
The deed, the transfer records, the account analysis, and the LLC verification from Nevada." She sat down.
"There is no Nevada LLC.
That took about twenty minutes to confirm."
Daniel looked at his hands.
"The deed transfer," Patricia continued, "was processed fourteen months ago at the county records office.
Your signature, Reena's signature, and a notary your wife uses for her real estate side work." She opened the folder to a specific page and turned it to face him.
"This is the notary's name.
She has been notarizing documents for Reena for approximately four years."
Daniel studied the page.
"This was planned," he said.
Not a question.
"The removal of your mother's name from the deed appears to have been intentional and premeditated, yes," Patricia said.
"In combination with the business loan misrepresentation and the private account transfers, it establishes a clear pattern.
Whether that rises to actionable fraud is something we can assess once you decide how you want to proceed."
"He wants to proceed with a divorce," I said.
Patricia looked at Daniel.
He nodded once.
"All right," she said.
She opened a second folder.
"In that case, we should discuss the asset position before any additional transfers are made.
Specifically—"
Reena came back from the bathroom.
She stopped in the doorway of the ballroom when she saw Patricia.
She took in the folders on the table.
She took in Daniel's face.
She walked across the room and stopped at the edge of the table and did not sit down.
"Mrs.
Calloway," Patricia said pleasantly.
Reena looked at me.
"You planned this," she said.
"This entire evening.
The manager, the microphone, the attorney.
You planned all of it."
"No," I said.
"I planned the manager and the microphone.
Patricia was contingency."
"Contingency for what?"
"For whatever you did with the evening." I looked at her steadily.
"If you had behaved tonight the way a decent person behaves, I would have used my authority over the booking to make a simple statement about who paid for the evening, given my son a quiet envelope with my attorney's business card and a note asking him to call her on Monday, and gone home." I paused.
"You made different choices."
Reena's eyes moved from me to Daniel.
"Daniel." Her voice had changed again.
Softer now.
Something real in it, finally, underneath the years of performance.
"Daniel, please.
We can fix this.
Whatever your mother is telling you — whatever this is — we can sit down and fix it."
"My mother," Daniel said, "hasn't told me anything I wasn't able to see for myself tonight."
"Daniel—"
"You put cake on her face," he said.
"You put cake on her face and looked at me while you did it because you knew I'd laugh.
You knew exactly what I'd do." His voice was not loud.
It was the opposite of loud.
"You've known exactly what I'd do for two years.
And you used it."
The silence that followed was the longest of the evening.
"I love you," Reena said.
Her voice broke slightly on the last word.
Genuinely, I thought.
Whatever else she had done, that might have been true.
"I know," Daniel said.
"I think that made it worse, actually."
She stood at the edge of the table for another moment.
Then she picked up her small evening bag from the chair where she had left it.
She looked at me one final time.
"I underestimated you," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"You did."
She walked across the empty ballroom, past the unlit candles and the centerpieces beginning to be dismantled by the catering staff, past the enormous wedding cake that was still mostly intact, and out through the double doors.
They swung shut behind her.
May you like
Patricia clicked her pen.
"Shall we?" she said.
