Chapter 6: The Photograph
The photograph was of Marcus.
He was standing outside a building I didn't recognize — a low brick office block with a solicitor's sign above the door.
The timestamp in the corner read fourteen months ago.
Standing next to him was Diane.
They were both looking at a document.
Marcus's hand was on the page.
I set the photograph on the table.
I didn't say anything for a long time.
Marcus came in from the garden where he'd been with Evan.
He saw my face before he saw the photograph.
He stopped in the doorway.
"What happened?"
I turned the photograph to face him.
He looked at it.
The color left his face.
"Claire—"
"What is that building?"
He didn't answer immediately.
That was its own answer.
"Marcus.
What is that building?"
"It's a solicitor's office," he said.
"But it's not what it looks like."
"Then tell me what it is."
He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down heavily.
"Fourteen months ago, my mother told me she had found new information about my father's estate.
She said there were documents she wanted me to look at.
She asked me to come with her to a meeting."
"And you went."
"I went.
But Claire, I didn't sign anything.
I looked at what they put in front of me and I told them I wouldn't sign it.
That's why nothing came of it."
"You went to a solicitor's office with your mother to review documents about contesting our home," I said.
"Fourteen months ago.
While I was pregnant with our second child."
He closed his eyes.
"I miscarried at sixteen weeks," I said.
"Do you remember that?
Do you remember what that month was like?"
"Yes."
"And somewhere in that same month, you were sitting in a lawyer's office with the woman who has spent two years calling our son illegitimate."
"I didn't know about the emails then.
I didn't know what she'd been saying."
"But you knew she wanted to contest the estate."
"Yes."
"And you still didn't tell me."
He put his hands flat on the table.
"I thought I could manage it.
I thought if I went and heard her out and refused to participate, she would drop it.
I was trying to protect you."
"You were protecting her," I said.
"Every time you stayed quiet, you were protecting her.
Not me.
Not Evan."
He didn't argue.
I picked up the photograph.
"Who sent this?"
"I don't know."
"Ruth?"
"Maybe.
Or someone else who was at that meeting.
There were two other people in the room.
I don't know who they were."
I stood up and walked to the window.
Evan was in the garden, dragging a stick along the fence, talking to himself the way he did when he was building an imaginary world.
"I need to know something," I said.
"And I need you to answer me honestly."
"Okay."
"Is there anything else?
Anything you've known, or done, or agreed to — anything at all — that I don't know about yet?"
The pause before he answered was three seconds long.
Three seconds is not a long time.
May you like
But it was long enough.
"There's one more thing," he said.
