Chapter 6: The Husband Who Didn't Know
Richard Holt called Jennifer directly four days later.
She told me about it that same evening, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of tea she had barely touched.
"He asked if he could meet with us," she said.
"Not through lawyers.
Just — talk."
"What did you say?"
"I said I'd ask you."
I turned my own cup in my hands.
"What did he sound like?"
Jennifer considered this.
"Tired," she said.
"He sounded like someone who had just found out the floor wasn't where he thought it was."
We met him the following Saturday at a coffee shop on neutral ground — his suggestion.
Richard Holt was in his mid-sixties, silver-haired, with the kind of careful posture that came from decades of boardrooms.
He stood when we walked in.
He shook my hand before either of the girls'.
"Mrs.
Calloway," he said.
"Thank you for coming."
We sat.
He didn't order anything.
He set his hands flat on the table and looked at me directly.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
"I didn't know.
I want to be clear about that — not as a legal position, but as a fact.
I did not know about any of this when I married Kayla."
"What do you know now?" I said.
He exhaled slowly.
"I know about Gerald Marsh.
I know about the insurance policy.
I know about the notary." He paused.
"I know that she left two infants with their grandmother and never looked back."
Lizzie said, "Did she tell you she had children?"
"She told me she had two daughters who had chosen to cut off contact with her.
That she had been a young widow, that it had been a very painful time, and that her daughters blamed her unfairly for their father's d*ath." He looked at the table.
"She said you'd been poisoned against her by your grandmother."
"And you believed her," Jennifer said.
Not unkindly.
"I did," he said.
"I'm sorry for that."
I studied him.
He was not what I had expected.
I had built a version of Richard Holt in my mind over the past two weeks — a man like Gerald Marsh, calculating and complicit.
This man was something else.
He was embarrassed.
He was genuinely embarrassed, the way a decent person is when they discover they have been used.
"What are you asking for?" I said.
"Nothing," he said.
"I'm not here to negotiate.
My attorney already tried that and I'm told you declined, which is your right." He looked at me steadily.
"I'm here because I wanted to look you in the face and tell you that what was done to your family was wrong.
And because I wanted to ask — not for Kayla's sake, but for my own conscience — whether there is anything I can do."
The coffee shop hummed around us.
Someone laughed at the counter.
Jennifer looked at me.
I said, "There is one thing."
He waited.
"The photograph," I said.
"The one the girls put in that bag.
I want to know — when Kayla came home that day, what did she tell you had happened?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"She said you had attacked her.
That you had screamed at her and threatened her and that the girls had sided with you out of loyalty."
"And the photograph?"
"She said it was a fake.
Something you had manufactured to hurt her."
I nodded slowly.
"And now?"
He reached into his jacket pocket and set something on the table between us.
It was the photograph.
The one from the bag.
Kayla and Gerald Marsh at the restaurant, six weeks after my son's funeral.
"I found it in her desk drawer," he said.
"She kept it."
None of us spoke for a moment.
"I don't know why she kept it," he said quietly.
"I've stopped trying to understand her."
He pushed the photograph gently toward me.
"I thought you should have it back."
I picked it up.
I looked at it for the first time — really looked.
Kayla in a red dress, laughing, her hand on Gerald Marsh's arm.
Behind them, through the restaurant window, the street outside was still covered in the gray of early winter.
Daniel had been buried six weeks before that photograph was taken.
I set it face-down on the table.
"Thank you for coming, Mr.
Holt," I said.
He stood when we stood.
He shook my hand again at the door.
As we walked to the car, Lizzie said quietly, "Do you feel sorry for him?"
"A little," I said.
"Me too," she said.
Jennifer unlocked the car.
She didn't say anything until we were all inside.
May you like
Then she said, "Patricia called this morning.
The filing goes in on Monday."
