Chapter 7: What Was in the Desk
Daniel left at seven the next morning.
I fed the girls, changed them, got them settled in the living room with my mother, who had arrived at six-forty-five with pastries and the careful, composed expression of a woman who had been awake since four.
"You heard from Claire," I said.
"I told her it was time." My mum set the pastries on the counter and turned to look at me.
"I should have told you myself.
Weeks ago."
"You were protecting me."
"I was.
But you didn't need protecting.
You needed to know."
I leaned against the counter.
"What exactly did she say to you?
Her exact words, as close as you can remember."
My mum was quiet for a moment.
She picked up one of the girls — Rosie, the middle one, who was already making her opinions known about the morning — and held her against her shoulder.
"She said Daniel was a good man who had made a decision under pressure and would come to regret it.
She said you'd had a difficult pregnancy and emotions were running high and that was understandable, but that once things settled, he would see the situation clearly." My mum paused.
"And then she said that she hoped I would be a support to you when that time came.
As if she was doing me a kindness.
Warning me."
"She was staking a claim," I said.
"She was telling you she'd already decided how this ends."
"Yes," my mum said.
"That's exactly what she was doing."
Daniel came back at ten-fifteen.
He walked in, kissed the girls, nodded to my mum, and then looked at me.
"Kitchen," he said quietly.
My mum took all three girls to the living room without being asked.
Daniel sat down and put a folded piece of paper on the table between us.
"She wrote a letter," he said.
"To me.
She never sent it.
My dad found it in the back of her desk drawer."
I looked at the paper.
I didn't touch it yet.
"What does it say?"
"It says that if I chose to remain in this marriage after having only daughters, she would consider me to have made my position clear, and she would make hers equally clear." He kept his eyes on me.
"It says she intended to contact my father's business partners — he has three, men he's worked with for over twenty years — and inform them that my father's judgment had become unreliable.
That he was making emotional decisions.
That they should consider whether he was still fit to be trusted with shared assets."
The room was very still.
"She was going to go after his business," I said.
"She was going to threaten to.
Whether she'd have actually done it—" He stopped.
"I think she would have.
I think she'd convinced herself it was justified."
"Because of daughters."
"Because of daughters."
I looked at the letter on the table.
At the fold lines.
At the fact that it had been written and kept and not sent — held in reserve like a weapon she hadn't needed to use yet.
"Does your father know what's in it?"
"He read it before he gave it to me.
He found it three weeks ago." Daniel's voice was careful and even.
"He said he's been sitting with it ever since, trying to decide if she was capable of actually sending it or if it was just — rage, on paper.
Something she wrote and then thought better of."
"And now?"
"Now he thinks she would have sent it.
After last night — going to Garrett, the things she said about his mental state — he thinks she's been capable of more than either of us understood."
I finally touched the letter.
Just the edge of it.
"What does he want to do?"
Daniel looked at me steadily.
"He wants to give it to a solicitor.
He wants it on record.
And he wants to know if we want to be part of that, or if we'd rather he handles it separately."
I thought about the hospital.
The weeks of monitoring.
Daniel driving back and forth every day.
Her absence.
The black dress.
My mother's phone ringing the day after I gave birth.
"We're part of it," I said.
May you like
Daniel nodded once.
Like he'd already known that was the answer, and had needed to hear it anyway.
