Chapter 8: What Serena Knew
I showed James the message.
He read it twice, handed the phone back, and said nothing for a moment.
"Do you want to respond?" he asked.
"I don't know yet."
I thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.
By evening I had decided that whatever Serena wanted to say, I needed to hear it — not for the case, which was already won, but because something in the phrasing had caught in my mind and wouldn't let go.
*What Grant hasn't told you yet.*
Not what Grant did.
Not what Grant said.
What Grant hadn't told me.
I texted back: *Tomorrow.
Noon.
You choose the place.*
She chose a small café in Decatur, far enough from Buckhead that neither of us was likely to be recognized.
She was already there when I arrived — mid-thirties, dark-haired, sitting very straight with a glass of water she hadn't touched.
She looked nervous.
Not guilty.
Nervous.
"I almost didn't come," she said when I sat down.
"I almost didn't either."
She turned the water glass in a slow circle.
"I ended things with Grant eight months ago.
Before the divorce was filed.
I want you to know that I'm not — I'm not here to defend what happened.
I know what it was."
"Then why are you here?"
She reached into her bag and set a folded document on the table between us.
"Because Grant has a second property," she said.
"A condo in Midtown.
He bought it four years ago.
He didn't disclose it in the divorce settlement."
I looked at the document without touching it.
"How do you know this?"
"Because he used it as our — because I spent time there." She pushed the paper slightly closer.
"I don't know if it changes anything for you legally.
But when I heard Patricia was contesting the will, and I heard what she was saying about you — I thought you should know."
I picked up the document.
It was a property record printout.
Grant Monroe.
A Midtown Atlanta address.
Purchase date four years ago.
Current estimated value just over four hundred thousand dollars.
"He hid this from the settlement," I said.
"Yes."
I set the paper down.
I looked at Serena across the table.
She was watching me with an expression I recognized — the expression of someone who has done something they can't undo and is waiting to find out what it costs.
"Why did you really come?" I asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Because Robert Monroe was kind to me once, when he had every reason not to be.
I ran into him at a coffee shop near the hospital, about a year before he passed.
He knew who I was.
He sat down anyway." She looked at the table.
"He told me that the people we hurt don't stop being real just because we stop looking at them.
He wasn't angry.
He was just — clear."
The water glass sat untouched between us.
"He sounds like himself," I said.
Serena nodded.
"I thought you should have everything you were owed.
That's all."
I took the property record with me when I left.
James called it a material omission in the settlement disclosure — actionable, significant, and something a judge would take seriously.
Grant's apology the night before suddenly had a different weight to it.
He had known about the condo.
May you like
He had called to tell me he wasn't testifying against the will, and he had said he was sorry, and he had said nothing about the property he had hidden.
James filed the motion the following morning.
