Chapter 7: The Call from Carol
I had met Carol Brooks four times in three years of marriage.
Nathan had kept us carefully separated.
He described his mother as "difficult" and "from a different world" and "someone who wouldn't understand our life." I had accepted that because Nathan had presented it with such practiced ease, and because I had been too busy learning how to be the wife he wanted to question the family he was keeping at a distance.
Now her voice was in my ear, and it was nothing like difficult.
It was the voice of a woman who had been waiting a long time to make this call.
"I saw the news this morning," Carol said.
"The asset freeze.
The filing." A pause.
"I want you to know that I am not calling to defend him."
"All right," I said carefully.
"I'm calling because I have something you should know.
Something I should have told you before the wedding.
I didn't, and I have lived with that." Her voice was steady but the steadiness cost her something.
"Nathan's father did the same thing.
To me.
For eleven years."
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Nathan watched it happen," Carol continued.
"From the time he was seven years old until I finally left when he was eighteen.
He watched his father use money as a weapon, use my isolation as a tool, use my love for him as a reason to stay." She paused.
"I always believed Nathan hated what his father was.
I believed he would be different."
"Carol—"
"I was wrong.
And I knew I was wrong by the second year of your marriage.
I saw it in the way he spoke about you at Thanksgiving.
The way he corrected you in front of people.
The way he watched to see if you would push back." Her voice tightened.
"I said nothing.
I told myself it wasn't my place.
I told myself you seemed strong enough to handle it." A long pause.
"I was a coward."
"You were afraid," I said.
"That's the same thing, sometimes."
We were both quiet.
"What is it you want to tell me?" I asked.
"Nathan has a storage unit," Carol said.
"In Burbank.
He has kept it since before your marriage.
I know about it because I helped him move things there when he left New York." She paused.
"There are documents in that unit, Sophia.
Financial documents.
Correspondence.
Things he kept off his main systems because he didn't trust digital records." A breath.
"I don't know exactly what's in them.
But I know he was careful about that unit in a way he wasn't careful about anything else."
I reached for a pen.
"What's the address?" I asked.
She gave it to me.
Unit number and all.
"Carol," I said, when she had finished.
"Why are you doing this?"
A long pause.
"Because you deserved better," she said.
"And because I spent eleven years telling myself that staying quiet was the same as keeping the peace." Her voice broke slightly on the last word.
"It isn't.
I know that now.
I just learned it about thirty years too late."
"It's not too late," I said.
"Maybe not." She didn't sound convinced.
"Will you be all right?"
"Yes," I said.
"I will."
After we hung up, I called my father's assistant and read out the Burbank address.
"How soon can someone get there?" I asked.
"Forty minutes," she said.
"Go now.
Take legal counsel.
Document everything before you open a single box."
"Understood."
I set the phone down.
Nathan had a storage unit full of documents he trusted more than his own servers.
Documents he had kept since before the marriage.
Documents his own mother knew about and had chosen, finally, to give up.
I thought about what might be in those boxes.
Then I thought about the eight months of planned divorce.
The redirected funds.
The crop on the wall that he had always told guests was a decorative antique.
May you like
And I understood that what we had found so far was not the whole of it.
It was only what Nathan had wanted us to find.
