Chapter 9: The Correction
The handwriting analysis took three weeks.
The forensic examiner was a retired document specialist Grace had used before.
She compared the signature on the relinquishment filing against Ruth's letters, a signed tenancy agreement from the same year, and a birthday card Ruth had written to a cousin.
Her report was fourteen pages.
The conclusion was four words.
*Not the same hand.*
Grace filed the application to have the original relinquishment declared fraudulent on a Tuesday morning.
Daniel was in a meeting when his phone lit up with her message.
He stepped into the hallway to read it.
*Filed.
Expect a response within six to eight weeks.
The property claim will follow once the primary ruling comes through.*
He stood in the hallway for a moment.
Then he went back into the meeting.
He told Ruth that evening.
They had been meeting twice a week since the wedding — at the café near the station at first, then at his flat once it became clear she was going to be in the city for some time.
She had a room in a small hotel that she paid for week by week, and she had not once asked him for anything beyond his time.
"Six to eight weeks," she repeated.
"Grace says it could be faster.
The evidence is strong."
Ruth nodded.
She was looking at her hands on the table.
"I've waited eleven years," she said.
"Six weeks is nothing."
"It's not nothing," Daniel said.
She looked up.
"It's not nothing," he said again.
"None of this is nothing."
She held his gaze for a moment.
Then she looked back at her hands and something in her shoulders released, very slightly, as if a small permanent tension had been given permission to rest.
"Vivienne called me," she said.
Daniel went still.
"When?"
"Yesterday.
She found my hotel through — I don't know how.
She's resourceful." Ruth paused.
"She wanted to apologize.
Directly.
To me."
"What did you say?"
"I listened." Ruth was quiet for a moment.
"She said she had spent two years knowing the truth and telling herself there would be a better time.
She said she understood if I couldn't forgive her." Ruth looked up.
"She sounded like someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a long time and had finally put it down."
"Are you going to forgive her?"
Ruth considered this seriously, the way she considered most things.
"I think forgiveness is something I'll arrive at slowly," she said.
"I'm not there yet.
But I don't think she's a bad person.
I think she made a bad choice and then kept making it because the alternative was frightening." She looked at Daniel.
"What about you?"
"I don't know yet," he said honestly.
"That's fair."
"She hasn't contacted me since that day outside the café."
"She's giving you space."
"I know." He turned his coffee cup in his hands.
"I don't know what I want from her.
I don't know if what we had was real or if I can separate it from everything else."
"It might have been both," Ruth said.
"Real, and also built on something wrong.
Those things can exist at the same time."
He looked at her.
"You're not what I expected," he said.
"What did you expect?"
"I don't know.
Someone angrier, maybe."
"Oh, I was angry," Ruth said.
"For years.
I was so angry I could barely function." She paused.
"And then one day I realized the anger was keeping me from finding you.
So I put it somewhere else and I focused on the search." She looked at him steadily.
"There'll be time for anger later.
Right now I just want to sit in a café with my son and drink bad coffee."
Daniel looked at her.
Then, for the first time since the church steps, he smiled.
It was small.
Uncertain.
The smile of someone remembering how.
Ruth saw it.
She didn't make a fuss of it.
She just picked up her cup and looked out the window at the street, and the corner of her mouth lifted very slightly in return.
May you like
Outside, the city went about its business.
The ruling came in five weeks, not eight.
