Chapter 101: She Never Called
The transcript arrived at four in the afternoon, forty-one pages in a brown envelope, with a note from Adaeze clipped to the top.
Read it before dinner, the note said. You will sleep better.
Paula.
I had wondered for weeks what Garrett's people would do with her.
She was the lawyer who drafted the petition Grant served me between the oysters and the steak, page eleven mistake and all.
She was also the lawyer who withdrew from his case long before the end, without spectacle, owing him nothing and me even less.
Garrett's lawyers had put her on their witness list to bury me.
I knew the story they needed from her. I had been reading it in the gossip columns since the lawsuit began.
The vengeful wife.
The trust as her rifle.
The divorce as an execution.
They had rehearsed it on television, and now they needed it under oath.
They needed Paula to swear I had called her office, asked questions, pulled strings. That I had aimed a family trust at my own husband and smiled while it fired.
I made coffee and sat down at the kitchen table in the lake house.
Then I read it straight through.
Page four. Their lead counsel asked whether I had ever contacted her during the divorce.
Never, Paula said.
Did anyone from the Hale Trust call you about the case?
No.
Did Ms. Hale ever ask you to slow-walk filings, to raise your fees, to bury her husband in motions?
No.
Did her lawyers?
Her lawyers, Paula said, were the most disciplined correspondence of my career. Everything in writing. Everything on time. Nothing personal.
The transcript gave nothing away. No sighs, no pauses, no tells.
Just a professional reading from a record, and the record was clean.
I turned the page carefully, still unwilling to trust good news.
Their counsel tried the side door. Would it surprise you to learn the trust ended its contract with Mr. Wexler's firm while the divorce was pending?
Contracts end, Paula said. My job was the divorce. In the divorce, she never once asked me for anything improper. Neither did anyone acting for her.
He asked about the audit that gutted Grant's old firm. She knew only what the public filings said.
He asked about the storage unit. Same answer.
Every door he opened had a wall behind it.
Then came the passage I read three times.
I have practiced family law for twenty-two years, Paula said. The angry ones call. They call at midnight. They call my partners. They call the newspapers.
She never called.
Not once.
Make of that what you want.
I sat back in the chair and listened to the lake move against the dock.
They had wanted a narrator for their story about me.
They had gotten a metronome instead.
A metronome does not cry on cue. It just keeps time.
Adaeze called at six, while Owen pretended not to watch me from the stove.
Small win, she said. Clean win. They cannot lead with her at the hearing now, and they cannot afford to cut her either.
Then why do I feel a second shoe hanging somewhere over my head?
Because it is there, Adaeze said. Check your email.
The amended witness list had landed at five fifty-two, from their lead counsel, courtesy copied to the court.
Second name: an accountant I had never met. Harmless.
A man with a calculator could not hurt me. A woman with a history could.
Third name: Sabrina Cross.
Owen read it over my shoulder and said nothing, which from Owen is a whole paragraph.
I read it twice, hoping the letters would rearrange themselves into someone else.
They did not.
They had subpoenaed the other woman.