Chapter 102: They Were Making Offers
I had not said her name out loud in more than a year.
Sabrina Cross.
Twenty-eight when I met her, all laugh and no plan, the girl from the string-light photograph.
The girl who stood in a hotel lobby at midnight learning that her new chapter could not cover the executive suite.
And the woman who later walked into a lawyer's office with proof of what Grant had been doing with his firm's money, and handed my side the knife that ended him.
Garrett's people wanted her for one reason.
They thought she hated me.
It was not a stupid theory.
Run it the way they ran it. The wife destroys her lover's career, his firm, his future.
Then the wife refuses to hire the girl. Refuses to pay her. Looks her over in a kitchen and says, I do not hire people like you.
They must have found that sentence somewhere and framed it.
I would have, in their shoes.
If Sabrina Cross stood up and called me a viper in a skirt suit, their evidence problem would finally have a face.
The worst part was that I owed her.
Whatever else she had been, she ended the war of my marriage with one honest envelope.
And debts like that are exactly what women like Sabrina get asked to repay, in rooms like theirs, by men with nice coats.
I put nothing past men who had already bought my cousin.
Adaeze laid it out over the phone, voice flat as a ruler.
They need a human being, she said. The documents are losing for them. They want a wronged woman who will cry on cue.
Will she? I asked.
That, Adaeze said, is the only question in this case I cannot answer with a document.
I could not answer it either. That kept me up.
Helen knew the current facts before anyone. Helen always does.
Night school, she said. Business law, of all things. Days she answers phones at some little two-name firm and drafts their letters. She split with that young partner of your ex's months ago. Keeps her head down.
Keeps her head down, I repeated.
Marcus had lasted four months after the firm fell. Helen kept score of such things.
I thanked her and sat with that. Sabrina Cross, answering phones by day, reading casebooks by night, building a person out of shifts.
For two days, nothing.
Silence from Sabrina Cross was a language I did not speak.
In the old days her silence would have been rest.
I told myself everyone has a price. I had spent two years watching a city find theirs, invoice by invoice.
Then, on the third night, at eleven forty, my phone lit up with a number I did not know.
I almost let it go to voicemail.
But something in the ring sounded like a person standing on a ledge.
I answered.
Do not hang up, she said. It is Sabrina.
You should not be calling me, I said. You are on their witness list.
I know the rules, she said. I am not asking about the case. I am telling you something you need before I walk into that room.
Owen stirred beside me. I put a hand on his shoulder and stepped into the hall.
Her voice was not the laugh from the photograph anymore. A year of night school and cheap coffee had sanded it down.
They found me after class, she said. Not lawyers. A woman from a research firm, with a very nice coat.
She knew my tuition. She knew my rent. She knew exactly what I owe, and to whom.
They had done their homework on her the way they had done it on me.
I stood at the dark window. The lake was black and calm, keeping its own counsel.
I did not ask what kind. I was not allowed to ask, and she was not allowed to say.
Nora, Sabrina said.
They are making me offers.