Chapter 9
Chapter 9 - Not the Gun, the File
Aaron came to the house that night anyway.
I opened the door because Nadia, my attorney, had told me on the phone an hour earlier that a calm, short meeting at a reasonable hour was safer than an ugly one at the wrong one.
He stood on the porch in a jacket I had bought him two Christmases ago and he didn't try to walk past me.
He said, "Thank you for letting me in."
I said, "I'm letting you in to end this.
Not to reopen it."
We sat at the kitchen table.
The same table.
He started with the thing he'd been rehearsing.
"I loved you," he said.
"I still love you.
That part was real the whole time."
I let that land because I wanted to hear how he thought it sounded.
Then I said, "Love that only works when I'm eight time zones away isn't love.
That's convenience with a nicer word on it.
You can call it anything you want, but I know what it was."
He looked at his hands.
Then I put the folder on the table.
I opened it slowly, because a file isn't a weapon and I didn't want it to look like one.
I set the loan paperwork down first, with the R in Rebecca leaning the wrong way.
I set the account record down next, his name and Melissa's, opened in April, on the same page as our tax refund.
Then the dry cleaner's ledger, photographed on Harris, with his phone number on a ticket from a part of town he never drove through.
Then the printed message from Melissa's phone, the one with the photo, the captive that said your wife's other skin.
Then the statement he had written and signed at this table four days ago.
He looked at all of it and didn't touch any of it.
"What is this," he said.
"This is what happens next," I said.
"The divorce is filed.
The accounts are frozen as of four o'clock this afternoon.
The forgery is being referred, and that one isn't mine to take back — the bank and the JAG office do that.
I'm not asking you for anything.
I'm telling you what you'll be receiving in the mail."
He said, "You went to JAG."
I said, "I went to JAG the day I found the loan.
I'm a Staff Sergeant, Aaron.
My name is on that signature.
You had to know that mattered to someone."
He said, "What about Melissa."
I noticed that was the second thing he asked about, not the first.
The first had been about himself.
I said, "She's a witness, not the crime.
If her statement gets used, I won't testify against her.
If she lies, I will.
She wrote things down.
That's more than you did."
He reached across the table once and put his hand out for mine.
I didn't take it.
I got up and walked to the hall closet, and I came back with the box I had brought down from the top shelf earlier, and I set it on the table beside the folder and opened it.
Inside was the pale blue robe.
Washed.
Folded.
The tie rolled once, the way my mother rolls it.
He said, "Rebecca—"
I said, "You handed this to her.
You handed my mother's gift to another woman in my house.
Look at it and tell me that was a slip and not a decision."
He started crying.
Quietly, in the way men cry when they realize they can't negotiate their way out.
I didn't cry.
I had already done that in my truck in the parking lot behind the attorney's office, before I could safely drive home.
I let him cry for a minute, because I'm not cruel, and because he needed to be seen doing it.
Then I asked the last question.
The one I had brought home with me that March afternoon with the flowers still in my hand.
"How long.
Not the loan.
Not the account.
How long was she in my house."
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and looked up at me, and the thing he said next was not the thing I had prepared for.
He said, "It started with Brad."
I sat back down.
I said, "Say that again."
He said, "Brad helped me open the account.
In April.
He kept the paperwork at his place.
He covered for me twice when you called and asked where I was."
I didn't say anything for a moment.
I was thinking about every phone call I'd made from a tent in the middle of the night, having asked my husband what he was doing, and having heard the sound of a kitchen that was mine.
I thought about Brad at my parents' table, thanking my mother for the pie.
I said, "Does Brad still owe you money."
Aaron said, "Yes."
I said, "That's the whole thing, isn't it."
He didn't answer.
I stood up and closed the folder and put the box with the robe back under my arm, and I walked him to the door because the meeting was over.
On the porch, he said, "I really did love you."
May you like
I said, "You loved the version of me who couldn't check."
I closed the door, and I locked it, and I stood there in the hallway with the folder in one hand and my mother's robe in the other, listening to his car pull out of the driveway, and knowing exactly whose phone number I was going to use next.
