Chapter 7 - The Twenty-Second Clip
Chapter 7 - The Twenty-Second Clip
The next morning I called Rachel from the car outside Ellie's daycare, and she told me to start where the paper led, not where the anger led.
The paper led to a phone number printed under a trust attorney's name on the certified letter that had been taped inside the hall closet.
So I called it.
A woman answered on the third ring and said, "Ellen Marsh."
I sat in the car with the heat running and told her exactly who I was, and I asked her one question, which was whether the money was really what I thought it was.
She was quiet for a second.
Then she said, "Yes.
Your husband has been paying me two thousand dollars a month since last spring.
And the envelope he handed me in your driveway was the last payment, because the trust hearing is in three weeks."
I asked her why he would pay her at all if the trust was already going to court.
"Because money isn't for keeping the trust," she said.
"It's for keeping me off the record.
If I show up at that hearing with anything, his whole story about being the only family his mother had left falls apart."
I asked her what she meant by anything.
She took a breath like she had been holding it for a while.
"The last thing I need to tell you is the reason I started recording," she said.
"At the party, before anyone was paying attention, your daughter reached for Nick's phone on the table.
He grabbed her arm and yanked her back so hard she tipped sideways.
She started screaming and she didn't stop for a long time afterward.
That's the part I want you to know, because you're going to hear him say the video was the whole story."
She paused.
"It wasn't the whole story.
It was twenty-two seconds of it, and I recorded it because I've been watching him do this to people I love for twenty years, and I've finally learned to hit the button before, not after."
I sat there in that parking lot and I did not cry, which surprised me, and I did not yell, which did not.
I asked her one more thing.
"Do you still have it?"
"I have everything," she said.
"Every transfer, every text, every time I sat in a parking lot outside your house and told myself I wasn't going to be the reason that little girl grew up in the middle of it."
I told her I was filing something that morning, and I was going to put her name on it whether she liked it or not.
She said, "Put my name on it.
I'm not hiding behind the money anymore."
Rachel was waiting for me outside her office with a legal pad and a coffee she didn't drink.
We sat in the conference room for two hours and I handed her everything I had: the driveway Ring footage showing Ellen pulling in sixteen minutes early and Nick walking out to her with an envelope in his hand; the certified letter from the trust attorney addressed to E.
Marsh; the trust document itself, with the sticky note in Ellen's handwriting pressed to the top of the first page; and the second phone.
I had found the second phone in Nick's gym bag on the top shelf of the closet, the one he'd forgotten about because he had one laundry day a week and I did all the rest.
The messages on it were mostly with his attorney and mostly boring, but three of them were to a number saved as E.M.
The last one said, "Toddler arm thing is in the past.
Nobody records anything at a kid's party."
Rachel read it twice and set it down flat on the table and said, "Karen, we are going before Judge Halloran this afternoon.
Pack a bag and take your daughter to your sister's."
I did.
I picked Ellie up at four, packed a small suitcase for her and a smaller one for me, and dropped her at Deb's house with her red blanket and the elephant she still sleeps with, and then Rachel and I walked into the courthouse at six minutes to four with three manila folders.
The clerk looked at my paperwork and then at me and then at the clock.
The motion went in.
I stepped back outside onto the courthouse steps and looked at my phone, and it was Nick's name on the screen.
I answered because I wanted him to say it out loud.
He did.
"You have no idea what you just started," he said.
I stood on the third step with a mother holding her daughter's coat in one hand and my car keys in the other, and I said, "I do, actually.
May you like
Because I have the envelope."
He was quiet for a beat, and then he hung up, and I went home to my sister's house with my daughter, and I slept for five hours for the first time in two weeks.
