The Smile Across the Yard: A Story of Betrayal and the Video That Changed Everything

Chapter 10 - A Table by the Window

Six months later I am divorced, I still live in the same house, and my daughter has a bedroom with a blue ceiling that I painted myself in one weekend while Deb watched Ellie at her place.

Nick sees Ellie twice a month, supervised, at a center in town with a check-in desk and a sign-in sheet, and I am not going to pretend that part is easy to watch from the parking lot.

He pleaded guilty in March to a reduced charge of felony theft of trust property, and his plea deal cost him the dealership and the membership at the club he grew up in, and as far as I know his own mother's side of the family stopped speaking to him after the accounting came out.

I will say one thing for him, because it is true and because my daughter deserves me not to lie about her father.

He has not missed a single visit.

Not one.

Maybe that is a man trying to be a father, or maybe that is a man trying to look like one to a judge, and I do not have to decide that today, and I have stopped trying to decide it every night before I fall asleep.

The trust got restructured by a new court order in June, and the way it works out is this: half stays in a fund for Ellie until she is twenty-five, and the other half goes to Ellen Marsh.

Ellen did not ask for that.

The guardian ad litem recommended it and the judge agreed, and Rachel told me afterward that Ellen actually argued against part of it in a letter to the court, which is the kind of thing that made me stop trying to find anything wrong with her.

She moved back to Ohio in July, to the town where her mother raised her, and she runs the greenhouse her mother started, which is apparently full of rosemary and geraniums and one lemon tree that is older than both of us.

I do not have her friendship.

I want to be honest with you about that, because I know how these stories are supposed to end and this is not that.

We are not close.

But once a month, on the second Tuesday, we meet at a diner off the highway about halfway between her greenhouse and my office, and we sit at a table by the window, and we mostly talk about Ellie.

Ellen brings her pictures from the greenhouse, because Ellie is in a phase where she wants to touch every plant she sees, and Ellen thinks that is a good sign in a child.

Sometimes we talk about the women we were both told to be quiet for.

Her mother, who died when she was nine.

Nick's mother, who hired an attorney to write that trust and then died four months later without telling her own son what she had done.

Me, two years in a marriage where I kept telling myself that the closed laptop was about work and the missing money was about the dealership and the late shifts were about the man I promised to love through worse.

Ellen told me one time, over a plate of eggs, that the reason she mailed eighteen certified letters was not that she expected to win.

She said she mailed them so there would be a paper trail that did not depend on anyone believing a woman who showed up at a family party with a gift bag and a smile.

I still keep the twenty-second clip on my phone.

Not because I need it for court anymore, because I do not.

I keep it because there are hard days, like the day Ellie's teacher called me because Ellie got angry at a boy on the playground and pushed him, and I sat in that principal's office with my heart going fast and I could hear Nick's voice in my own head saying that toddler arm thing is in the past.

On those days I play the clip once in my car in the school parking lot and I watch that woman with the gold necklace stare into the camera with a smile she was forcing onto her face so a two-year-old could be safe, and I remind myself that the woman on the other side of the camera is not a stranger.

She is a woman whose kid died of nothing but bad luck, who got taken in by her aunt, who was paid to be quiet and was not quiet, who hit record in my yard while her hands were shaking.

That is the whole story, and I have told you the parts of it that I lived and the parts I learned from documents and from her own handwriting, and I have not made myself look better in any of it, because I have stopped needing to.

The lake house is still standing on the north side of the lake with twenty acres around it, and no one in this family has been back.

The gate is still chained and padlocked, and I get a letter from the trustee every year asking me whether I have any opinion about the future of the property, and every year I write back the same two words.

Sell it.

My daughter is almost three now, and she is loud and funny and sleeping through the night in a room with a blue ceiling, and that is what I wake up for.