She came downstairs in her robe, wet hair, phone already in her hand.
She saw the papers before she saw me.
She picked them up slowly, the way you pick something up when you already know what it is but your body is still hoping you are wrong.
I was sitting at the table with my coffee. I did not say anything.
“Paul.”
“Sit down, Sandra.”
She did not sit. She stood by the counter with the papers against her chest and her face doing something I had never seen it do before. Not guilt exactly. More like calculation. Watching to see how much I knew.
“I think we should talk,” she said.
“David Arens will be handling everything on my side,” I said. “His number is on the second page. You can call him when you have retained your own counsel.”
“David Arens — you already have a lawyer?”
“I have had a lawyer for three weeks.”
That was when she understood.
She sat down.
“How long have you known?”
“Since your birthday,” I said. “I drove up to surprise you. I saw you with Derek in the conference room at the Marriott on Michigan Avenue at approximately one fifty-nine in the afternoon. I stayed for about a minute. You never saw me.”
She put her hand over her mouth.
“I went home,” I said, “and I have spent the past three weeks making sure that everything is in order. The accounts, the documentation, the custody arrangement I am proposing. It is all in those papers.”
“Paul, please —”
“I am not angry,” I said. “I want you to know that. I am not doing this from anger.”
I stood up and put my mug in the sink.
“I am doing this because I spent fourteen years building something I believed in, and I would like the next fourteen years to be built on something real.”
She started to cry.
I am not a man who is unmoved by his wife crying. I want to be clear about that. It was hard to stand there. It was one of the harder moments of my life.
But I had sat in Gene Foss’s office and read six hundred and forty-three text messages, and I knew what I knew.
I told her I had already spoken to Lily and Marcus’s school counselor, who was on standby. I told her the proposed custody arrangement gave her equal time and I had no interest in using the children against her. I told her the financial split was fair, document by document, and David Arens had confirmed that in Ohio, with the evidence I held, I was in a position to ask for considerably more than I was asking for.
“I am not asking for more,” I said. “I am asking for fair.”
She asked about Derek.
I told her that was her concern, not mine, though she should know that Cheryl Callahan had received a phone call from me nine days earlier and had, as of last Thursday, retained her own divorce attorney in DuPage County.
Sandra went white.
“His wife knows?”
“His wife knew before these papers were printed,” I said.
I put on my jacket.
“I am going to take a drive. The kids are at school until three. You have the house to yourself.”
I drove to the river, the Little Miami, where I used to fish with my father on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. I parked at the gravel lot off Morrow-Cozaddale Road and I walked out to the bank and I stood there for a long time with my hands in my coat pockets.
It was cold. Maybe thirty-eight degrees. The water was running fast from the rain we had gotten the week before. There were a few dead leaves still on the surface, moving quick.
I stood there until I felt like myself again.
The divorce was finalized seven months later in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.
Because of what David Arens was able to demonstrate regarding Sandra’s use of shared marital credit accounts to fund four years of travel she had falsely reported as business expenses — a portion of which Derek Callahan had also expensed on the company side — the settlement came out in my favor in a way that Sandra’s attorney had advised her she could not contest without making things significantly worse.
I kept the house.
I kept primary physical custody of Lily and Marcus.
Sandra relocated to a condo in Hyde Park, about a forty-minute drive from Derek’s former home in Naperville, though by the time she moved there Derek and Cheryl’s divorce was already in progress and Derek himself had been placed on administrative leave pending his company’s internal investigation into the expense discrepancies. He resigned in February.
I heard from mutual friends that Sandra and Derek were still together, at least as of spring.
I hope it is worth it to them.
I am not being sarcastic when I say that. I genuinely mean it. I have children with Sandra. I want her to be a person worth knowing for their sake.
Marcus turned fourteen in April. We had his birthday party at the house, grill in the backyard, about fifteen kids from his school. Lily made him a cake from scratch, lemon with buttercream, because she had been watching baking videos for three months.
I stood at the grill in the sun and I watched my kids and I thought: this is the thing I built that is still standing.
Lily came up beside me with a paper plate.
“Dad,” she said, “you’re smiling weird.”
“I’m just happy,” I said.
She looked at me for a second with that look teenagers have when they are deciding whether an adult is being genuine or embarrassing.
Then she bumped her shoulder against my arm and went back inside.
I flipped the burgers.
The afternoon was warm and the yard smelled like charcoal and fresh-cut grass and I was, for the first time in a long time, exactly where I was supposed to be.
