Chapter 6 - The Folder with My Name on It
Ysolde came back the next afternoon.
She parked on the street this time, not in the driveway, and she walked up to the porch with a manila envelope in her hand.
"I shouldn't be here," she said.
"Then why are you?"
"Because I went home and couldn't sleep, and I started looking at things I should have looked at months ago."
She handed me the envelope.
Inside were printed messages.
Dozens of them, from a number I didn't recognize, and a name at the top of the first page.
Cressida.
"She's a woman I know from the paint store," Ysolde said.
"She started coming in this spring for samples.
She was doing a kitchen.
She was seeing a man who told her he was divorced and couldn't have children."
I read the messages standing in the doorway.
The same words.
The same little jokes.
The same story about a marriage that ended badly and a heart that couldn't risk another loss.
"She gave me these when I called her last night," Ysolde said.
"She thought I was the other woman.
I had to tell her I was the other other woman."
We sat at my kitchen table and put the pages side by side.
Dates, addresses, the names of streets.
The paint store, the coffee shop on Dutton, a house he claimed was his mother's.
The nursery renovation came up in the messages to Cressida too.
He'd told her he was helping a friend fix up a room.
He'd been using the house we lived in to meet women, and the room we'd made for our baby was the excuse.
Then I went into his study while Ysolde waited in the hall.
The top drawer of his desk was locked, but the key was in a dish on the windowsill, and I opened it and found a green folder with my name written across the tab in black marker.
Inside was a loan agreement against the house, in my name, with my signature at the bottom.
I know my own signature.
I know the way I make the A, and the loop on the i, and the little pause before the last l.
That was not my hand.
There was a check stub from a bank I'd never used, and a printout of a text message from a number I knew.
My brother Grant's number.
The text said, "I'm not signing anything until I see the books."
Below it, on a separate slip of paper in Beckett's handwriting, someone had written two words.
Problem solved.
I sat down in his chair because my legs wouldn't hold me.
Ysolde came to the doorway and asked if I was all right, and I couldn't answer at first.
Grant had been dead for a year and four months, and I'd cried at the funeral and thanked Beckett for standing beside me, and he'd held my hand and said we'd get through it together.
"What is it?"
Ysolde said.
"My brother," I said.
"He died in an accident on a job site."
She looked at the paper in my hand.
"And Beckett wrote that?"
I nodded.
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, "I can't help you with the rest of this.
But Cressida will talk to you.
She's angrier than I am."
I took the folder and the messages and went upstairs, and I stood in the nursery with the crib I'd built and the yellow curtains Ysolde had helped me hang, and I looked at the baseboard where the shoebox had been hidden.
I had spent eight months making a room for a baby.
He had spent longer than that making a room for me to live in, a room with a door that locked from the outside.
I picked up my phone and called Eldon again, and I said, "I need the name of a lawyer.
Not a divorce lawyer.
Something else."
He didn't ask me why.
He just said, "I know a man named Vance," and gave me the number.
