Chapter 8: What My Mother Said
She had read the email three times before she called Douglas.
That was the first thing she told me.
Not that she believed it — she was careful to say that — but that she had read it three times, which told me everything about the doubt it had been designed to plant.
"He wrote that you stopped trying," she said.
"That you chose the hospital over everything else.
That he grieved the children you couldn't have and you wouldn't let him grieve with you."
I was sitting in my car in the hospital parking garage.
Engine off.
Phone pressed to my ear.
"He grieved," I said.
"That's what he wrote."
"Mom.
During the seven years we went through fertility treatment, Brandon attended four appointments.
Four.
Out of thirty-one.
I have the records.
I kept them because I am a doctor and I keep records of everything, and also because somewhere in year five I think I already knew I was going to need them someday."
Silence on the line.
"He told me you were cold," she said.
Quietly.
Not accusing.
Just saying it.
"I was a woman who had been told six times that her body had failed at the one thing her husband had decided defined her worth.
I was not cold.
I was holding myself together with both hands so I could keep going to work and keep paying the mortgage and keep being a functional person while my marriage dissolved around me." I stopped.
"I'm sorry.
I'm not angry at you."
"I know you're not."
"I'm angry at him."
"I know that too." A pause.
"He also said Lauren was a comfort to him.
That she was there when you weren't."
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
"She was there," I said.
"She was there for both of us.
That's what made it what it was."
My mother was quiet for a long moment.
I could hear her breathing.
I could picture her at the kitchen table, the one she'd had for thirty years, her reading glasses pushed up on her head.
"What do you need from me?" she said.
The question broke something open that I had been keeping carefully closed.
"I need you to know the truth," I said.
"And I need you not to respond to him.
Don't write back.
Don't call him.
Don't let him know the email landed."
"All right."
"And Mom — I need you to be willing to say, if anyone asks, that he contacted you.
That he sent that email unsolicited.
Because that is going to matter."
A pause.
"Is this for the legal case?"
"It might be."
"Then yes," she said.
Simply.
Without hesitation.
"Of course."
I sat in the car for a while after we hung up.
The parking garage was dim and smelled of concrete and exhaust.
Somewhere above me, the hospital was running — patients, nurses, the soft machinery of people being kept alive and helped and sent home.
I had spent twenty years in that building.
I had learned to read the difference between a patient who was scared and a patient who had given up.
Between a family that was holding together and one that was fracturing at the seams.
I had not always been able to read my own life with the same clarity.
But I could read it now.
Brandon had sent that email because he was running out of moves.
The settlement rejection had rattled him.
Lauren's silence was no longer something he could count on — he didn't know about our conversation yet, but he would sense the shift.
And now he had reached past the legal case and into my family, which meant he was no longer just defending himself.
He was trying to win.
My phone buzzed.
Douglas.
I answered.
"Adrienne Cole wants to meet on Monday," he said.
"She's seen the documents Lauren provided."
"All of them?"
"All of them.
She called it —" A pause, as if he was reading.
"She called it a significant development."
"What does that mean for the timeline?"
"It means things are moving faster than I expected." Another pause.
"Brandon's attorney called again this afternoon.
The offer is now two hundred and ten thousand."
I watched a car pull slowly past me in the garage, headlights sweeping the concrete wall.
"Douglas," I said.
"When Brandon finds out Lauren gave those documents to the prosecutor —"
"He'll know by Monday.
Possibly sooner."
"What will he do?"
Douglas was quiet for a moment.
"That's what concerns me."
I thought about Lauren in that small apartment.
Noah on her hip.
The mobile playing its loop.
"Can we get someone to check on her?" I said.
"I'll make a call."
"Tonight."
"Tonight," he agreed.
I started the car.
The headlights came on, illuminating the gray wall in front of me.
Brandon had gone to my mother to make me feel alone.
He had miscalculated.
The people he'd tried to use against me were the same people now standing beside me.
May you like
But he wasn't finished yet.
And neither was I.
