Men like Grant never leave when asked. They negotiate. They stall. They circle language like raccoons around a locked trash can, looking for the latch.
“You’re upset,” he said, as if he were narrating weather to a child. “This is not the time to make permanent decisions.”
My father had died forty-eight hours earlier. His mistress had worn my dress to the funeral. There were emails in front of me suggesting my husband had been planning around my father’s death like it was a quarterly earnings report. And still he went with you’re upset.
I leaned against the desk and looked at him. Really looked.
Fifteen years is long enough to memorize a person’s face by the map of it. I knew the notch in his left eyebrow from a college soccer injury. I knew the tiny white scar on his chin from a Thanksgiving knife accident. I knew the exact expression he wore when he wanted to sound reasonable while lying through all his teeth.
He wore it now.
“Blackwood told me you have thirty days to vacate,” I said. “If you make this difficult, I’ll enjoy shortening the process.”
“Natalie, be rational.”
“You brought your girlfriend to my father’s funeral in my stolen dress.”
“She shouldn’t have come.”
“But she did.”
“That wasn’t my idea.”
I thought about the way Becca had sat in the front row, glowing with confidence right until the money turned out not to be his. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t find you credible.”
He dragged a hand through his hair again. “She thought—”
“I do not care what she thought.” My voice cracked like a whip between us, and for a second even he looked surprised. “For once in your life, Grant, this is not about managing the mood of the youngest woman in the room.”
The room smelled like paper and cedar and the faint smoke from the fireplace no one had lit since Christmas. Outside, a sprinkler clicked on in the front yard. Water hissed over the roses. Everything ordinary kept going.
He tried a different angle. “The marriage has been over for a long time.”
“No,” I said. “Your honesty has.”
He stared at me, then looked at the files again. “What exactly did James tell you?”
Not Dad. James.
There it was again, that tiny shift from family to transaction.
“He told me enough,” I said.
“That man never trusted me.”
I actually smiled at that. “Turns out he had excellent instincts.”