Chapter 5
She had not counted on me needing my razor at the wrong time on the right night.
I called Roy at six in the morning. I had not slept. Roy picked up on the second ring because Roy was the kind of man who answered calls from his business partner at six in the morning without complaint, and I told him what I had found, specifically the part about the bid and the county contact, and Roy was quiet for four seconds and then said tell me you took screenshots.
I told him I had screenshots.
What happened next took two weeks and required an attorney named Patricia Hines who had built her practice in Dayton on exactly this kind of case, which was the kind where a spouse has committed a discoverable wrong in the process of preparing for a divorce and the documentation is unusually thorough because the person who built it kept it on a phone they believed was not accessible. Patricia said in our first meeting that she had handled a hundred cases more complicated than this one and that the screenshots were the cleanest evidence package she had received in four years.
She also said the pregnancy issue was its own matter entirely and that I should arrange independent verification before any conversation with Claire about what I knew.
I arranged it. The result was what the messages had suggested it would be. I sat with that information for a day and then I put it in a file and I did not look at it again until Patricia needed it, because there was a child involved and the child had not done anything to anyone, and whatever happened between me and Claire and Marcus Webb was going to have to be handled in a way that understood that.
The county bid was another matter. Roy contacted an attorney we knew in the county administration space, a man named Gerald Park who had handled bid disputes before, and Gerald made three phone calls in forty-eight hours and learned that the irregularity in the review process was real and documentable and had not yet produced a decision. The bid was placed into a formal review hold. Marcus Webb's contact at the county office resigned before the formal investigation opened. The Morrison Group withdrew their competing bid six days later without explanation.
We won the county contract on a re-evaluation that was conducted by a panel that had not been involved in the original process. Roy and I sat in my car in the parking lot of the county building after the call and I heard him take a breath that sounded like a man setting something very heavy down on the ground.
I had not spoken to Claire about any of it.
She did not know what I had found in the laundry room. She did not know I had called Roy or Patricia or Gerald. She did not know that the thing she and Marcus had been building for eleven months had been unwound before it could close. She knew only that I had been quieter than usual and that the company seemed to be handling something and that I sometimes left the room when my phone rang.
May you like
Patricia filed the divorce petition on a Thursday morning. I was not home when Claire was served, because Patricia had advised me to be somewhere else, and I had followed that advice. I went to the office and sat at my desk and looked at the Birchwood Drive contract folder for the county project and thought about the summer cookout and the laugh before I had finished the sentence and the six years of a life that had been, for at least eleven of those months, something other than what I had believed.
I thought about the child.
