Chapter 6
At two-forty-five in the afternoon, Ethan's attorney called Margaret's direct line and asked if there was any possibility of a conversation before things proceeded further.
Margaret said: there is nothing to discuss that cannot be discussed in front of a judge.
The proceedings took eight months. Margaret had wanted to warn me they would take longer. They took eight months because the documentation was what it was, because Gerald's preserved records were what they were, because the forensic account of the eleven transfers and the two fraudulent consulting agreements and the diverted client relationships was thorough enough that Ethan's legal team spent the first four months attempting to find an interpretation that helped their client and the second four months negotiating terms.
The terms were these.
Ethan retained his personal accounts and his car and the things that had been his before the marriage. He retained no interest in Hartwell Designs, which the court affirmed had never been a marital asset under the terms of my father's trust structure. He retained no claim on the brownstone, which was similarly structured. He signed an agreement related to the diverted client relationships that Margaret described as generous, by which she meant I had agreed not to pursue additional civil action on the condition that the clients were released and the competing firm was dissolved.
Tessa's name did not appear in any of the proceedings, because Tessa had not been a party to any legal instrument and had, as far as Margaret could determine, known about Ethan's marriage but not about the specific nature of his plans, which made her a different kind of person from Ethan rather than the same kind.
May you like
The child was born in January. A boy. I learned his name from a mutual acquaintance who told me without meaning to cause pain and did cause it anyway, which is how those things tend to go.
I sat with that for some time. I sat with the knowledge that there was a child in the world whose existence was connected to the worst eight months of my life and who had not done anything to anyone, and I sat with my father's letter on the desk in the study that I had not yet decided to redecorate, and I thought about what it meant to love generously while not handing anyone the keys to your life, and I understood my father had meant both things at the same time rather than one as a qualification of the other.
