She put her glasses on again.
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You already did it.”
“He put sixty thousand dollars into my son’s company.”
“I know.”
“Was that yours?”
I thought about it.
Crestline paid Derek well.
But the house in Atlanta was in both our names, and the equity line on it had been opened, Monique had found on Tuesday, in April two years ago, for sixty-two thousand dollars, with a signature that was mine and wasn’t.
“Some of it,” I said.
Judy closed her eyes.
“Howard’s going to want to give it back.”
“Howard should talk to my lawyer. Not because I want it. Because your son should know what his seed money was. He can decide what to do with that.”
“And Brittany?”
“Brittany let herself fall on my floor yesterday so my husband would think I’d pushed her,” I said. “In front of his mother. With a family ring on her finger. I don’t have a lot of energy left for Brittany, Mrs. Miller. I’m going to save what I have for the twelfth.”
Judy looked at me.
“You’re coming.”
“I was invited.”
“By me.”
“By you,” I said. “Addressed by hand. I’d like to RSVP, if you’ll have me.”
For a long moment, Judy Miller didn’t say anything.
Then she reached across her new granite and put her hand on mine.
“I’ve got a guest room,” she said. “It’s the one he paid for. You can have it.”
Monique had the rest by Friday.
The equity line.
The sixty-two thousand.
A second account at a bank in Chicago that Derek had opened in 2023 with Brittany as a signer, funded by “consulting fees” from a Crestline vendor that Monique thought Crestline’s audit committee would find very interesting.
And the prenup.
2018.
Paragraph 11.
Monique read it to me over the phone in Judy Miller’s guest room.
“‘In the event of adultery by either party, substantiated by documentary evidence, the non-offending party shall be entitled to the marital residence free of any claim, and the offending party shall forfeit any interest in the non-offending party’s business.'”
“I remember that paragraph,” I said. “Derek laughed at it. He said ‘what business.'”
“Reed Events is a business,” Monique said. “It’s been a business since 2015. It’s a business with a website his girlfriend’s mother found in twenty minutes. And an engagement invitation with his name on it, postmarked, addressed by the bride’s mother, is documentary evidence, Camille. It’s the most documentary evidence I’ve ever held.”
“So the house is mine.”
“The house was always going to be yours. Paragraph 11 makes it yours without a fight. What I’d like to talk about is the sixty-two thousand, because that’s not adultery, that’s forgery, and that’s not a divorce matter, that’s a police matter, and I need you to decide before the twelfth how far you want this to go.”
I looked out Judy’s guest room window at a yard Derek had paid to landscape “in Camille’s memory.”
There was a bench.
There was, I’d learn at the party, a small brass plaque on the bench.
“Let’s go to the party first,” I said. “I’d like to see what he says when the dead woman walks in.”
PART 3
October 12.
Dayton.
The Miller house, with Derek’s granite and Derek’s landscaping and forty guests in the backyard under strings of lights that Brittany’s brother had hung that morning.
I came at 4:15.
Judy had told me to come at 4:15, because the toast was at 4:30, and she wanted me “in the yard before he’s got a glass in his hand.”
I wore navy.
I did my own hair.
I’d planned four hundred weddings and I knew exactly what the mother of the bride’s face does when she sees the wrong guest come through the gate.
