Page 81 of Wreckage and Rain

Summer

There's a manila envelope on my doormat when I come home from Reclamation, no postmarks and completely blank. There is a small white note paper-clipped to the top. The handwriting on the note is one I'd recognize in a coma. Colt.

Colt is here. He is in Chicago.

I stand in my doorway with my gym bag on my shoulder, my keys in my hand and I look at the envelope for a long time before I bring it inside. I take it to the kitchen table. Sit down with it. Stare at it. The note is two lines. White cardstock. His handwriting. The same hand that signed our marriage certificate and wrote the inscription in the leather notebook on our first anniversary.

Summer. You should know all of it. I won't ask for anything else. Wherever you end up with this, I will respect it. I will love you always. Yours, Colt.

I read it three times. He came to my door. He set this on the mat and walked away.

***

Two hundred and forty-three pages. Cover sheet through appendix. I read it like I outline thrillers. Chronologically. Pencil in hand. Margin notes when something seizes my chest.

The headhunter email Sonny wrote a year and a half ago, looking for a female candidate, twenty-five to thirty, for an account executive position. Must be intelligent, ambitious, and presentable. The role requires close collaboration with my son, who is being groomed for CEO. The ideal candidate will be someone he respects professionally and finds personally compelling. Discretion is paramount.

I read that last sentence three times. Personally compelling. Discretion is paramount. He wrote that. To manipulate his son. To manipulate me. He has sat across from me a hundred times in his dining room and his garden and the box at the Charleston Symphony, smiling in my face, asking how the writing was going. He is a snake.

The compensation package. One hundred forty thousand a year base salary. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year with a bonus. Two hundred from Sonny's shell companies. I do the math on a yellow legal pad in the corner of the report. That's twenty-eight thousand a month to break my marriage. Didn't know that was something that could be quantified, yet here we are.

The phased strategy. Integration. Isolation. Escalation. Deleted calendar entries including my birthday, family dinners, and nights out scrubbed from Colt's phone. The strategic dinner party seating to separate me from Colt and control the narrative. Cheyenne getting walked into the spot beside my husband while I was put at the wrong end of the table to talk to Carol about teapots. If the optics appeared that Cheyenne was already Colt's partner, me disappearing wouldn't make as many waves.

What takes me down is page seventy-six.

Confirmed via sworn affidavit from bartender at The Butcher Block on Queen Street, Charleston, SC: subject Cheyenne Aldrich tipped the bartender one hundred dollars on multiple occasions to deliver pre-ordered drinks directly to subject Colt Bennet during four dinners over a six-week period preceding the night in question. Pattern consistent with progressive dose testing. The bartender believed at the time that the requests were of a sexual or recreational nature and didn't ask questions.

Four dinners.

I set the pencil down. I put both hands flat on the table.

The Wednesday I walked past The Butcher Block on my way to the market, saw them through the window, went in and sat down at their table. The night he kissed me on the cheek instead of the mouth. The night his cover story didn't match hers. That was one of the four.

He was being dosed by that viper.

I have been carrying that night for months. I have built his entire guilt around it. How he couldn't meet my eyes. The candles on the table. The intimate setting. How he kept blaming Cheyenne for picking the restaurant like he was reaching for somebody else's fault to stand in front of his own. How their stories didn't add up. I thought I was watching a man falling in love with another woman.

I was watching a man being slow-poisoned in front of me.

I sit at the table. I don't cry. The crying is for later, in the shower, like every night for two months. I didn't have all the facts that he was being poisoned in front of my eyes. However he chose to go there with her. He chose to tell me not to wait up that he was working and grabbing dinner in the office. I don't know how to sit with the two sides of this. The violation of his body, and his violating our marriage. He chose her every night before. In pieces. In attention. In laughter. In intimate moments. In letting me disappear into the background. In the soft hours that should have been mine. The emotional affair was his. Every minute of it and he chose it.

And then someone took the choice away from him entirely. With a glass of bourbon and a paid bartender and a sleight-of-hand he couldn't have caught even if he had been looking for it.

I read the rest.

The night of Tidewater celebration. The full dosing, the posed pictures to make it appear that Colt and Cheyenne were together. The photographers in the bars and by the limo. The hotel. The Belmond Charleston Place. The room reserved atfour thirty in the afternoon, before the celebration started. The photographer paid to stay in the lobby. The hallway camera catching Cheyenne supporting Colt down the corridor because he couldn't stand on his own.

The part where it says, in clean legal English, that he is going to live the rest of his life not knowing what was done to his body that night.

I press the heel of my hand against my mouth. Hold it there.

The embezzlement. Eight years. Twelve million dollars. Shell companies and Cayman accounts and Sonny Bennet running a fraud his son was being groomed to inherit and cover.

The part where the PI explains why I was removed from Colt's life. I read it twice. Subject Summer King-Bennet was the primary impediment to the principal's long-term strategy. Subject was making subject Colt Bennet into a man not amenable to manipulation.

I read it a third time.

I was removed because I was making my husband into a man his father couldn't use.