Chapter 2

The silence around the oval table had a texture, like the moment after a dropped plate decides whether to shatter.

Dane opened his mouth. Closed it. His hand went to his tie, the navy one already loosened, and he pulled at the knot as if it were strangling him.

"It's a formality," he said. "A standard clause. Dad's lawyer put boilerplate in everything—"

"Your father's lawyer," Corinne said, "wrote nothing. That's my father's handwriting."

She pointed at the paper, still lying open on the cloth between the wine stain and the cake. Berta had not touched it again. It lay there, creased white along the folds, the circled paragraph dark and undeniable.

"My father loaned the money," Corinne said, "and he wrote the note himself. He had it notarized. You were twenty-six, Dane. I was twenty-four. We'd been married for two years, and your father's business was three months from bankruptcy, and my father wrote you a check for forty thousand dollars from his own savings."

Berta made a small sound, like a chair scraping.

"It was a company loan," Dane said. "We paid it back. We paid it back with interest—"

"Three percent," Corinne agreed. "Below market, and you know why. Because your father promised my father you'd take care of me."

Dane's ruddy cheeks had gone patchy, red and white like a too-ripe apple. He was not looking at the paper. He was looking at the wine stain that had nearly reached Corinne's folded hands.

Marisol picked up the paper. She turned it toward the pendant light, her smooth brown fingers careful at the edges as if it were holy. Corinne watched her mouth move, reading.

Marisol had a heart-shaped face and high cheekbones, and she was thirty-four, and she had been Dane's wife for eleven months. In that time Corinne had spoken to her exactly four times. The first time was at the courthouse, after the divorce was finalized, when Marisol had smiled and said, "I hope we can all be friends." Corinne had said nothing.

Now Marisol read the circled paragraph slowly, moving her lips over the words, and the color in her face shifted like a tide going out.

"It says," Marisol said, in a voice gone flat, "that the payoff reverts to the estate—"

"To Corinne's estate," Berta snapped. "I can read."