Chapter 1: The Cashier’s Pen
“Just sign it, Nora. You came with nothing.”
Grant slid the papers across his mother’s dining table, right between the gravy boat and the cranberry sauce. He did it the way he used to slide me the dinner check, back when we were young and he still pretended to reach for his wallet.
Nobody had touched the turkey.
Evelyn sat at the head of the table in her emerald silk blouse, her heavy gold necklace catching the candlelight. She didn’t look surprised. She looked like a woman watching a show she had paid for.
“There’s a pen in front of you,” she said. “Use that one. It’s from the bank.”
I looked down. A cheap blue ballpoint with a gold logo. Of course she’d planned the pen.
“Grant,” I said. “Our daughter is upstairs.”
“Maddie’s got her headphones on.” He loosened his burgundy tie. “This doesn’t have to be ugly. The prenup is clear. You keep your car and your personal things. I keep the house, the company, the accounts.”
The prenup. Evelyn had pushed it across a different table fifteen years ago, three days before our wedding. Nothing personal, dear. Grant has a future. You have a bookkeeping certificate.
I had signed it without reading past the first page. I’d had my own reasons.
The woman beside Grant shifted. Sloane Mercer, his “growth consultant,” in a red dress that did not belong at a family Thanksgiving. She’d come in with him and taken my chair, the one nearest the kitchen, where I’d sat for fifteen years so I could get up and refill everyone’s plates.
“Sloane’s here for the business side,” Grant said, catching my look. “Harbor Point closes in two weeks. I need my life simplified before then.”
Simplified. I had kept his books for nine years without a salary. I had given up a drafting job in Chicago so he could take a risk on a tiny development firm in Ohio. I had cut coupons while he bought suits, because the clients have to see success, Nora.
“You’re divorcing me,” I said, “over a real estate deal.”
“I’m divorcing you because we’ve grown apart.” He said it like a line he’d practiced in the car. “Look at you. Look at me. You still dress like you’re working the register at the Hy-Way.”
Sloane laughed into her wine glass. Evelyn didn’t bother hiding her smile.
“I always told him,” Evelyn said. “A man marries the level he means to stay at. He married a cashier.”
My hands were flat on the tablecloth. I noticed that my left thumb was pressing so hard into the linen that the nail had gone white.
I could have said it right then. Three words, and the whole table would have gone silent.
But I had made a promise to myself at twenty-six, when I walked out of a house with forty rooms and took a Greyhound bus west with one suitcase. I would be loved for who I was or not at all.
Apparently, it was going to be not at all.
I picked up the bank pen.
“Good girl,” Evelyn said.
I signed on every yellow tab. Eleanor N. Pierce. The Eleanor surprised Grant; he’d forgotten I even had a first name before Nora. He frowned at it for half a second and then let it go, because Grant never looked at anything twice unless it could make him money.
“There,” he said, gathering the pages. “Was that so hard?”
“Maddie stays with me,” I said.
“For now.” He tucked the papers into a leather folder. “We’ll talk about it once you’ve found an apartment. And a job.”
Sloane reached over and patted his arm, her diamond earrings swinging. “Babe, we should go. The Harbor Point deck needs another pass tonight.”
That was when the doorbell rang.
Evelyn frowned at the clock. “Who on earth comes at seven on Thanksgiving?”
Nobody moved, so I did. Old habits. I walked down the hall past the family portraits that had never included me, and I opened the front door.
The man on the porch wore a navy three-piece suit and round wire glasses. His beard had gone gray since I’d last seen him. Behind him, a long black car idled at the curb, its headlights cutting through the cold.
He took off his hat.
“Miss Ashford,” Henry Okafor said quietly. “Your father is asking for you. I’m afraid there isn’t much time.”
Behind me, in the dining room, the conversation stopped.
