Chapter 4: The Clause
Douglas came to the cottage the next morning with a lawyer, a box of donuts and the face of a man who has just found oil under his lawn.
“Fourteen million copies,” he said on my porch, before I’d even opened the screen door. “Mer. Fourteen million. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did,” I said. “You asked if it was five grand.”
He laughed like I was kidding. Then he sat down in my mismatched chair without being asked.
“Okay. Look. I was hasty with the papers. We’re a family. We’ll withdraw the custody thing.” He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded. “But you need to understand, legally, everything earned during a marriage is marital property. Half of Lark House is mine. Half of the TV deal. We’re a team, Mer. We always were.”
“A team,” I said. “Was Sienna on the team?”
He didn’t even blink. “Sienna’s a consultant.”
“I know. I heard her consulting in your study.”
His lawyer suddenly found the lake very interesting.
Douglas stood up and brushed powdered sugar off his slacks. “You can be as bitter as you want, Mer. It doesn’t change the math. A judge will split it down the middle. I’m being generous, coming here first.”
“Generous,” I said. “Last week I was furniture.”
After they left, I sat on the dock with my feet in the cold water and called my new lawyer, a sharp woman named Delia who’d already read everything Jo sent her.
“Meredith,” she said, “did you sign a prenup when you married into the Carters?”
“Constance made me. The day before the wedding. Her own lawyer drafted it. I signed it in my wedding shoes.”
“Do you have a copy?”
I didn’t. But I knew who did.
Constance came herself that afternoon. I hadn’t expected that. She stood on my porch in her lavender tweed suit with a leather portfolio under her arm and her chin up, the way she stands at funerals.
“Douglas told me,” she said. “About Lark.”
“I imagine he did.”
She held out the portfolio. Inside was the prenup, nineteen years old, yellowed at the edges. One paragraph was flagged with a pink sticky note.
Each party shall retain as separate property all income and assets derived from his or her own separate business, profession or creative work.
“I wrote that clause,” Constance said. “Myself. I wanted to protect Carter Development from a schoolteacher who’d married my son for his money.” Her mouth twisted. “I was very proud of it.”
“It protects me now,” I said.
“Yes.” She looked at the lake for a long time. “I was a schoolteacher’s daughter too, you know. Douglas’s father’s mother treated me exactly the way I treated you. I swore I’d never be like her. Then I was her, and worse, because I knew better.”
It was the most honest thing she’d ever said to me. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I told her the truth back.
“I hid Lark from Maisie too,” I said. “I told myself I was protecting her. I was protecting me. She deserved better from both of us.”
Constance nodded slowly. At the bottom of the steps, she turned.
“The inscription,” she said. “Who never misses a clue. I missed every one of them, didn’t I?”
That night, at 11:58, Jo called.
“Turn on your phone,” she said. “Don’t panic. Don’t read the comments.”
It was a gossip site with eleven million followers. My photo, an old one, from a Carter Christmas card. Under it, the headline:
EXCLUSIVE: Bestselling Author R.J. Lark Is a Lake Forest Housewife Who Hid Millions and Abandoned Her Daughter.
The source was “a family member close to the situation.”
“He sold it,” I said. “He sold me before I could tell it myself.”
