“Are you much of a gardener, Mr. Skopes?” I asked.
“A gardener?” he said, and made a scoffing noise. “I have a gardener.”
“Interesting. Does he tend azaleas?” I asked.
At the head of the table, the court reporter’s hands paused for a hairline fracture of a second. He’d noticed the slides. Then he gave a shrug so infinitesimal it was practically internal. His hands resumed their rhythmic bobbing on the steno with the world-weariness common to his breed. Daphne Skopes and Nick stared blandly at him, as if shorthand typing was a fascinating sight, just as I had prepped them to do.
“I don’t know the names of flowers,” Skopes said. These were not the kinds of questions he expected. He had good instincts, and they were telling him that something was amiss.
“Please get to the point, or move off gardening questions,” his lawyer said.
“Sure,” I said to Anderson. Then, purely to keep a rhythm, I asked Skopes, “Where did you go to college?”
“Vanderbilt,” Skopes said.
“And did you join a fraternity at Vanderbilt?”
The slideshow finally caught Anderson’s attention. He made a faint, choked noise.
“Do you not want me to answer that?” Skopes asked, turning to his lawyer. He saw Anderson’s face. Followed his line of vision.
The room got very quiet.
The slide changed.
“Did you join a fraternity at Vanderbilt?” I repeated, as if nothing were happening. As if Skopes’s ugliest self weren’t on display here, in front of the wife he had bought for similar purposes, but with more socially acceptable currency.
“You absolute bitch,” said Bryan Skopes in a flat voice.
I wasn’t sure if he meant me, or Daphne, or the girl his eyes were on. The very young one, with magenta hair and baby cheeks. The one on her knees.
The picture changed again. He was staring at it, at himself, trying to see a way around all that this was going to cost him.
“You absolute bitch,” Skopes repeated, his voice still toneless, but now his face was washed with red.
I kept my own face blank, perused the papers in front of me. “I’m not familiar with a fraternity called You Absolute Bitch. Would that be Psi Alpha Beta?”
Skopes stood up. His forehead was beginning to look sweaty. I could see him measuring how these photos might play to a much larger audience. To his Rotary Club. His church. His father. The neglected daughters he believed he loved, just as he believed that he was a good person. These pictures told a truer story, and for this moment, he was the one tasting helplessness. He was flayed open, all his inner ugliness exposed to the air.
“Give her what she wants,” he said. Anderson tried to speak, but Skopes cut him off. “Just give her what she wants.”
My favorite words.
Skopes thought he was saying them to his lawyer, or perhaps even to Daphne. He was wrong. Those words belonged to me.
After today, it would devolve into paperwork. Nick and I would do a long billable dance with Jeremy Anderson, slicing up the fat financial pie. That was nice and all, but my meat was in this moment. This perfect, unrepeated moment when Skopes was exposed. When all the stories that he told himself were washed away, and he saw himself, true.
Now I paused to set the dish of tuna on the floor. Henry wolfed at it. I grabbed the phone to text the Brit, and there, sticking out of the stack of mail, was the corner of a thick cream-colored envelope. I pulled it out, and saw my name and my return address engraved in burnt brown. Kai’s PO box in Texas was written in my spider-scrawl. It was the very one I’d tossed into my outbox in the last hour of Valentine’s Day. Now it had three red words in my mother’s handwriting, slanting across the front.
Return to Sender.
All thought stopped. All breath. My victory went bang out of my head. All my plans for the night went, too. My cat and my own hungers—gone. I couldn’t even hear the music.
Some time passed. Maybe half a minute, maybe a few seconds. I couldn’t tell.
This close, I could hear Henry making a low, overloud grumble in his chest that he felt as only a vibration. I heard him smacking up tuna. I turned the envelope over and saw the flap was sealed with Scotch tape. I hadn’t sent it that way.
My hands felt swollen and clumsy. They trembled so violently that I could barely get it open.
Inside, I found my check. She’d written VOID in the same red pen across the front.