“Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment. “That was fast.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” I said.
He sat down across from me. He didn’t take off his coat.
“Peggy, we can handle this like adults. There’s no reason to involve—”
“The petition is filed,” I said. “If you’d like to respond to it, you’ll need to contact your own attorney.”
I picked up my tea. I looked out at the garden. After a long moment, I heard him stand, walk to the hallway, and go upstairs.
That night, he made two phone calls behind the closed bedroom door. I did not try to listen. I didn’t need to.
Within forty-eight hours, Richard had retained an attorney, a man named Gregory Foss, who had a reputation in Connecticut family law circles for aggressive representation and a particular skill at what Helen described, with careful neutrality, as asset discovery.
Foss’s first move was a formal request for full financial disclosure from both parties. This was, of course, exactly what Richard wanted. He believed, I was certain of this, that discovery would reveal my dependence and his leverage. He expected to find a woman with modest nonprofit income, half a colonial house, and limited retirement savings. He expected to be in the stronger position.
What he did not expect was a call from Gregory Foss, eight days after the petition was filed, informing him that I had retained counsel, that my counsel had preemptively filed a full financial disclosure that included the existence of a three-million-dollar trust, and that said trust was structured as separate property under Connecticut law, predating the marriage, with no commingling of marital funds.
Helen told me about the call secondhand. Foss, apparently, had been very quiet for a moment.
Then Richard called me directly, which, Helen noted, was a violation of proper procedure, but not uncommon.
“You have three million dollars,” he said.
It was not a question. His voice had a quality I had not heard before. A particular tightness, the sound of a man who has been walking on ice and has just heard it crack.
“My father left it to me,” I said. “In trust.”
“You never—”
He stopped, restarted.
“Peggy, this is— We should talk about this before it goes any further.”
“I have an attorney,” I said. “Please communicate through her.”
I hung up.
The escalation came two days later, and it came from a direction I hadn’t fully anticipated.
Dana Holt.
She called me from a number I didn’t recognize. I answered because I didn’t recognize it. She was composed, carefully, artificially composed, the voice of someone who has rehearsed. And she told me that she and Richard were serious, that this divorce was going to happen regardless, and that if I made things difficult, she had information about me, about my father’s finances, about my relationship with my daughter, that she would not hesitate to bring forward.
I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of a grocery store, the same parking lot where I had once cried and reapplied my lipstick and gone inside to buy milk.
“What information?” I said.
She paused.
“I’ve been talking to Drew,” she said. “Richard’s son. He has a very different view of who you are as a person, Peggy.”
“Dana,” I said, “let me be very clear. If you contact me again, I will provide my attorney with the recording of this conversation.”
I had, on Helen’s advice, enabled automatic call recording on my cell phone three weeks earlier.
“And it will become part of the file. If you have information you believe is relevant to these proceedings, you are welcome to submit it through proper legal channels.”
She hung up.
I sat in the parking lot for a moment. My hands were steady on the steering wheel. Was I frightened? Yes, a little. Not of Dana Holt, but of the shapelessness of the threat, of not knowing exactly what Richard had told her, or what Drew might say, of the way an ugly divorce can draw in people at the edges of a life and weaponize them.
But fear, I had learned, was not the same as danger.
And Dana Holt had just handed me something useful.
I called Helen. She listened to the recording. She was quiet for a moment.
“That,” she said, “was a mistake on her part.”
Within a week, Gregory Foss had formally communicated to Helen that Richard was open to a negotiated settlement and that his client wished to proceed in good faith. The aggressive asset discovery request was quietly withdrawn.
They had looked at the board. They had seen what was on it. And for now, only for now, they had stepped back.
That weekend, I drove to Clare’s house in Simsbury. She had two children, eight and ten, who immediately demanded I play board games with them, which I did for two hours on the living room floor. Clare made soup. We sat in her kitchen after the children were in bed, and I told her, finally, fully, everything.
She cried. I didn’t.
I held her hand and let her cry for both of us.
“Mom,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I wasn’t ready,” I said. “But I am now.”
