Chapter 12: Crated

"He can't," I said into the phone. "Hutch bought it before I ever met Graydon."

"Hutch bought it. You own it now. And you got it during the marriage."

"For a dollar."

"Judges don't care about the dollar. They care about the date."

Hutch was standing very still beside me, shirtless, with charcoal on his chest where I'd pressed my hand.

He could hear every word.

"When?" I asked.

"There's a hearing on the eighteenth. I'll fight it. I want you to be ready to lose."

I hung up.

Hutch was already putting his shirt back on.

He did the buttons wrong and didn't fix them.

"I did that," he said.

"You didn't know."

"I've been a Winthrop for thirty-three years. I should have known."

We lost on the eighteenth.

The hearing was over in ten minutes.

The judge ordered the painting crated and held in a fine-art storage facility until the divorce was final, with neither party allowed to touch it.

Graydon wasn't even there. He sent a lawyer with a tan.

The storage company the court picked was the one the bank always used.

I knew the name. I'd seen it on four years of invoices for the lobby collection.

Cate's people.

The movers were coming on Friday at ten.

Thursday night I couldn't sleep at Fran's.

At two in the morning I drove to Moonlite.

The lanes were dark.

The light was on upstairs.

I went up the stairs and stopped in the doorway.

The bed was bare.

Hutch had taken the painting down off the wall.

She was lying face up on the floor on a moving blanket, under the lamp.

He was kneeling next to her.

There was a red can of lighter fluid from the back-lot grill on the floor by his knee.

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