Chapter 22: Duck

We got to Bexley in two cars, and Deborah's driver was already standing at the bottom of the porch steps with his arms folded.

He was a big, calm man who had driven her for twenty years.

He had not let anyone past him.

On the porch, a young man in a quilted vest held a phone up on a stick, narrating to it in a bright voice.

Next to him, a woman in a windbreaker held a stack of papers.

"...and this is the Hallam estate," the young man was saying. "Where a man's lawful wife is being kept from him. We'll be here until she comes out."

Deborah got out of the car, and she was not hurrying.

She put her cane on the first step and looked up at the phone.

"Young man," she said. "You're on my porch."

"Ma'am, this is a public interest..."

"It is not a public anything. It is a porch."

The woman in the windbreaker stepped forward.

"Willa Prentiss?" she said, to me. "You've been served."

She put the papers in my hand and went down the steps without waiting.

It was a civil complaint, Albrecht against Prentiss, for slander.

For every word I'd said in the clinic lobby, and for a cut of my salary.

I almost laughed.

"Is that a threat?" I said to the phone.

The young man kept filming.

"My viewers have a right..."

A car came up the street much too fast and pulled onto the Hallam lawn with two wheels over the curb.

Spencer got out.

He had no jacket, and his tie was pulled loose.

The man I had married in a courthouse had always been pressed and tidy, and I had never seen him with his hair like that.

"Willa!" he shouted. "Tell them! Tell them what you told me!"

"Spencer, go home," Lydia said.

"You don't get to say my name." He stumbled up the walk. "You took everything. My job. My house. My name on the registry."

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