He Let Me Crash on Christmas Eve, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Served

A process server hands Susannah a petition calling her an abandoner of the marital home, Nate swears he didn't file it, and his mother reads it aloud in front of the lounge before she takes Joy in her arms.

"Did she sign yet?" I said. "Sign what, Nate?"

"It's nothing. She's worried about me."

"Sign what?"

"The divorce papers." He said it to the floor. "I told her what you left on the table."

"You told her before you told your own mother."

"I was in her car. I had to tell someone."

The woman by the window stood up and walked out of the lounge without a word.

The man in scrubs followed her.

Then a stranger in a gray quarter-zip pushed through the door with a thick envelope.

"Susannah Rankin?"

"Yes."

"You've been served."

He put it in my hand and was gone before I could ask who from.

The top page said Hamilton County Domestic Relations Court.

Under it, in capital letters, was the word PETITIONER and Nate's full name.

I read the first paragraph, then the second, then the third.

"What is this?" My voice came out flat.

"Zanna, I don't know." Nate took a step toward me. "I never filed anything."

"Your name is on it."

"Let me see."

I held it away from him.

"It says I abandoned the marital home," I said. "It says I took our property without consent, and I'm refusing a father access to his newborn child."

"I didn't write that."

"Whose lawyer is this?"

He looked at the signature block.

His face changed.

"It's the Pilkington Construction law firm," he said slowly. "The one that does the company's contracts."

"Why would your boss's law firm file for you?"

"Her father said they'd look after me. I thought he meant... I didn't think he meant this."

"Did you sign anything?"

"I signed a page at her father's house on the twenty-sixth. They said it was an insurance form."

I stared at him.

"You signed it without reading it."

"They put it in front of me and I was half asleep. I trusted them, Zanna."

"Trusted them to sue me while my daughter was in an incubator."

"I never wanted this."

"You never asked what it was."

The lounge door swung open again.

Peggy Ardrey came in at a fast walk with her purse on her arm and her reading glasses swinging on their cord.

Lorna had called her from the hall.

She looked at me first.

Then she looked at the envelope in my hand.

"Give me that," she said.

I handed it over.

She put on her glasses and read the first page standing up, with her lips moving.

She was sixty-two and had driven a school bus for thirty-one years, and she did not lower her voice for anyone.

"Petitioner states that Respondent abandoned the marital home without notice," she read aloud. "That Respondent has obstructed Petitioner's access to the minor child. That Respondent has acted out of spite and emotional instability."

She looked up.

"Spite," she said.

Nobody in the lounge moved.

"Mom," Nate said.

"Don't you Mom me." She turned the page. "Susannah left the house on the twenty-eighth. Where were you on the twenty-fourth, Nathaniel?"

"Mom, not here."

"Where were you on the twenty-fifth? Where were you on the twenty-eighth when she needed a ride out of this hospital?"

"I was at the shop with Kendra."

"With Kendra," Peggy said.

She said it very quietly.

Then she folded the papers once and handed them back to me.

"Honey, keep them," she said. "Show them to your lawyer, and show them to the judge."

She took off her glasses.

"I raised him better than this, and I am so sorry."

"It's not your fault," I said.

"No," Peggy said. "It's his."

Nate's jaw was shaking.

He did not defend himself.

"May I see her?" Peggy asked me. "Just once, before I say another word to him."

I looked at the woman who had driven eight miles in an ice storm to bring me soup the week my father died.

The nurse had told me skin-to-skin was allowed for family one at a time.

"Come on," I said.

We scrubbed our hands at the sink, side by side, to the elbow.

Joy lay in her incubator in a knit cap Lorna had bought at the gift shop.

The nurse opened the porthole and laid my daughter in Peggy's arms, tubes and all.

Peggy bent her head and made a sound I had never heard from her.

"Hello, Joy," she whispered. "I'm your grandma. I drove your daddy to school when he was five years old and he cried the whole way."

I laughed through my nose.

It was the first time in four days.

Through the glass window of the unit, Nate stood in the hall with his hands against the pane.

He could see us.

He couldn't come in.

Kendra was beside him, with her hand on his back.

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