He Made Me Hear Her, So I Took My House Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Sitting Room
Odette sits through two hours of her husband's other woman and then knocks on the half-open door. Rafael says sign, and page three names the woman in his bed as the buyer of her house.
I had just hung up on the lawyer when our housekeeper knocked.
She said, "Mrs. Cordero, your husband is home."
I stood up too fast and my knee hit the desk.
There was water on my face. I had been crying for ten minutes and hadn't noticed.
"Thank you," I said, and wiped my cheeks with both hands.
At the door she said, "Mrs. Cordero, he isn't..."
Then she stopped and looked at me with her mouth pressed flat.
I smiled at her so she wouldn't have to finish.
That morning Rafael had texted me: Wait in the sitting room outside my suite at five. I need you there.
I had thought it was a surprise. I had put on the green dress he liked.
The sitting room sits at the end of the east hall, between the stairs and his bedroom door.
At five exactly I opened the door to the hall.
His bedroom door stood open the width of a hand.
It never did that. Rafael closed every door behind him, even to the bathroom.
A woman laughed inside.
It was a loud laugh, pitched to carry down the hall.
Then Rafael laughed too.
I walked into the sitting room and sat down on the couch.
His gray suit jacket lay across the floor in front of me. His trousers were next to it, and his tie, and one cuff link.
A red dress was draped over the arm of the other chair.
A black lace slip lay on the rug between them.
Rafael loved suits. He said a man should dress like what he owned.
He liked women who looked like they cost something, too. I had known that before I married him, and I had married him anyway.
I was the plain one. I had told myself that was a kind of safety.
Behind the open door the bed began to knock against the wall.
I looked at the clock on the mantel and did not move.
I could have left the room. The front door was forty steps away.
I stayed, because the lawyer had told me less than an hour ago exactly what I had left.
The house. That was all.
Papa's land was gone, and his company, and the money he had promised me and my mother until the day he died.
Rafael had found Papa his last lender, the month before. He had called it a favor.
Two hours later the bed went quiet.
Then the shower ran, and stopped, and the woman laughed again in a lower voice.
I stood up and smoothed my dress.
I walked to the open door and knocked on it with one knuckle.
"Come in, Odette," Rafael said.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in a white undershirt and his suit trousers, which someone had handed him from somewhere.
A woman with long blonde hair lay across the pillows in my mother's old silk robe.
I had never given anyone that robe. It had hung in the east closet for twenty years.
"This is Dahlia," Rafael said. "Dahlia, my wife."
Dahlia raised two fingers at me.
Rafael did not look ashamed. He looked tired and patient.
"You heard," he said.
"I heard."
"Good. I didn't want to tell you in a hallway."
He reached to the nightstand and picked up a blue folder.
It was already thick. A pen was clipped to the front.
"Sit," he said.
"I'll stand."
"Odette. You've been alone in this house for a year. Your father's gone. You don't work. You're not a person who can do this by herself."
"Do what?"
"Leave quietly." He held out the folder. "Sign where the tabs are. My mother says you'll want to do it tonight, while it's still raw."
I took the folder because my hand wanted something to hold.
The first page was a divorce petition. The date at the top was three weeks old.
Three weeks.
I had been learning to make his mother's tamales three weeks ago. I had been asking what he wanted for dinner.
"You wrote this before," I said.
"I wrote it when I decided." He shrugged. "You're a good person, Odette. You're also honest, dull and boring, and you know it. We both knew what your father's money was for."
Dahlia studied her nails.
I turned a page. Then another.
The third page was not about the divorce. It was a sales contract, with the address of this house at the top.
Under SELLER it said my name and his.
Under BUYER, in black type, it said: Bascom Holdings LLC. Dahlia Bascom, managing member.
I looked up at the woman in my mother's robe.
She was looking at me, and she was not smiling anymore.
"I'm not signing tonight," I said.
"Odette."
"I'm taking this to my own lawyer."
"You don't have one," Rafael said. "You can't pay one."
He was right about the money. I had three hundred and forty dollars of my own.
So I tucked the folder under my arm and walked out of the room.
Behind me Dahlia said, in a different voice, "Rafael. You told me she had already moved out."
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