Schemes Come to Naught novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Place There
At the county clerk's office Dex signs away everything Ines might have claimed, swears in the hallway that she will always have a place at his company, and she wishes it well; the next morning she is at her desk asking where he wants her.
The clerk stamped the last page a little after ten on a Tuesday, and my marriage was over.
Ines had signed every page without reading it.
She turned each one to the signature line, signed, and slid it back across the counter.
I had come prepared for a fight over the townhouse.
Three months earlier I had moved the savings, the Bexley townhouse and the lake house into a trust, so there was almost nothing left for her to claim.
Our friends had a word for that.
Ruthless.
I had a speech ready for when she got angry.
She never gave me the chance.
"Two certified copies, please," she told the clerk.
The clerk stamped two more sets and handed them over.
Ines put them in her bag, picked up her coat, and walked out.
I caught up with her in the hallway.
"Ines, we were together ten years."
She kept walking.
"We don't have to make this ugly over money," I said.
"It's already done, Dex."
"I know you're angry."
"When your first company folded, you sat on my kitchen floor and told me money always comes back," she said. "I believed you. I've been thinking about that all year."
I had said it.
I remembered saying it.
I also remembered Valeria, my fiancee, sitting across from me in July with her hands flat on the table.
Not one more dollar goes to her, she had said, or I'm not setting a date.
I told myself it was the practical thing.
I told myself Ines was a grown woman with a good career and would land on her feet.
She reached the stairwell door and glanced back at me.
It was a cold look, and it was the last one I expected from her.
It annoyed me more than shouting would have.
For a second I almost told her not to bother coming in to work tomorrow.
Then I thought of her at nineteen in a borrowed sweater, eating gas station noodles beside my first laptop, and I didn't say it.
"You're not walking away with nothing," I said. "You still have your job."
She said nothing.
"I swear it, Ines. As long as Lowell Systems has a door, you have a desk behind it."
The clerk heard it through the open office door.
A young man waiting with a marriage license envelope heard it too.
Ines stopped.
Her face had been closed all morning.
Now she smiled, and it looked real.
"That's generous, Dex."
She held out her hand and I shook it, because I didn't know what else to do.
"I hope the company lasts," she said. "I mean that."
"It will. It's stable. We're not going anywhere."
"Good."
She pushed the stairwell door open and was gone.
Valeria was waiting at the curb with the engine running and two coffees in the cupholders.
Mine was black with one sugar.
She had never once gotten it wrong.
"Oh, honey," she said when I climbed in. "You look wrung out. Was it awful?"
"She didn't even read it."
"People who are finished stop reading." She squeezed my knee. "It's done, Dex. Nobody can touch that money now."
"I told her she keeps her job."
Valeria's thumb stopped moving.
"In the hallway?" she asked. "Who heard?"
"A clerk. Some kid with a license."
"Then it's nothing," she said, and her smile came back easily. "A kind thing to say at a hard moment. Nobody will hold you to it."
She pulled into traffic.
"Tonight I'll need the passwords to the trust accounts," she said. "Just so I can finish the paperwork."
"Sure."
I didn't think about it.
I thought about lunch, and the white dress she had picked out for the courthouse in December, and how light I felt.
I felt like I had solved something.
The next morning I came in at twenty to eight, early for me.
The lights on the fourth floor were already on.
Her old office had been dark for two weeks, ever since I told HR to hold it.
The door stood open.
Ines sat at her desk in the gray cardigan she wore on bad days, a mug of tea steaming beside the keyboard.
The plant on the sill had been watered.
Her badge lay on the desk next to the keyboard, still active, because nobody had thought to cancel it.
She looked up and tucked her pen behind her left ear.
"Good morning, boss," she said. "Where do you want me?"
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