Five Hours a Year novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Desk With Her Name

Leah starts at Frances's firm in San Francisco; a certified letter arrives with her signature line already typed.

On Saturday morning I called Frances from my mother's back step, with the folder on my knee.

"Desmond told us he was flying home at noon," I said. "At eight that night he was standing next to Alec's phone."

"Could he have flown and gone straight to the office?"

"He said he had a noon flight, and Alec said he had four minutes, and Desmond said, That's time, Alec. He was timing the call."

Frances was quiet for a second.

"Then he lied about a small thing to a grieving widow's face," she said, "and a man who lies small has a reason to. Get a pad."

I got one from the drawer where my father kept his raffle tickets.

"Write the day, the hour, the words, and who else heard them. Do it now, while it still sounds the way it sounded."

I wrote it all.

Friday, 8:00 p.m. D.M. at W.K.'s elbow. Said noon flight home. Cards frozen by 2:00. Page three.

When I read it back, it looked like the first page of a file.

"Good," Frances said. "Now keep the pad on you. And Leah, don't tell him you know."

"Why not?"

"Because he thinks you're a wife," she said. "Let him."

I stayed through Monday, for my mother's sake.

On Tuesday, at seven in the morning, I landed in San Francisco with one suitcase and the cash from my mother's purse.

My mother had refused to come with me.

"I have my sister and thirty casseroles," she'd said at the gate. "Go be a person."

Frances's firm took up the fourth floor of a narrow brick building two blocks from the Embarcadero.

There were eleven lawyers, one coffee machine, and a dog.

"The dog is not a lawyer," Frances said, steering me past him. She had her red glasses pushed up into her gray hair. "But he has been in more depositions than most of them."

She showed me to a glass-walled office with a desk, two chairs, and a window full of gray bay.

A nameplate sat on the desk.

It said LEAH STALLWORTH, and it was not new.

There was dust on the top edge.

"You had this made six years ago," I said.

"Your father had it made. He mailed it to me the week you got married and said, keep this somewhere dry." She tapped it once. "I kept it dry."

I didn't trust my voice, so I sat down.

Frances perched on the edge of the desk and folded her arms.

"We bill in tenths of an hour. We never bill a friend. We don't lie to judges, and we don't hold a client's hand for free past the second tissue."

"That's a lot of rules."

"They're four. Your husband had a hundred."

She stood.

"Your cards are still dead, so I'm putting you on an advance. Don't argue, it's a loan with a smile on it."

I stopped her at the door.

"Frances, why wait six years?"

"Because I'm not in the business of rescuing grown women," she said. "I'm in the business of having a desk ready when one decides."

By ten I had a laptop and a stack of eight files that nobody else had time for.

By noon I knew I was rusty.

I read one motion three times, and the second paragraph still wouldn't tell me what it wanted.

At one, a young associate stuck his head in.

"Frances says you used to try cases. There's a tenant meeting tomorrow at seven, forty people in a church basement, and the landlord's lawyer has been telling them they have no standing."

"I haven't been in a room with forty strangers in six years."

"They're not strangers," he said. "They're angry."

I took the file and read it in the conference room with my shoes off and my feet on the next chair.

At some point the dog came in and lay down across my socks.

Somewhere between the third lease and the fourth, I realized I had been working for five hours and nobody had sent me a bill.

I laughed once, out loud.

The dog lifted his head and put it back down.

At four, the office manager came to the glass door with a cream envelope in her hand and Frances behind her.

The office manager ran the front desk and the Friday lottery pool, and she had not stopped talking since eight.

She had stopped now.

"A courier brought this," Frances said. "It's certified, so I signed for it."

"From New York?"

"From Kittridge & Marr."

I took it.

My hands were steady, and I was proud of that.

Inside was a petition for dissolution of marriage, forty pages long.

The clerk's stamp on the first page said it had been filed in New York on Friday, at 9:14 in the morning.

I put my finger on the time.

On Friday at 9:14, Desmond had been sitting at my mother's table, in my father's chair, eating a pastry, and telling me that nobody should do anything they couldn't take back.

"He filed it while he was asking me to wait," I said.

"He filed it while he was drinking your mother's coffee," Frances said.

The petition named the grounds as abandonment.

It demanded that I return to the marital residence within ten days or be considered to have waived any claim to property held in my name.

At the bottom of the last page was a signature line with my name typed under it, and above it, in blue ink, Alec's signature.

"They want you to consent to everything," Frances said. "Right there."

I turned back a page.

"Property held in my name," I read. "Frances, I don't hold any property in my name."

"That's what I thought, too."

I turned to the page that listed the assets they meant.

There was one line, and it was the same line that had been on page three of the folder in my mother's kitchen.

LT Holdings.

L. T. Leah Stallworth.

I had noticed the initials once, years ago, and decided that Alec's accountant had been lazy.

"It can't be mine," I said. "I've never had an account. Alec said it was for taxes."

Frances took her red glasses out of her hair and looked at me.

"Then why," she said, "would a firm go to this much trouble to take it away?"

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend