There was silence on the other end. A long, stunned silence.
“I feel betrayed,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I’m thinking of divorce. I can’t trust this man.”
Lydia didn’t say anything for a while.
I’d known her for twenty-eight years. I knew her silences. This one was the kind where she was thinking very carefully about what to say next.
Then she asked, “Has he ever treated you badly?”
I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I looked at the folder on the desk.
“No.”
“Not once? In twenty years?”
“No.”
“Has he been a good father?”
I thought about Ethan reading the comics in funny voices. About Rose on Nigel’s shoulders at the beach, in a picture I’d just seen for the first time. About Nigel sitting on the edge of Rose’s bed every night for years, reading her chapter books.
