“I’m not here about the affair,” I said, before she could get started.
“I don’t care about that.
I’m here about this.” And I laid the one-point-two-million-dollar promissory note on her glass counter and let her read the fine print.
I watched her hands begin to shake as it went in.
Damian had promised to divorce me by spring and buy her a condo; she’d thought she was the secret real thing and I was the marriage he was trapped in.
What she had not known was that the note in her hands was tied to an illegal lending operation, that the money had never been hers, and that if Damian went down or ran — and he was about to do both — the people he owed would come looking for the nearest collectible asset, which was her business, and then her.
“What do you want from me?” she whispered, tears coming.
“I want you to choose,” I said, and I wasn’t cruel about it, because there was nothing to be cruel about; we were two women he’d used the same way.
“You can go down as his accomplice when the federal charges land.
Or you can walk into the DA’s office and be my witness.
Those are the doors.
I’d take the second one.”
She was quiet for a while, standing there behind her own counter in the salon he’d built to trap her, and I let the silence be.
I understood exactly what she was moving through, because I’d moved through it myself only days before — the collapse of a whole story you’d organized your life around, the sick lurch of realizing that the person who made you feel most chosen had been the one using you most completely.