All Chapters of Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Charlie's mother went on record. I did not see that coming.Not fully. I had known, from her call two weeks prior and her office visit the day after, that Vanessa was in a different posture toward the truth than she had been for the previous seven years. I had known she had submitted the additional statements about Lila's pre-gala conversations to Sofia and that those statements had been incorporated into the evidence package and had contributed, in the way that good evidence contributed, by establishing premeditation in a way that the medical records and Marcus's testimony and Dr. Cole's documentation had established mechanism.But a public statement was different from a legal submission. Legal submissions existed in the record and were accessible to the relevant parties and were, in the formal, procedural sense, part of the public truth. Public statements were something else. They were the choice to stand in front of the broader world and say something with your own voice and your o

He sent it through Sofia. She handed it to me and said: don't let him off easy. I told her I wouldn't.Sofia arrived at my office on a Thursday afternoon, eighteen days after the press conference, with the envelope in her hand and the expression she reserved for things she had decided were important and was delivering with the specific, considered care that important things warranted. She set it on my desk with the clean, deliberate placement of someone who is not going to comment on it and is trusting you to receive it at whatever speed is yours to receive it at."He left it at reception," she said. "Not delivered. He came himself. Left it with Jessica and left."I looked at the envelope. White. His name in the upper left corner in small, precise print. My name on the front in handwriting I recognized from a different context, from a different table, from a divorce certificate signed at a courthouse on a grey December morning."When?" I said."This morning. About nine thirty."I had

Charlie asked if he could meet his son. I asked Leo first.This was how it had to work. Not because I was protecting Leo from Charlie, specifically, though protection was always present in how I thought about my son, but because Leo was five years old and had opinions about the things that happened in his life and the opinions deserved to be part of the decision. He had already met Charlie, twice, in the unplanned way of the preschool gate and the cereal morning, and he had already formed an assessment, which was that Charlie knew about the thagomizer and liked cereal and was, therefore, worth further investigation.But a formal meeting was different from an accidental one. A formal meeting carried the weight of what it was, which was a father and a son meeting with the knowledge of what they were to each other, and that weight deserved to be brought to Leo honestly and in the right order.I explained it to him on a Saturday morning, gently and without excessive architecture, the same

He asked him: did you love my mom? And Charlie didn't hesitate.We were in the museum café by the time it happened, the three of us at a small round table near the window with the afternoon light coming in at the angle it came in at four o'clock in October, and Leo had a hot chocolate and Gerald was propped against the sugar dispenser and Charlie had a coffee and I had tea that was, predictably, already going cold.The museum visit had run long. Not because anything had gone wrong but because Leo's three-wing itinerary had expanded to include a special conversation with one of the museum's education staff about the latest research on ankylosaur defensive behavior, which had not been on the original schedule but which Leo had initiated by approaching the staff member with the focused confidence of someone who has identified the relevant expert in the room and intends to consult them. The staff member, a woman in her fifties who had the patient, genuinely interested quality of someone w

Not for me. For Leo. That was the right order.The Saturdays began the following week and then continued with the specific, reliable consistency of something that has been incorporated into the structure of a life rather than accommodated within it. Not every Saturday, that would have been too much too quickly and Leo had not asked for every Saturday and I had not offered it. But one Saturday out of every two, with occasional additions when Leo specifically requested them, which he did with the increasing frequency of a child who has added someone to the category of people worth spending time with and intends to act on that categorization.The pattern, in the weeks that followed, looked like this.Saturday mornings at the park, when the weather permitted, which in October permitted it approximately half the time and Leo had developed a precise system for determining which Saturdays the weather would be acceptable before I had finished my first cup of tea. He was usually right. He attr