Chapter 13: The Wedding That Wasn’t
“The callback number belongs to Adrian’s office,” Rachel said.
I looked at the jacket I had just hung in the closet. For weeks, I had tried to put a person at the firm workstation where someone had used my account at 2:14 in the morning. Now I had a number, and I wanted it to be an answer.
“Who was on the call?”
“We don’t know yet. The provider’s recording and ticket have been preserved, but counsel is still obtaining the complete copies. The number tells us where the callback went, not who requested the reset or used your account afterward.”
I sat back on the bed.
“Can you ask Adrian?”
“Yes. Through his attorney. Don’t call him yourself.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
I had not called him since the night at the Hawthorne. Still, I opened our message thread after Rachel and I hung up. His last unanswered message said he wanted us to stop hurting each other. I read it twice, then put the phone down without replying.
By the following afternoon, Rachel had enough of the provider’s records to put specific questions to Adrian’s counsel. The support worker had called the firm’s published office number, been transferred, and completed a reset for my account. The ticket did not establish that I requested it. The session that followed was logged under my ID at the firm workstation, but the records did not show whose hands were on the keyboard.
Rachel arranged a meeting at her office. Adrian came with his lawyer. I chose to be there.
He looked at the empty chair beside mine before sitting across the table. I could remember him pulling it out for me at crowded dinners, one small courtesy he never forgot in public.
Rachel placed a copy of the provider ticket between the lawyers.
“Did you direct anyone in your office to request access to Claire’s account?”
Adrian looked at his attorney. She told him he could answer.
“Yes.”
He turned toward me.
“I asked my assistant to get it reset. I needed to see what you’d taken from the review folders.”
“You could have asked me,” I said.
“You weren’t talking to me about the invoices anymore.”
“I sent you questions. You told me to pause.”
“That’s exactly why I needed to know what was in your copy.”
Rachel waited until he had finished.
“Did Claire authorize your assistant to obtain access to her account?”
“No. I didn’t think I needed her permission to check a firm account.”
I had used that account while doing work he had asked me to do. Hearing him call it a firm account did not explain why he had gone around me.
“Did you use it at 2:14 that morning?” Rachel asked.
“I went home before midnight. I told my assistant to handle the reset.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I don’t know who logged in at 2:14.”
His attorney wrote something down. Rachel asked for the assistant’s name, the instructions Adrian had given, and any messages about the reset. His attorney said she would respond after reviewing them. Adrian agreed that the provider should retain the recording.
Rachel did not ask him to account for every disputed approval on the strength of that answer. The approval table, the paper bearing my signature, and the overnight session were still different pieces of evidence. I wanted to push them together. Instead, I watched Rachel put a mark beside the question Adrian had not answered.
Then she opened her second folder.
“Claire also needs a truthful account of what happened at the Hawthorne. You called her and said Marcus had made you marry Serena.”
Adrian’s face changed. He looked less guarded than embarrassed.
“I was upset.”
“I heard that,” I said. “I still came away believing something had happened to you.”
“Marcus showed up with divorce papers.”
“For his marriage,” Rachel said.
Adrian looked at her, then at me.
“Did anyone perform a wedding?” I asked.
“No.”
“Was there a marriage license?”
“No.”
I had expected those answers. I had waited weeks to hear him give them.
Rachel slid a short written account toward me. Marcus had provided it to the independent reviewers after they asked about the hotel confrontation and the statement Adrian said he signed. With his permission, Rachel had obtained a copy for my attorney’s file.
Marcus wrote that he arrived at the Hawthorne twenty-three minutes after my first photograph. He found Adrian and Serena near the elevators. He showed Serena the first page of the divorce papers his lawyer had prepared, then asked them both how long they had been involved and whether either had used charity money to hide it. He said they answered neither question directly.
He also wrote that he had brought no license and asked no one to marry. According to his account, Serena asked Adrian to say what future he wanted with her. Adrian said he would marry her when they were both divorced. Serena took a sheet of hotel stationery from her bag, wrote a statement, and asked him to sign it.
Adrian had called me six minutes after Marcus arrived.
“Is that account wrong?” I asked.
“Marcus made it sound like I had a choice.”
“What did he threaten?”
“He had the papers. He knew about the invoices. I thought he was going to tell everyone.”
“He could tell them whether you signed?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you to sign?”
Adrian’s eyes went to the account in front of me.
“No. Serena asked me.”
The room was quiet except for the air vent above the door.
I remembered Serena in the lobby, her earrings flashing as she laughed with him. I remembered her telling me, two nights earlier, how lonely she was. I did not know whether she had wanted a promise from Adrian for months or had asked for one only when Marcus appeared. Adrian could tell us what he had done.
“Did you mean it?” I asked.
“At the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“I meant that I didn’t want to lose her. Then I called you, and I realized I might lose everything.”
He pressed his fingers against the edge of the table.
“I told you Marcus made me do it because I needed you to come. I thought if you saw what had happened, you’d help me explain.”
“You wanted me to explain a promise you had just made to someone else.”
He did not answer.
For a long time, I had replayed that phone call as if a different response from me could have changed what followed. I had pictured Adrian trapped in some elaborate confrontation, asking for help. Marcus’s account and Adrian’s answers left something much plainer: he had signed Serena’s statement, and then he had asked me to carry the blame for it.
Rachel requested a copy of the statement and asked that the original be preserved. Adrian’s lawyer said Serena had the paper; Adrian had photographed it on his phone. The lawyers arranged for a copy of the photograph to be provided. I did not need to see it to know no one had married at the Hawthorne. I did want the record kept.
Adrian’s attorney closed her folder, but he stayed in his chair.
“Claire, can we talk about our own paperwork?”
“We can talk through our lawyers.”
“I’ll give you the house. I won’t contest what’s in your name. We can finish it quickly.”
Those were terms I had wanted him to offer before I had known about the invoices. I waited.
“In return,” he said, “I need you to stop presenting the reset as if I tried to put those approvals in your name. You can tell the reviewers you don’t know who used the account. You can leave out my instruction to my assistant.”
“I’ve already told them I don’t know who used it.”
“Then we agree on that.”
“We don’t agree on leaving you out.”
His attorney turned toward him, but Adrian kept speaking.
“You know what a drawn-out fight will cost us.”
I thought of the rides Maya had fought to keep running. Two supporters had paid for further weeks of transportation while the charity examined charges it should have examined sooner. No settlement between Adrian and me would replace a missing payment record or tell those families what came next.
“My marriage isn’t payment for my silence,” I said.
“I’m trying to make it easier for you.”
“You can offer those divorce terms through Rachel. The reviewers still get your answer about the reset.”
Rachel added a note to her file. She would send Adrian’s counsel a written account of what he had acknowledged so there could be no later argument about what we had heard. She would keep my separation from him distinct from the charity’s inquiry.
Adrian rose when his attorney did. At the door, he stopped.
“There’s something you should know before you hand them the full transaction trail.”
Rachel looked up.
“If it concerns the payments, tell your attorney and the reviewers.”
“It concerns where the charity got the money.” He turned back to me. “Those consulting charges were assigned to a restricted grant. If the donor decides the charity spent that money on the wrong work, the charity could have to return it.”
“Has the donor asked for repayment?” Rachel said.
“Not yet.”
“Then we need the grant terms and the accounting records.”
Adrian gripped the door handle. I could not tell whether he was warning us about a real obligation or hoping I would be too afraid to ask.
May you like
He looked at me.
“The money’s gone, Claire. What happens to Maya’s program if they have to pay it back?”
