Would You Like a Rose

Chapter 12 - What Nicholas Owed

Nicholas Harland's attorneys were, as Victoria had predicted, cooperative. They were cooperative with a specific, purposeful efficiency that suggested their client had received a very clear and very frank accounting of the exact nature of his legal exposure arising from eleven years of interference in a matter touching estate law, fiduciary obligation, and what Teresa Reyes had described, in a letter to James, as potentially fraudulent suppression of a legitimate heir's claim.

The separation agreement was reached within six weeks. It was not the most favorable document Nicholas had hoped to negotiate, but it was considerably better than the alternative his attorneys had outlined if the matter were to proceed through any form of contested litigation.

Victoria signed it on a Friday afternoon, alone in James's office, with the specific, quiet finality of someone closing a chapter they'd spent considerably longer inside than they'd understood at the time.

She did not feel what she expected to feel, which was mostly grief. She felt something more like the particular lightness of a burden finally set down, a specific relief at no longer having to maintain an arrangement she'd understood, for at least the past two years, to be something other than what it appeared.

She'd told Clara about the separation the previous week, over dinner at a small restaurant in midtown that Clara had chosen, which was the first time Clara had chosen anything, and which Victoria had found quietly significant.

"Are you all right," Clara had asked.

"I'm considerably more all right than I expected," Victoria had said.

"He was your husband for fourteen years."

"He was," Victoria agreed. "And he also spent eleven of those years making decisions about your right to exist in my life that were not his to make. I can grieve one of those things and be furious about the other simultaneously."

"You can," Clara said. "That's allowed."

The divorce itself proceeded over the following several months without the kind of drama that often accompanies the dissolution of marriages involving significant assets, largely because Nicholas had calculated, correctly, that drama would be substantially more costly to him than reasonable cooperation.

Victoria moved into a smaller apartment in the same building, by her own choice, keeping only the furniture and art that had been hers before the marriage. The larger apartment, a marital asset, was sold, and the proceeds divided according to the agreement.

On the day she completed the move, she called Clara from the smaller apartment's empty living room, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and the Rosewood ring on her finger catching the late afternoon light.

"It's done," she said.

"How does it feel," Clara asked.

"Quiet," Victoria said. "And honest. Those might be the same thing right now."

"I think they often are," Clara said.

Victoria looked at the ring for a moment.

"I've been thinking about having another one made," she said. "The same design. To give to you. Since the original belongs to both of us by right and there should have been two of them from the beginning."

There was a silence on Clara's end of the line, the specific, charged silence of someone preventing themselves from crying in a manner they consider embarrassing.