The Signature in the Rain
Chapter 01 - The Signature in the Rain
The pen cost more than Lily Rinaldi's first car. She knew because Cole had once told her the price, laughing at the extravagance of a man who had sent it to him as an apology.
Now it lay between them on a black marble conference table, beside twelve pages of divorce papers and a bottle of water no one had opened.
Through the glass wall, Manhattan was disappearing into rain. Lily was thirty-one weeks pregnant with three babies. Their movement had begun to feel less like kicks than neighbors rearranging furniture in a room much too small.
"We're done, Lily. I have a flight to catch."
Cole checked his watch. He was wearing the gray suit she had bought for their fifth anniversary. She wondered whether he remembered that, or whether a suit could outlast the reason it had been given.
"The lawyer said I should have someone review these," she said.
"My lawyer reviewed them."
"Your lawyer."
A muscle worked in his jaw. Behind him stood Samuel Crane, the family's attorney, a narrow man with silver hair and the patient expression of a doctor waiting for an unpleasant procedure to end. Samuel had brought no attorney for Lily. He had brought tissues.
"The support arrangements are generous," Samuel said. "The document can be filed after the babies arrive. Signing today establishes your intentions."
"My intention," Lily said, "was to stay married."
Cole looked at the window instead of her.
The last three months had taken him away in pieces: calls in the hall, nights at the office, a new scent on his shirts. When she asked whether there was someone else, he asked why she needed to turn every problem into a trial.
Today she would have given anything for a trial. Trials had witnesses. They allowed you to speak.
"You abandoned all four of us," she said.
For the first time he flinched. It was small, no more than the movement of an eyelid, but she knew him well enough to see it. Then he pushed the papers closer.
"Sign, Lily. Please."
She signed because her ankles were swelling in the shoes she had insisted on wearing, because Samuel said the papers were only a proposed settlement, because her doctor had asked her to avoid stress, and because she wanted to leave that room before she begged Cole to love her.
A tear fell beside her name, darkening the paper. She hated that the two men saw it.
At the elevator Cole took a call. He covered the receiver and said, "The car will take you wherever you need."
"Home," she said.
His gaze lifted sharply. "Not the penthouse. Just for tonight."
She studied him. "Why?"
"Work being done. Plumbing."
"In my apartment?"
Aunt June had transferred the penthouse into Lily's name before Lily married Cole, keeping her beloved workroom there until she died six weeks ago. Not a Rinaldi property. Never one of Cole's gifts. June had bought the place when the building was much less fashionable and stayed while the city changed around her.
"It's complicated," Cole said.
The elevator doors opened. His phone was already at his ear.
Lily rode down thirty-eight floors with one hand against her stomach. She was almost at the lobby when she felt the first baby turn, a slow, stubborn roll. She pressed her palm against the place.
"I'm here," she whispered.
Outside, reporters stood beneath umbrellas by the revolving door. Someone had told them. Of course someone had told them. She should have expected it from a family whose arguments sometimes appeared in financial newspapers before the people involved had finished having them.
"Mrs. Rinaldi, is Cole marrying Solen Voss?"
"Is it true she moved into the penthouse?"
"Did you know he gave her the nursery?"
At first the questions became one enormous sound. Rain blew sideways through the awning. Flashbulbs turned the wet pavement into broken pieces of light.
"What penthouse?" Lily asked.
A woman with iron-gray hair and a dark blue raincoat stepped forward. Unlike the others, she did not thrust her phone into Lily's face. She held it at a distance Lily could choose to see.
On the screen was a photograph from a society account. Solen Voss, blond and perfectly dressed in cream, stood in Lily's living room holding a glass of champagne. Behind her, against the window, sat the walnut rocking chair Aunt June had restored the winter before she died.
A pale blanket hung over it. Lily's pale blanket, embroidered with three little yellow ducks.
The caption said: *A fresh chapter, high above Manhattan.*
Lily thought of the cupboard where she kept her children's first clothes, each set folded inside a separate cotton bag. She had sewn their initials by hand even though she hadn't chosen their names.
"Who are you?" she asked the woman in the raincoat.
"Nora Pike. I write for the Ledger. I haven't published that photograph. Someone sent it to every entertainment desk in town this morning."
"Cole said there was a plumbing problem."
Nora's mouth tightened. "I think you need to get out of this rain."
Someone called for a second photo. Lily stepped back, caught the edge of the revolving door, and felt a brief pulling low in her abdomen. She stood still until it passed. Nora did not touch her. She opened her umbrella and moved between Lily and the cameras.
"There's a car waiting," Nora said. "You can decide whether you want my help or not."
Lily did not want a reporter's help. She wanted June alive. She wanted to sit at her kitchen table while June set down tea and asked practical questions in a voice that never made misfortune sound like a performance.
She reached for her phone and called the number of the building's front desk. A stranger answered.
"I'd like to speak to Ruth," Lily said. "Ruth Bell."
"She's no longer employed here, ma'am."
"Since when?"
"Three weeks ago."
Lily stared through the rain. Ruth had worked in the building twenty-one years. Ruth had a key to June's old workroom. Ruth brought oranges from the market every Thursday because she knew Lily forgot to eat fruit when she was restoring books.
"This is Lily Rinaldi. I own unit forty-two."
Silence. Then the man said, almost apologetically, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Rinaldi. We've been instructed not to admit you."
"By my husband?"
"No, ma'am. The instruction was filed in your name."
For a moment the street seemed to tilt, though Lily knew it hadn't. Nora caught the expression on her face and quietly closed her umbrella against the wind.
Lily asked the man to repeat himself. He did. Then he added that the notice had been received twenty-three days earlier, accompanied by an authorization to change the locks.
Twenty-three days earlier, Lily had been in the hospital for an ultrasound, watching three little hearts beat on a screen while Cole sent a text saying he could not make it.
"Ma'am?" the man said.
May you like
Lily held the phone to her ear long after he hung up. She had thought Cole had left her that morning.
But someone had begun taking her home away three weeks before he asked for the divorce.
