PART 1 — MAY I SHOW YOU SOMETHING
The day Lowell filed, he wore the grey suit he wore to our wedding.
He smiled at me across that courtroom the way a man smiles when he has already finished something.
He wanted the house, the savings and full custody of Rafferty, who is eight. According to the petition I was unstable, emotionally volatile, financially reckless and unfit. According to his lawyer I had abandoned my responsibilities as a wife and a mother.
I sat there in a navy dress with my hands in my lap and listened to strangers describe a woman I have never met.
Winnie sat behind him in pearls and a cream blazer with a tissue she did not use.
“He only wants peace,” she said, to the row in front of her, at a volume she had chosen.
Peace.
Peace was Lowell emptying the joint account eleven days before he filed. Peace was both cards cancelled on a Tuesday while I was at a supermarket till. Peace was his mother telling my son that Mummy is confused, sweetheart, and Daddy knows what’s best.
And beside him sat Sunniva Kroll, his office manager, in the role of concerned family friend, wearing a bracelet I found in the glove compartment of his car in the February.
Judge Theodora Quill turned a page.
“Mrs. Fenner. Your attorney isn’t present.”
“I’m representing myself today, Your Honour.”
Lowell almost laughed. His lawyer actually did.
“Very well.”
They thought I had come on my own because there was nobody. They thought I was quiet because I was finished.
They did not know that before Rafferty was born I did ten years as a forensic accountant, and that I had already traced four shell invoices and eleven consulting payments out of Lowell’s company, and that all of it was in an indexed folder on the table in front of me.
But numbers were not going to be enough, and I knew that before I sat down.
Because the thing Lowell had done that mattered was not the money.
He had taught my son to be afraid of telling the truth.
When Rafferty came in with the child advocate, his cardigan was done up on the wrong buttons and he had his bear under one arm.
He looked at me first. Then at his father.
And Lowell’s smile tightened, and he mouthed something at him. I could not hear it. I have since been told by two people what it was.
Remember what we practised.
My son’s fingers went tight round that bear.
And then he said, to Judge Quill, in a very small voice:
“Please can I show you something my mum doesn’t know about?”
And for the first time that morning, my husband’s face moved.
PART 2 — THE BIRTHDAY
Four months earlier we did Rafferty’s eighth at the house. About twenty-five people.
We were still living together then, in the way people do when it is over and neither has said so.
I had got him a tablet. A proper one for children, with the controls locked down, and I had spent an evening setting it up.
The thing I put on it, that mattered, was a little recorded-message function. He could record a message to me and send it, and he could record one to his dad.
I did that because Lowell had already started having him three nights a week at his flat by then, and because an eight-year-old on the phone says nothing and an eight-year-old with a camera says everything.
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