Daniel looked at the two lawyers and understood immediately that the flowers were not going to matter.
“Claire,” he started.
“Sit down,” Martin said, not unkindly.
They sat. The papers were laid on the table between us — organized, tabbed, precise. Three years of patience distilled into documents.
Divorce. Custody. Financial charges. Evidence.
Daniel stared at the stack for a long moment. Then he looked at me, and I saw something in his face that I had not expected: not anger, not denial, but a kind of collapsing. The recognition that a story he had told himself — about who he was, about what he had built, about how things were going to go — had just encountered reality and was not surviving the collision.
“We can talk about this,” he said. “There are things you don’t understand about what happened with the money, there were reasons, if you’d just—”
“The documents speak for themselves,” Martin said.
