by Zoe Kane
They walked in slightly awkward silence down the hall, left then right as instructed, and found themselves suddenly in front of a conference room, where a young man who must have been Charles Miller Jr. shook their hands one by one.
“Ms. Walter. Mr. Rey. I’m Charlie Miller. Please come in.”
He was so clearly waiting for both of them that Annie simply stared at him blankly in utter bafflement, as the other man looked up with a start and turned to Annie, eyes wide.
“Walter?” he said, as though the name had startled the life out of him. Charlie looked uncomfortable. “Annabel Walter?”
“Obviously,” she retorted, her confusion growing with every passing moment. “What is –“
“Why don’t you come in, please,” Charlie said again, holding the conference room door open and ushering them out of the hallway where people were beginning to stare. Annie – at a loss for how else to proceed – followed him inside.
The man from the lobby could not stop staring at her as she seated herself at the large, expensive-looking walnut table, removed her jacket and smoothed her skirt. His searching gaze made her uncomfortable and she couldn’t quite bring herself to make eye contact, but she sized him up out of the corner of her eye as she pulled the stack of files she’d brought out of her purse. He was very tall, and handsome in a scruffy, Brooklyn kind of way, and his clothes were simple but expensive – dark jeans, impossibly soft gray sweater, black leather jacket. The same wave of pointless rage that had made her want to strangle the receptionist came over her again; for Christ’s sake, you at least put on a goddamned tie for your lawyer, she thought irritably.
And that was when she looked up, and their eyes met, and she got her first good look at his face. And then it clicked.
She had been so baffled at the idea that someone else was here for the same meeting she was that she hadn’t heard what Charlie Miller had actually said. She hadn’t registered his name.
“Jesus,” she exclaimed involuntarily. “Are you Marcus Rey?”
They both looked at her in surprise, though for very different reasons.
“Obviously,” said Marcus, imitating her sarcastic tone from earlier, which made her blood boil.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“What do you mean, what is he doing here?” asked Charlie, confounded. “Ms. Walter, all of this was clearly laid out in the new will.”
“What new will?” Marcus and Annie repeated, temporarily unified in their confusion. Charlie went pale and looked from one to the other of them, unsure how to proceed.
“I’m sorry, is this not about the motorcycle?” Marcus asked him. Annie hadn’t thought she could get any angrier, but life is always full of surprises.
“The motorcycle?” she snapped. “What the hell does Danny’s motorcycle have to do with the kids?”
“What do the kids have to do with Danny’s motorcycle?”
“Okay, I’m going to go get my dad – I mean, I’m going to go get Mr. Miller Senior for you,” said the young man a little desperately, and fled the room as fast as he could, leaving the two of them alone, glowering at each other from across the table.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here to collect your prize when he’s not even in the ground yet,” Annie hissed.
“To collect my prize?” he fired back, incredulous. “Are you kidding me? Danny Walter is the only family I have left. I didn’t come to Portland to raid his garage for free shit, I came because my brother is dead. But funeral guests don’t usually get called in to meet with the attorney, so I assumed the only logical reason I was here was because of the will.”
“Half-brother,” Annie found herself passive-aggressively correcting him, and was pleased to see his jaw clench with annoyance. It felt good to make somebody mad. “Which I’m sure was your excuse for why you’ve never come out here to visit him once since his kids were born.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me or my life,” he began, and would have said more if Charles Miller Senior hadn’t walked in just then, shaken both their hands and sat down at the head of the table.
“I understand from Charlie that there appear to have been some . . . irregularities in this case,” he said calmly.
“Ms. Walter here was just accusing me of –“
“It’s Doctor Walter, thank you, and –“
“That’s enough,” said Charles Miller, and even though his voice was very mild and very polite, something in it shut them both right up. “Dr. Walter,” he said, turning to her, “I’m sorry but I understood that you had gone through all your sister and brother-in-law’s legal and financial arrangements with them.”
“I did,” she said. “Danny and I did all of it together. I have the will, I have the paperwork on the house, I have the girls’ documentation – medical records, all that.”
“Then how – forgive me, I don’t mean to doubt you – but how is it possible that you don’t know about the arrangement with Mr. Rey?”
“I’m sorry, what arrangement with Mr. Rey?” asked Mr. Rey, and Charles Miller – who had, so far, held out much better than his son had – began to look just the faintest bit panicky.
“You don’t know either?” he asked.
“Know what?” Marcus snapped.
“That you two have shared custody of the children.”
Chapter Six: The Will
The silence that followed these words was like no other silence any of them had ever experienced.
Annie stared at Marcus. Marcus stared at Annie. The air around the conference table was so thick with unasked questions that the confusion felt almost palpable. It was Annie, after a long moment, who finally spoke first.
“Okay,” she said to Miller, very slowly. “Start over. I came here a little under five years ago – just after Lucy was born – and the four of us, you and me and Danny and Grace, we sat here and we went through all the logistics and I witnessed the will.”
“Yes.”
“The will that said that in the event that anything happened to Danny and Grace, I would be appointed sole guardian of the children. And you asked about joint guardianship, just in case it was too much for one person to handle, but we decided it was too much pressure to put on Aunt Vera at her time of life and Michael was still in college then. So it was just me.”
“Yes.”
“I mean, I’m not hallucinating, right? I was here. We did have that exact conversation.”
“Of course,” said Miller, a little impatiently, “and then six months later Danny came back to draft the new one.”
“Danny came back alone?” Annie stared at him.
“Yes, he said he’d discussed it with both of you,” explained Miller, “that the three of you had had another conversation about joint guardianship and that he’d decided caring for three children was too much to ask one person to handle alone, because he didn’t want you to have to quit your job. So we drafted a new version” – he pulled a sheaf of papers out of the file in front of him and handed one copy to Marcus and one to Annie – “wherein joint guardianship of Isaac, Sophia and Lucy would be shared between his brother and Grace’s sister. Obviously neither of us found this scenario likely, with both of them young and in good health, but he felt confident that should the worst occur, this would be the best thing for the children. And also for you.”
“There must have been a mistake,’ she said helplessly. “Or . . . I don’t know. He was playing a joke.”
“Thanks a lot,” retorted Marcus.
“Well, what do you expect?” Annie exploded. “Did you think I would be happy about this? As if this whole situation weren’t already the worst kind of disaster, now I’m being asked to believe that somehow Danny would entrust the care of his children to an alcoholic, womanizing –“
“Whoa there,” Marcus interrupted irritably, “you don’t even know me.”
“Oh, I know all about you,” she said. “I've heard about all the pranks you pulled in college, the all-
night benders, the shoplifting -”
“That was once.”
“Mr. Miller, there’s no way this can be right. Danny would never do this.” She swallowed hard. “Danny would not have made this decision without me. I know he wouldn’t.”
“It appears that he did,” said Miller gently, and something inside of her collapsed. All the fight went out of her suddenly, and she felt nothing but weary exhaustion. “We can go over the details more thoroughly,” he continued, “but the gist of it is that the house belongs to both of you, and all the assets are held in trust for the children, with the exception of a separate account for personal expenses. The account is quite sufficient to provide for the possibility that one of you might wish to quit your job in order to stay home.”
“Sure,” said Marcus. “I don’t mind.”
Annie stared. “What are you talking about?”
“He said the reason Danny wanted there to be two of us was at least partly to make sure you didn’t have to give up your job,” said Marcus reasonably. “That must mean you have a job you don’t want to give up. I don’t hate mine, exactly, the money’s really good and everything, but it’s not like being a Wall Street suit was what I always wanted to be when I grew up. I’m happy to stay home with the kids.”
“You’re agreeing to this?”
“You’re not?” retorted Marcus. “They’re my brother’s children. They’re all the family I’ve got left. And he wanted me to do this. Of course I’m agreeing to it.”
“I was perfectly capable of handling this on my own.”
“Well, Danny didn’t seem to think so.”
Charles Miller cleared his throat. “Dr. Walter, if I may – this is rather, I suppose, a delicate matter, but best to clear it up right away . . . You do understand of course that you would serve as legal co-guardians and there is of course no presumption on anyone’s part that you and Mr. Rey would actually be married. That’s quite unnecessary, I assure you.”
“’Unnecessary’ is certainly one way of putting it,” Marcus muttered under his breath.
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she snapped. “This is my family we’re talking about.”
“Mine too,” he fired back, with a flash of real, cold anger, “which you seem to keep forgetting,” and Annie shut up.
She knew very little about Marcus Rey. She knew he lived in New York, that he had a job in finance and made a lot of money. She knew that he had been the son of Danny’s father by a previous marriage, and that when that wife – like all the others before and after – realized what a dirtbag she’d married and split, taking her child with her, she had taken refuge for a few years living with Marcus’ mother in her apartment. Unified by their shared regret at having married the same asshole, and their relief at having escaped before his violent mood swings turned their focus to the children, Marcus and Danny’s mothers had forged an unusual but powerful friendship, and for five years the boys were raised like brothers.
Then Danny’s mother had gotten a job in Oregon, a good one she couldn’t say no to, and Danny had moved across the country and said goodbye to the only sibling he’d ever known. They stayed in touch all through high school, and reconnected again when Danny moved back to New York for college. But Marcus didn’t like the West Coast, and his job in New York kept him busy; he had been closing some multi-million-dollar land deal for a client and missed the wedding, and he’d never once been out to Oregon to visit Danny since the kids were born, although she knew that Danny had flown out there a handful of times to see him. Grace had met him herself only twice, and Annie never.
He had taken on a kind of mythical status to the Walter siblings, to whom he was something of a private family joke – Danny’s ne’er-do-well half-brother with a million-dollar loft and a juvenile criminal record, who had slept with every leggy size-zero supermodel in the New York metropolitan area. They joked about him among themselves; every time a hotshot Wall Street asshole was in the news for bulldozing a community center to build condos or throwing their two-year-old a $400,000 birthday party, they would text each other the article links with a joke about how Danny’s brother was at it again. After a few years Annie had, quite honestly, forgotten Marcus Rey actually existed except as an excuse for the game. She hadn’t actually remembered, until she looked up and recognized his face sitting across from her, that he was a real person.
“You really didn’t know?” she asked him suddenly, her voice flat and tired. She didn’t sound combative anymore, just puzzled and sad, and it took some of the fight out of him too.
“No,” he said honestly, and it helped a little – although he said it a little bitterly, as though there was still a part of him petty enough that he wished he had known, so he had something to lord over her.
Or maybe he was bitter that his life had been transformed in an instant without anyone asking him what he actually thought about it. Welcome to my world, she thought, and he looked at her suddenly with something like understanding, making her wonder just how easy it was for him to read what she was thinking.
“I’m going to go make you both copies of the new documentation,” said Miller, “and I’ll send out for some lunch, shall I? We’re going to be here for a while longer. In the meantime, I suggest the two of you try getting to know each other.” He rose to leave the room, then turned back in the doorway. “And if either of you feels compelled to start throwing things,” he said politely, “please aim away from the windows.” And then he was gone.
“What are you thinking right now?” Marcus asked, his tone a little cautious but not unfriendly, as Miller shut the door behind him. Annie sighed and rubbed her temples.
“Right now,” she said wearily, “I’m just wondering what in the ever-loving hell my brother is going to say.”
* * *
“Danny did what?” exclaimed Michael into the phone so loudly that Annie had to hold it away from her ear.
“Keep it down,” she hissed. “I went into the hallway, not to the moon. He’ll hear you.”
“I’m sorry, I just – I can’t believe it.”
“I know.”
“I can’t believe he would have made this decision without consulting you.”
“That’s what I said. He had to have known how I’d feel about it.”
“I wonder if Grace knew.”
“She’d have said something, you know she would have. She’d never have kept this to herself.”
“Well, maybe,” conceded Michael gently, “except –“
“Except what?”
“Except that they didn’t think it would ever actually come up,” he reminded her. “The only way this would ever matter would be if they both died before the kids turned eighteen. Nobody would ever have predicted that would happen.” Annie was silent. “Danny loved his brother,” Michael went on. “It probably made him feel good to know that if something happened to him, that at least Marcus wouldn’t lose every tie to family. It doesn’t mean he didn’t think you could handle it on your own.”
“Then why didn’t he tell me?”
“I don’t know,” Michael sighed. “We might never know. But right now there’s nothing you can do about that part.”
“I hate it when you’re right.”
“What’s he like?”
“Awful. I hate him.”
“Why?” asked Michael, his voice infuriatingly reasonable. “What did he do?”
Annie thought for a moment, and was forced to admit that Marcus hadn’t technically done anything that would sound reasonable if she said it out loud. The motorcycle thing was defensible, really. And he’d only snapped at her because she’d snapped first. She knew she didn’t like him, but she also knew that she didn’t have a reason for it that would hold any water with her brother.
“Nothing yet,” she muttered darkly, “but he’s going to.”
“Give me one good example of any time when Danny made a decision even half this significant without thinking it all the way through.”
“Mich
ael –"
“Three kids are a lot of work, Annie,” he pointed out, “and you’re already –“ He stopped short.
“I’m already what?” she said snappishly. “In over my head? I’m already screwing this up?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“I could have handled this alone,” she insisted. “I wanted to do it alone.”
“That’s the problem,” said Michael quietly. “You’re thinking about what’s best for you.” Annie was effectively silenced by this, and Michael would have said more but stopped short at a noise in the background. “Hang on, it’s Aunt Vera,” he said, and Annie could hear the muffled background sounds of Michael setting the phone down and filling her in. All in all, it sounded from the lack of obscenity-laced exclamations that Aunt Vera was taking the news better than anyone else had so far.
“What did she say?” asked Annie when she heard Michael pick the phone back up again.
“She wants to know if he’s cute.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“She says it’s a valid question.”
“She knows I’m not marrying him, right?”
“She knows,” said Michael, with a faint hint of a smile in his voice, “but she says it will be less obnoxious having a stranger underfoot all day long for the rest of our lives if he’s at least pretty to look at.”
“I’m hanging up now,” said Annie, and she did.
Miller still hadn’t returned by the time she came back into the room, and Marcus was on his phone, texting with someone whose name (Annie wasn’t really reading over his shoulder, she just happened to walk behind him on the way back to her seat and her eye just happened to glance down, that’s all, easy mistake, it’s not like she had any reason to care what he was saying about her or anything, because that would be crazy) was apparently “Linnet.” Of course he’s dating a woman named Linnet, Annie thought dismissively. She’s probably half his age. Probably a model. Probably reads at a fourth-grade level. Probably has daddy issues. Ugh.