Look Closer

“Anyone could say they’re pregnant. You read those last few diary entries? She’s trying to convince him to file for divorce before our tenth anniversary. And he keeps resisting. She keeps pushing, he keeps saying no. Then suddenly she’s pregnant? No way. No fucking way.” She shakes her head, a bitter smile on her face. “She knows that’s what’s splitting up Simon and me. I don’t want kids. He does. So when all else fails, she pulls the pregnant card, that conniving little—”

“Just let me read this, Vicky. Let me read all of it.”

“Read fast,” she says. “I don’t have much time.”

—

I read fast, trying to digest the highlights. The start of the romance, where Simon’s sounding like a lovestruck puppy. Lauren was his first love, apparently, as Vicky told me before. He’s acting like it on these pages. She broke his heart but came back to Chicago, nearly two decades later. Back to Chicago, to Grace Village, where she feels like she’s in a doomed marriage and so, apparently, does Simon.

I wonder how long it took her to get the goods on Simon’s trust money? Couldn’t have taken long. Says here she used to work at Simon’s dad’s law firm, so she must have known ol’ Teddy was loaded. And no doubt she learned at some point that Teddy was dead. She must have known early on that Simon had inherited a lot of money.

Oh, and then she turned on the charm.

By the sixteenth of August: “Do you want me to be your whore, Professor Dobias?”

The thirtieth of August, even Simon knows he’s hooked, he’s struggling with it: “Are you my addiction, Lauren?”

But still, Simon’s conscience is getting the better of him. Recounting, in the September 12 entry, how Teddy cheated on Simon’s mother, and how Simon was repeating the cycle. “I have become the man I despise.” Looks like he spilled all that to Lauren, and she must have sent him some cryptic text message on that pink phone he bought her, one of those we-have-to-talk messages that left Simon in agony until they met. And then, yep, Lauren is good—she said we won’t be cheating if we’re married!

Well done, Lauren. She let him dangle for a night about the prospect of losing her, wondering what he’d do without her, and then she springs the idea of marriage on him, making it seem like the idea actually came from him.

So then she had her hooks in him. Simon was on cloud nine. He was fantasizing about it. He was dreading telling Vicky, yes, but otherwise happier than he’d ever been.

Lauren was smart. She wasn’t too obvious about it. She waited until mid-October, just last week, to start talking about the trust money.

And then, these last entries, the end of last week and this week. Vicky’s read on this is right. Simon was agonizing over when to file the divorce petition. Lauren was giving it the old college try, coming on pretty strong at times. “You two aren’t in love and you never were,” Lauren said. “She never loved you, Simon. She needed someone to take care of her. And you did. And now she’s eyeballing that trust money that’s so close she can taste it.”

Well, Lauren wasn’t wrong about that. Vicky can taste that money.

So can I.

But yeah, Lauren gamed this whole thing out. Manipulated Simon every step of the way. Dropping that pregnancy bomb was a thing of beauty. A Hail Mary if all else failed, and all else had failed. Simon’s loyalty to Vicky was too deep, so Lauren pulled out the nuclear option—the one thing Vicky wouldn’t give him.

I could learn to like this Lauren. Checking her out on Facebook, I could definitely learn to like her. She is Grade A, no question.

But she’s in my way. She may have gotten to Simon before I got to Vicky, but I don’t play fair. That money’s mine, and I’m not letting her beat me to it.

Vicky’s been pacing around, cursing under her breath, sometimes not under her breath, nearly punching a hole in my living-room wall at one point. When she sees me close the notebook, she walks into the kitchen, anxiously nodding her head.

“I’m screwed, right?”

I’m surprisingly calm, staring at the loss of all my hard work, the loss of my retirement money. But panicking isn’t going to help me get that money. I have a competitor, and she appears to be formidable, but this isn’t my first time in competition.

And I’ve never lost.

“He’s not filing until the day before your anniversary,” I say. “November the second. That’s, what, a week from tomorrow?”

Vicky nods, chewing on a nail.

“So the question is: What we do now?”

“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,” she says. “I’d like to break his neck.”

“And what if that happened?” I ask.

Vicky blinks, her expression changing.

“You said you care about him,” I say. “How much do you care about him?”

Vicky walks to the window, looks out over the alley. My guess is she’s spent the last forty-five minutes asking herself that very question.

“If he dies before our tenth anniversary,” she says, “the money stays in the trust. I don’t get a cent. It won’t be marital property.”