A Good Marriage(38)

The three journals still safely under the tissues, I headed quickly back toward the steps to the floor above. Straight ahead at the top was a small guest room; the bed was adorned with more bright decorative pillows than a bed in a boutique hotel. It was a chic museum of a room that looked like it had never been used. I checked the closet for the golf clubs, but it was empty except for more pillows and a couple of extra blankets.

At the other end of the hall was what looked to be Zach’s office. There was a lot of dark wood and leather and more books lining the shelves—Sailing Alone Around the World, The Oxford Companion to Wine, A History of the Modern Middle East. There were testosterone-fueled biographies, too: Steve Jobs, John F. Kennedy, J. P. Morgan. Maybe the books were a front—who Zach wanted to be—or maybe Zach was a wine-drinking sailor now? Eleven years was eleven years.

I remembered then how that conversation in Mahoney’s about our ambitions had ended back in law school.

“Well, I admit it: money drives me,” Zach had said after my impassioned defense of my future in public interest. “And not because I care about buying things. I care about what the money says about me.”

“Okay, that’s gross,” had been my honest response. “And what do you think money says exactly?”

“That I’m better than them.”

“Them who?”

Zach had been quiet then for a moment, considering. “Them everyone.” He’d looked up at me. “Everyone except you.”

And then he’d started to laugh. At himself, I’d thought at the time. Standing there now in his swanky, contrived home office, I wondered if he’d simply been telling the truth.

I headed over to Zach’s desk, but paused momentarily before opening the first drawer. What if I stumbled on something I’d rather not know? Something Zach hadn’t been worried about, because I was going there only to look in Amanda’s desk. Well, that was what attorney-client privilege was for. And while there were questions you didn’t ask a maybe-guilty client, it was better to be prepared for every last bad fact the prosecution might already know about.

I needn’t have worried: the contents of Zach’s desk were neat, orderly, and totally unexceptional. Some desk supplies and some personal files related to Case, which seemed to undermine the whole I-knew-nothing-about-my-kid speech Zach had given me. The other drawers were much the same. There was nothing about Zach’s new company either. A home office for somebody who apparently never worked from home.

Zach’s computer was on, but password-protected, the lock screen a lovely photo of Zach, Amanda, and Case as a baby. The truth was more imperfect, sure. Zach had already admitted as much. But idyllic images like that wouldn’t hurt with a jury.

As I moved away from the desk, my stocking feet caught on something sharp.

“Ouch!” I hissed, bending down to fish it out of the thick carpet.

It was a small white strip with some diagonal blue lines and arrows on one side above a thicker black line. It looked vaguely similar to the ovulation strips I’d used in those brief, foolish weeks I’d thought Sam was doing well enough that we could start trying to conceive.

An ovulation strip was potentially damaging evidence. Being pregnant, trying to have a baby, trying to end a pregnancy—these things could bring out the worst in a marriage. I could already imagine the scene a prosecutor might sketch: Amanda arrives home from the party later than Zach, angry that he left without her, and announces that she wants to get pregnant. Zach doesn’t want another kid. They argue. Things get out of hand.

I looked down again at the little test strip. The bright side of being on the defense? It wasn’t my obligation anymore to disclose facts helpful to the other side. I stuck the strip in a tissue and shoved it in my pocket. I’d use it if—and only if—it somehow became helpful to us.

I paused on my way out of the office at the closet door. It wouldn’t open. I tugged harder, but it wouldn’t give. For a moment, I wondered if it might be locked, but then, finally, after one last pull, it gave way. There at the back of the dark closet was the bag of Zach’s silver golf clubs, gleaming in the half-dark.

I left Millie waiting for her crime scene experts as well as, hopefully, a tech from the actual NYPD, and headed back to Young & Crane to draft a very persuasive bail appeal. I also needed to get someone from the managing clerk’s office down to Philadelphia first thing in the morning to resolve Zach’s warrant. I wasn’t showing up at a hearing with that outstanding. If staying on Paul’s good side meant I had to stay on as Zach’s attorney, I was at least going to do a respectable job.

On the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I started paging through Amanda’s journals, still under the tissues, though more halfheartedly now that Millie had pointed out we’d be unlikely to be fingerprinting them. I read first from the more recent one, from when Case was a young baby.

October 2010

He sat up today! And, oh my goodness, was he proud of himself. Huge grin! I got some video of it. Fingers crossed that it came out. I’ll ask Zach tonight if he wants to see. Or maybe I’ll just save it for the weekend. By then who knows what else Case will have done!

I can’t believe I thought that I couldn’t do this. That, after everything, I might be too clumsy or even cruel. As it turned out, loving Case has made all the difference.



Most notable was what I didn’t find in any of Amanda’s “new parent” entries. There was not a single complaint—not about the sleeplessness or the crying or the being overwhelmed. Everyone I knew who’d had a baby—which was most people by now—complained about such things. It was human nature. But Amanda seemed inhumanly grateful. She didn’t gripe about Zach either. He worked a lot, that was obvious from her entries, but she was so genuinely understanding. In keeping with Zach’s description, their marriage seemed distant, but not actually unhappy.