Meanwhile, my own people were losing faith. My mom drove up from Lexington and told me I had to fight this. My best friend Shannon called every night saying the same thing—get a lawyer, get a shark.
So I hired Lyra Schmidt—a German American woman in her mid-fifties with silver-streaked hair and the kind of calm, precise energy that made you feel like everything might be okay. She’d handled estate disputes for twenty years. She reviewed Carla’s filings in forty minutes and told me the loan had no partnership agreement, no formal terms, nothing giving Carla equity. The will was clean.
“We fight, we win, and Carla goes home with nothing but a lesson in contract law,” Lyra said.
I told her I needed a few days to think.
That night, after Tessa was asleep, I drove to Joel’s office. The building was dark except for exit signs glowing green in the stairwell. I unlocked his private office with the spare key I’d always kept on my keychain and sat at his desk. It still smelled like him—coffee and that sandalwood aftershave he’d used since college.
The office was exactly as he’d left it. His calendar was still open to March, appointments he’d never keep written in blue ink. A framed photo of Tessa on the credenza—the one from her third birthday where she’s wearing a paper crown and grinning with frosting on her nose. A sticky note on his monitor that said Call M re: dinner Sat in his handwriting. He never made that call.
I sat there for a while, just breathing in the last traces of the man I married. The leather chair still held the impression of his weight. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear him on the phone—that steady, confident voice he used with clients, the one that made frightened people believe things might work out.
Then I opened the bottom drawer—the deep one where he kept files he didn’t want anyone touching. Behind a stack of old case folders, I found a sealed manila envelope. My name was written on the front in Joel’s handwriting—not Miriam Fredel, just Miriam, with a small heart drawn next to it like we were still passing notes in high school.
I opened it. I read what was inside. And I sat in that dark office for almost an hour without moving, without crying.
For the first time since March 6th, my mind was completely clear.
