Page 24 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
Don’t explode,I told myself. He doesn’t have to say you’re right. He’s doing what you asked. Hopefully. Or we’re going to have a fight. Wait and see which it is.
I didn’t find out for another minute, because he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and flipped it open, took out a few bills, and handed them back to Karen. “Go have something to eat,” he told her. “Or go shopping, maybe, until Hope texts you.”
“For what? Tires?” Karen asked as she grabbed her backpack and climbed out. I saw her point. We were parked outside a Firestone store. She poked her head back into the car to announce, “This day has been one big fun time. I’m just saying. Plus, I’m going to get a caffeine addiction, the way you guys keep sending me off to have lattes while you fight.”
“We aren’t fighting,” I said. Well, hopefully not.
“Hope,” Karen said, “you’re totally fighting. Maybe you guys need, like, marriage counseling or something.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said, “except that Hemi is apparently still married.”
All right, so I exploded a teensy bit.
“I’m gone,” Karen said. She slammed the car door and headed down the street, and I sat and took deep breaths and tried to calm down.
“Right,” I finally said. “I want to hear what he says. Please call him back.”
Hemi shot another glance at me, then picked up his phone and punched a button.
“Walter Eagleton,” I heard over the speakers.
“We got cut off,” Hemi said. “Tell me now.”
“You’re still married,” the voice—Walter—said. “The attorney you used seems to have had a bad habit of taking clients’ money without doing any work, then faking the documentation. You weren’t the only one. He left a real mess behind. He’s disbarred now, or I’d advise you to file a complaint.”
“He didn’t file anything? Not even the initial paperwork?” Hemi asked, his voice still perfectly controlled. “The separation?’
“No.”
The word lay in the car like a stone, and after a minute, when Hemi didn’t respond, the voice went on. “I did some poking around, contacted a family law attorney over there, and got some more information. It sounds like it could get complicated.”
“How?” Hemi asked.
“Well, first, there’s getting that divorce through. You’ve got to serve the other party, then get on the docket. The good news is, it’s not New York. A few months, that’s all, as long as we can find her.”
Her. The other party.Hemi’s wife.
Well, I’d felt like we were rushing, hadn’t I? A few months would be fine. Never mind that we already had the date and the place, and that it was a place that mattered to Hemi, and the people who mattered to him, too. Not to mention those hopes and dreams of my own.
No. This is reality, not a fairy tale.It would be fine. Except for, you know, that thing that was keeping me frozen. Another secret. After everything we’d said—one more great big, whopping, destructive secret.
“But maybe that’s just as well,” Walter said, echoing my thought, except not, because he went on to say, “There’s still that prenuptial agreement to work out. You do know, I’m sure, that your fiancée will have to get her own attorney for that, and if he’s any good at all, he’ll be pushing us hard. Working with that tight deadline might have been advantageous there, but that’s out the window anyway, so we may as well focus on the positive. We’ll have plenty of time to play hardball.”
I’d heard the phrase “The hair rose on the back of her neck,” too, but I’d never experienced it before.
“But the main issue,” Walter said, “is that the division of marital property in New Zealand is on an ‘equal sharing’ basis. Which appears to be what I’d think of as ‘community property.’ In other words, you’re looking at a fifty-fifty split of anything either party has acquired during the course of the marriage. And that is very bad news, unless…”
Hemi remained as still as stone, but my head was spinning. Too much information, and, no, it wasn’t the prospect of Hemi having less money that was dominating my thoughts.
“Unless what?” Hemi asked.
“The ‘equal sharing’ rule only applies if you lived together a total of three years, not counting your mandatory two-year separation before the divorce. I have the date of your marriage here, of course, but I don’t know whether you lived together before you got married, or when you separated.”
Hemi, his voice curt and cold, gave Walter two dates—months and years—that he’d somehow pulled from his memory bank, and I found myself able to marvel at that even in the midst of my agitation.
“Hmm,” Walter said. “I make that not quite three years. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Hemi said.
