“Mr. Marlo, my mother had my old phone that June. I never received those voicemails. The signature on the intake form would have been my sister Caroline’s, who was 24 that summer and unemployed.”
His eyes closed for one second.
“I see.”
I looked at the small painting on the wall behind his desk. It was abstract in pallets of bone and rust and a deep green I had used in my undergraduate portfolio.
“That painting.”
“Yes, that’s from my portfolio.”
“Yes. I purchased the original from an auction in 2019. I knew the work. I wanted it nearby.”
I did not cry until I was back in the elevator. I cried in the cab on the way to LaGuardia. I cried in the gate area at the airport.
I called my father from the gate. I had not spoken to my father in 9 years.
He answered on the second ring.
“Lauren.”
“Dad.”
He started to cry before I did.
“I’ll be there. Whatever you need, whenever.”
I waited three more days before I called Aaron. I needed the binder in my hands.
On the 15th of December, on a Monday night, I asked Aaron to come over after work. He arrived at 6:12. It was raining.
He took off his coat and looked at the binder open on my coffee table and did not say anything.
I said, “I need you to listen until I am done. Then I will let you ask anything.”
He sat down.
I started where I needed to start.
June of 2017. A train I never boarded. An envelope on a bed. A sister who flew to New York in a name that was not hers. A creative director who had carried a binder for nine years.
I talked for 14 minutes.
He did not interrupt once.
I had counted the time on the kitchen clock in advance because I had been afraid of what would happen in his face.
The face did not change.
He looked at the photographs of the recision letter side by side with the offer. He looked at the badge image of Caroline. He looked at the print out of the termination letter signed in a hand that was not mine.
When I stopped talking, he said one sentence.
“You didn’t have a breakdown.”
“No.”
“I knew something wasn’t right.”
He pulled out his phone. He opened a notes app. He turned it around toward me.
There was a file titled Lauren Thanksgiving.
I scrolled through it.
He had taken four notes during the meal at his parents house on the 25th of November. Each note was a sentence my mother or Caroline had said about my breakdown that did not match the sentence one of them had said earlier in the same conversation.
He [snorts] had been listening for 4 hours and writing in his lap.
“How long have you been keeping that?”
“Since Thanksgiving.”
“You didn’t say anything to me.”
“You were doing your work. I was doing mine.”
He took my hand. He held it for a long time.
“What do you want, Lauren?”
I told him I did not want to file a lawsuit. I did not want the police. The statute had run on every piece of it.
I wanted the silence to stop.
I wanted my mother and my sister to be in a room with the people they cared about most when the silence stopped.
I wanted my father back.
I wanted a wedding that was actually mine.
Aaron listened.
Then he said, “If we do this in public, we do it where they will not be able to come back from it.”
“Yes.”
“Friday night, April 24th, the hermitage.”
“Yes.”
He took his time. He walked into my kitchen. He came back with a cup of tea. He set it down.
“When does Theodore fly down for the rehearsal?”
“Friday at 6:00.”
“What time is the flight?”
He did not ask if I was sure. He asked what time.
That was the moment I knew exactly who I was about to marry.
We spent the next four months getting ready.
Quietly, I gave Aaron the password to the Google doc I had been keeping since September. He started his own beneath mine.
He spoke to his father, Charles Castellon, about getting Brendan Voss invited to the rehearsal under the guise of a friendly business introduction.
Brendan was the younger cousin of Henrik Voss, who had co-ounded Marlo and Voss with Theodore in 1998. Brendan had been in the room when the firm had decided to terminate Lauren Hartwell for plagiarism in October of 2017.
Aaron’s father agreed without asking why.
Aaron’s father had liked me on site. So had his mother, Helen. So had his uncle, Walter.