I stood up, pulling my coat tight around my shoulders, ready to leave the gray light of the conference room behind.
Ben slumped in his chair, his fake weakness completely gone as his lawyers whisper to him.
Gary took off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie, using slow, deliberate circles.
On his desk, the blue-backed annulment papers lay open beside a yellow legal pad covered in his slow, heavy handwriting.
Martha sat next to me on the leather sofa, her fingers twitching against her handbag.
“Sign here, Clara,” Gary said, pointing with his gold pen to the bottom of the third page.
I cleared my throat before speaking. “Is this the document that ends it?”
“It is,” Gary said, his voice slow and steady. “An annulment on the grounds of fraud. The state prosecutor is already reviewing the hospital records we submitted yesterday.”
“The eighty-five thousand dollars is entirely back in your account,” Martha said, checking her wristwatch for the second time in five minutes.
I picked up the black felt-tip pen from the desk.
The plastic barrel felt light and cheap compared to my father’s old brass signet ring, which was currently sitting in the small drawer of my jewelry chest at home.
“Where was the money going, Gary?” I asked.
“An offshore account in San Jose, Costa Rica,” Gary said, placing his glasses back on his nose. “He had established it under the name of Benjamin Cole, using a post office box in Columbus as his secondary address.”
I held the pen over the signature line, watching my hand.
“He had the airline ticket printed and ready,” Gary said. “He was planning to leave the country forty-eight hours after the probate court released the funds on November fifteenth.”
“The limited power of attorney is what saved us,” Martha said, leaning forward to tap her finger on the desk. “If you had not given Gary investigative access last week, the bank would have processed his forged signature without a second thought.”
I pressed the tip of the pen to the paper and signed my name.
The ink was dark, drying quickly under the fluorescent lights of the office.
“That makes it official,” Gary said, sliding the document toward him. “The marriage is legally considered to have never existed.”
“And the house?” I asked.
“The creditors have dropped their claim against your property,” Gary said. “Once the court recognized the marriage was fraudulent from its inception, they had no legal ground to attach Ben’s construction debts to your brick ranch.”
He slid the papers into a thick green folder and closed it.
“So it is over,” I said.
“The civil side is,” Gary said, looking up at me. “But the state prosecutor called this morning about Dr. Paulson.”
“What will happen to him?” I asked.
“The medical board suspended his license three hours ago,” Gary said. “They are looking into his private accounts to see how much Ben promised to pay him once the Costa Rican transfer went through.”
I stood up and smoothed my skirt, the quiet of the office suddenly feeling very large.
The linoleum corridor of St. Jude Hospital smelled of the same pine-scented wax as it had six weeks ago.
