Page 1 of The Hampton Beach Café
ONE
The black swimsuit Frances wore was still dripping wet as she stood at the kitchen counter, and she was vaguely aware that a small puddle of water had formed at her feet. The towel she had intended to wrap around herself hung limply from her left hand. On her right, she held the unfolded letter that now bore spreading dark patches from where she grasped it between her fingers.
She had no idea where the envelope had gone, and honestly, she didn’t care.
Divorce.
Divorce was bad enough, but divorce through a letter delivered by a deeply uninterested teenage bicycle courier? That was worse. The fact that said bicycle courier had let themselves into the yard while she was swimming her morning laps and she had shrieked when she saw the poor kid? A lot worse.
A ragged breath in jolted her back to her senses, and she dropped the letter. She hadn’t so much been holding her breath as simply not breathing at all. Her world had stopped. The courier, she remembered now, had mentioned something about being too cheap to tip before they had taken off in a huff. She needed to stay calm, not stand around, barely breathing like an idiot.
She should call Malcolm. This must be a mistake. The postman stopped at the wrong house. She grabbed her phone and opened her favorites. Malcolm’s number was at the top. She pressed it.
Surely there were other women in California called Frances Crawford…She glanced down at the letter. Her name and address were printed clearly at the top.
“Other Frances Crawfords who also live at 173 Bermuda Crest?” she said aloud, trying to ignore the nagging sense of dread.
The first trill of the call made her jump, and creeping nausea she had kept at bay settled into her stomach. It wasn’t the normal sound of a call being connected, but the tri-tone beeps of a disconnected number.
This was not happening, it could not be happening, and it was definitely not happening.
The letter stared up at her. It certainly seemed to be happening.
“Dear Mrs. Frances Crawford…”
She read the letter four more times as she sank into the leather armchair that Malcolm had insisted on installing in their casual dining room, not really caring that she was, in fact, still wet from the pool or that the chlorine would hardly be beneficial to the leather.
The phone number at the top of the letter indicated that the lawyer was local. She dialed them instead.
Their number was not disconnected.
***
“Honestly, the documents are a little wet,” she explained several hours later.
On the fourth read-through, she had registered that the letter asked her to refer to the pre-nuptial agreement they had included in the envelope before signing her papers and returning them as soon as possible.
This time it was her own lawyers at the end of her phone call––neither the receptionist nor the lawyer she spoke to would tell her any more than what was in the letter. It was, of course, pretty normal for one party’s lawyer not to communicate with the other party, but that was other people! Not her. Her life wasn’t imploding, and her husband was most definitely not unreachable.
“Frances, I can’t give you advice on documents I haven’t seen…” her lawyer said, “…but when we reviewed your affairs three years ago, your prenup was filed with us. I’m assuming it hasn’t been rewritten in that time?”
“Of course not! I barely even remember signing the ridiculous thing! It was years ago, decades!”
The word decades was strangled like it was being forced out of her. It really had been decades. She had just turned eighteen when she and Malcolm got married, and they had only waited until then so they wouldn’t have to get their parents to sign off on the wedding. Well, his parents, really––her mom would have done anything to make her daughter happy.
“Twenty-three years ago, I signed what felt like a thousand pieces of paper––all of which I barely read because all I cared about was marrying the boy I loved,” Frances said in a low voice, “and you’re telling me that one of those pieces of paper was a contract saying that no matter what happens or whose fault it was if we divorced, I get nothing?”
There was a moment of silence as Frances’s lawyer prepared her response.
“Unless you’re planning on claiming that they tricked you into signing it, or he pressured you, then…yes.”
Frances leaned back into the deck chair and sighed.
“I was eighteen years, one week, and three days old,” she said quietly. “What the hell did I know?”
“Frances, don’t sign the papers you have with you now,” her lawyer said. “I need to look them over properly––and talk with the other firm. Please don’t get your hopes up, though. From memory, the agreement is pretty iron-clad. You leave the marriage with what you came into it with––your savings, your retirement fund, and a 1987 Toyota Corolla.”
The laugh that bubbled up out of her mouth sounded more manic than she intended, and she quickly covered her mouth with her hand.
