Daniel noticed.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
“I need the letters,” I replied.
He looked to the examiner, who sealed them carefully in a clear evidence sleeve after photographing them.
When he handed them to me, the plastic crinkled in my hands. So many years of love, flattened and stored in a box.
Outside Crown Ridge, the sky had turned the color of unpolished silver. Clouds hung low over the trees, and a thin mist gathered on the windshield of Daniel’s car.
Madison followed us out but stopped several feet away.
“Iris,” she said.
I turned.
For once, there was no performance in her face.
“I thought I was entering a marriage that was already over,” she said. “That does not excuse me. I know it doesn’t. But I need you to know Jason told me you had family money hidden away, that you were manipulating him, that you had abandoned people before. I repeated things I had no right to believe.”
