My Business Partner Emptied Our Company Account the Week My Husband Died. She Forgot I Signed the Lease.

Part 4: The Coffee Shop

We met at Fox in the Snow again.

I picked it. Rachel didn’t understand why until she walked in and saw me at the same corner table she had picked six months earlier, with a folder in front of me, my hands folded on top of it.

She stopped in the doorway.

I watched her put it together. It took her about four seconds. Her face did a thing I had never seen it do before, a sort of collapse and rebuild, like a building imploding and being replaced by a different building.

She came to the table anyway. She sat down. She did not take off her coat.

“Claire.”

“Rachel.”

I slid the folder across.

She didn’t open it.

“What is this.”

“It’s a dissolution filing. And a demand letter. And an accounting of what you owe me. And a copy of the six wires you sent yourself in November while my husband was dying, and the four wires you sent yourself after that, and the BizBuySell listing you put up in May.”

She stared at the folder.

“There’s also a second envelope in there,” I said. “It’s addressed to the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office. It’s not filed. It’s a courtesy copy so you can see what it says.”

She opened the folder then. She read for a long time. I let her.

The coffee shop was full of people on laptops. Nobody was looking at us. A woman two tables over was laughing at something on her phone.

Rachel looked up.

“Claire. I can explain.”

“I know you can. You explain things beautifully. You’ve been explaining things beautifully for six years. That’s why I stopped listening a while ago.”

“I was going to pay it back.”

“I know.”

“I was. I had a plan. There was a property in Grandview I was trying to close on, and the timing”

“Rachel.”

She stopped.

“I don’t want the explanation. I want you to sign the dissolution. You have seven days. If you sign it, I don’t file the second envelope. If you don’t sign it, I file it on day eight, and then we do this the loud way, and your mom finds out from the *Dispatch.*”

She started to cry. It was, I noticed with a distant kind of interest, a real cry. Not the parking lot FaceTime cry. This one had snot in it.

“Claire. Please. Please. I know what I did. I know. I was, I don’t even know what I was thinking, I was in a hole, and I told myself I was going to make it right, and then Danny, and then everything just, please.”

I looked at her.

I thought about saying a lot of things. I had a whole speech in my head, sitting in my chest like a stone, that I had been rehearsing since November. About Danny. About the plastic cup. About the six cents. About what kind of person does what she did in the week she did it.

I didn’t say any of it.

I said, “Seven days.”

I picked up my coffee. I stood up.

At the door I stopped and I turned around. She was still sitting at the table. She had her hand over her mouth. The folder was open in front of her.

I walked back.

I leaned down. I said, quietly, close to her ear so nobody else could hear, “You never asked how he died. In fourteen months. Not once.”

Then I left.

—

She signed on day five.

Priya handled the closing. I did not see Rachel again. She wired the first installment of what she owed me on a Wednesday in August. She still owes me most of it. She will owe me most of it for a long time. Priya says we’ll get it eventually. I have stopped caring exactly when.

Fernwood Interiors is mine now, fully. I hired a woman named Denise, who used to run operations for a competitor and had been laid off in the spring, to do what Rachel used to do. Denise answers her emails. Denise has been to Cabo exactly zero times since I hired her. I like Denise very much.

The hotel group renewed for another three years. The dental group is opening two new locations and wants us on both. We hit $1.6 million in revenue for the year, up from $1.4. I put half of my draw into a savings account labeled, in my banking app, HOUSE, because I am going to sell the house Danny and I lived in and I am going to buy something smaller, on the other side of town, where the light comes in differently in the mornings.

I have not sold it yet. I keep meaning to.

Last Sunday I went to the storefront to sign for a delivery, because Denise’s kid had a soccer game. I let myself in with my key. The showroom was quiet. Sun coming through the front windows onto the rug samples. Somebody, probably Denise, had put a small vase of grocery store carnations on the reception desk.

I stood there for a minute in the middle of the floor with the delivery slip in my hand.

I thought about Danny sitting at the kitchen island in 2019, reading the guarantor clause out loud, looking at me over the top of the page.

I thought about the black binder.

I thought about Rachel, wherever she was, doing whatever she was doing.

I locked up. I got in my car. I sat in the parking lot for a while before I started the engine.

On the passenger seat, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Priya. *Second installment cleared this morning. On track.*

I didn’t reply right away.

I sat there and I watched a woman across the parking lot try to load a folded stroller into her trunk one-handed, and fail, and laugh at herself, and try again.

I put the car in drive.

I went home.