“I’m sure you’re overreacting.”
“I’m overreacting?” She opens the laptop, the screen dark, and types in a password. The screen comes alive.
It’s a court document. I’m not an attorney, but I’ve seen my share of divorce filings in my day, among the many women I’ve targeted. It says “Petition for Dissolution of Marriage,” the official phrasing. Simon Peter Dobias, petitioner, v. Victoria Lanier Dobias, respondent, in the Circuit Court of Cook County. “Irreconcilable differences have arisen between the parties that have caused the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. Past efforts at reconciliation have failed, and future attempts at reconciliation would be impracticable.”
Fuck me. Simon’s divorcing Vicky.
“Still think I’m overreacting?”
“Hang on, hang on.”
I open the notebook with a green cover. Some kind of a diary, handwritten in pen. With dated entries. The first one, the Fourth of July.
“God, I can’t believe this,” Vicky says. “I am nine days away from our tenth anniversary. Nine days!”
I clear my throat and read from the first entry. “‘The whole reason I came to the club today, my first time in several years, was that I thought you might be at the Fourth of July festivities,’” I read. “‘I’d been thinking about you since that day in May—‘”
“Oh, yeah, apparently he spots her on Michigan Avenue last May, and his pathetic little heart goes pitter-patter. And then he’s rehearsing lines in the mirror for when he sees her again.”
The next entry, July 15. Simon and Lauren are meeting at some café. “‘And then the kiss,’” I read aloud. “‘Had it been up to me to initiate it, I’m not sure it ever would have—‘”
“Had it been up to him.” Vicky snorts. “It never would’ve been up to him. She set her sights on him. She gamed out this whole thing. She’s playing him like a fiddle. She wants his money!”
“You don’t know that,” I say. “Let’s—”
“Um, I think I do know that. Keep reading. Cut to the end if you like, so I don’t have to listen to more descriptions of that little slut spreading her legs for him and talking dirty to him and manipulating the shit out of him. She has him wrapped around her skanky little finger.”
I read the last few entries, sitting down now, the initial shock ending and a growing ache forming in the pit of my stomach.
“She’s pregnant?”
“That’s what she told Simon,” she says. “My ass, she’s pregnant.”
“You think she’s making that—”
“Anyone could say they’re pregnant. You read those last few diary entries? She’s trying to convince him to file for divorce before our tenth anniversary. And he keeps resisting. She keeps pushing, he keeps saying no. Then suddenly she’s pregnant? No way. No fucking way.” She shakes her head, a bitter smile on her face. “She knows that’s what’s splitting up Simon and me. I don’t want kids. He does. So when all else fails, she pulls the pregnant card, that conniving little—”
“Just let me read this, Vicky. Let me read all of it.”
“Read fast,” she says. “I don’t have much time.”
? ? ?
I read fast, trying to digest the highlights. The start of the romance, where Simon’s sounding like a lovestruck puppy. Lauren was his first love, apparently, as Vicky told me before. He’s acting like it on these pages. She broke his heart but came back to Chicago, nearly two decades later. Back to Chicago, to Grace Village, where she feels like she’s in a doomed marriage and so, apparently, does Simon.
I wonder how long it took her to get the goods on Simon’s trust money? Couldn’t have taken long. Says here she used to work at Simon’s dad’s law firm, so she must have known ol’ Teddy was loaded. And no doubt she learned at some point that Teddy was dead. She must have known early on that Simon had inherited a lot of money.
Oh, and then she turned on the charm.
By the sixteenth of August: “Do you want me to be your whore, Professor Dobias?”
The thirtieth of August, even Simon knows he’s hooked, he’s struggling with it: “Are you my addiction, Lauren?”
But still, Simon’s conscience is getting the better of him. Recounting, on the September 12 entry, how Teddy cheated on Simon’s mother, and how Simon was repeating the cycle. “I have become the man I despise.” Looks like he spilled all that to Lauren, and she must have sent him some cryptic text message on that pink phone he bought her, one of those we-have-to-talk messages that left Simon in agony until they met. And then, yep, Lauren is good—she said we won’t be cheating if we’re married!