Well done, Lauren. She let him dangle for a night about the prospect of losing her, wondering what he’d do without her, and then she springs the idea of marriage on him, making it seem like the idea actually came from him.
So then she had her hooks in him. Simon was on cloud nine. He was fantasizing about it. He was dreading telling Vicky, yes, but otherwise happier than he’d ever been.
Lauren was smart. She wasn’t too obvious about it. She waited until mid-October, just last week, to start talking about the trust money.
And then, these last entries, the end of last week and this week. Vicky’s read on this is right. Simon was agonizing over when to file the divorce petition. Lauren was giving it the old college try, coming on pretty strong at times. “You two aren’t in love and you never were,” Lauren said. “She never loved you, Simon. She needed someone to take care of her. And you did. And now she’s eyeballing that trust money that’s so close she can taste it.”
Well, Lauren wasn’t wrong about that. Vicky can taste that money.
So can I.
But yeah, Lauren gamed this whole thing out. Manipulated Simon every step of the way. Dropping that pregnancy bomb was a thing of beauty. A Hail Mary if all else failed, and all else had failed. Simon’s loyalty to Vicky was too deep, so Lauren pulled out the nuclear option—the one thing Vicky wouldn’t give him.
I could learn to like this Lauren. Checking her out on Facebook, I could definitely learn to like her. She is Grade-A, no question.
But she’s in my way. She may have gotten to Simon before I got to Vicky, but I don’t play fair. That money’s mine, and I’m not letting her beat me to it.
Vicky’s been pacing around, cursing under her breath, sometimes not under her breath, nearly punching a hole in my living-room wall at one point. When she sees me close the notebook, she walks into the kitchen, anxiously nodding her head.
“I’m screwed, right?”
I’m surprisingly calm, staring at the loss of all my hard work, the loss of my retirement money. But panicking isn’t going to help me get that money. I have a competitor, and she appears to be formidable, but this isn’t my first time in competition.
And I’ve never lost.
“He’s not filing until the day before your anniversary,” I say. “November the second. That’s, what, a week from tomorrow?”
Vicky nods, chewing on a nail.
“So the question is: What we do now?.”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,” she says. “I’d like to break his neck.”
“And what if that happened?” I ask.
Vicky blinks, her expression changing.
“You said you care about him,” I say. “How much do you care about him?”
Vicky walks over to the window, looks out over the alley. My guess is she’s spent the last forty-five minutes asking herself that very question.
“If he dies before our tenth anniversary,” she says, “the money stays in the trust. I don’t get a cent. It won’t be marital property.”
Interesting answer. Interesting because she didn’t say, I could never do something like that, I could never hurt Simon. She’s just saying that it wouldn’t work. That means she’s keeping an open mind.
“Lauren’s married,” I say. “Someone named Conrad?”
She flips a hand. “Apparently.”
“How about we tell him about the affair?”
“He probably already knows,” says Vicky, turning to me. “And if he doesn’t, so what? Sounds like their marriage is in the dumper, too.”
I sit down at the table. I’m not coming up with many answers here.
“He’s been different,” she says.
“Simon has?”
She nods. “He’s been more distant the last few days. I didn’t—didn’t think much of it. He gets that way a lot, lost in his thoughts. I didn’t think anything of it.”
I blow out a breath. “What if—What if Simon were injured but not killed?”
“C’mon.”
“What do you mean, ‘c’mon’？ I’m serious.”
Vicky takes a moment with that. “Like, injure him enough that he’s out of commission but not kill him, just to buy us a week until November third comes and goes?”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Exactly? And how exactly does that happen? Hit him with a car hard enough to hospitalize him but not enough to kill him? Shoot him but miss all vital organs? Hit him over the head hard enough to put him into a coma but not enough to end all brain activity?”