The House on Habersham Road
Do not react.
My attorney, Daniel Reyes, had said it three times before we walked into the Fulton County Courthouse that morning, and once more in the elevator, and one final time as we stood outside the courtroom doors with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Do not react. Whatever they say, whatever they do, you keep your face still and your eyes forward, and you let me do the rest.
I had nodded each time. But I’m not sure I truly understood what he was asking of me until I was standing on those stone steps in the Atlanta heat, watching Patricia Monroe clap her hands together like a woman applauding at the theater, and realizing that the play she was celebrating was the ruin of my life.
Eight years. That was how long I had been married to Grant Monroe. Eight years, and it had ended in a courtroom that smelled of industrial cleaner and old paper, with a judge who signed the final decree in the flat, tired way of a man who signs a hundred of them a month, for whom the dissolution of the most important thing in my adult life was simply the next item on a docket.
“Well,” Patricia announced, in that carrying voice she used at charity galas and Junior League luncheons, the voice designed to make sure every person within thirty feet could hear her, “at least the Monroe house is safe now.”
And the family laughed.
There were about a dozen of them clustered around the base of the steps. Grant’s sister, Vivian, in her sleeveless linen dress and her enormous sunglasses. Grant’s uncle, a florid man named Douglas who had never once in eight years remembered my name correctly. Assorted cousins and their spouses, all of them dressed as though they were going to a wedding rather than watching a marriage die. They had come, I understood, to witness. To be present at the moment the interloper was finally cast out, so they could tell the story later, at Thanksgiving and at Christmas and at every gathering for the next twenty years. The story of Allison, the nobody Grant had married in a fit of poor judgment, and how the family had at last been rid of her.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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