I would like to have met her. She sounds like she was handling it.
PART 4
Harriet Nunn practices out of two rooms above a bakery on Corliss Street and has been doing this for thirty-one years.
She told me three things at the first meeting, and I wrote all three down.
One: do not confront him. Not once, not about anything.
Two: everything in that apartment that has my name on it, photograph, do not remove.
Three — and she said this last and slowly — a person who has forged a signature once has generally forged it more than once, and I should stop thinking of the hundred and eighty thousand as the number.
It was not the number.
Otto Brandt died six years ago and his money was substantial and it was gone by the second year, because Pia’s protocol is out of network, and because there is an infusion she has been on for eleven months that costs a little over twenty-two thousand dollars a month, and because the private room at Bellhaven is nine hundred a night.
Between the equity line, a personal loan, two credit accounts in my name that I have never held a card for, and eleven withdrawals from an investment account my mother left me, the total is a little over four hundred and ten thousand dollars.
The last withdrawal is dated two days after my accident.
Two days. I was in a bed on the third floor with a dressing on my eyebrow and my husband was signing my name in an office across town.
And then Harriet found the other thing, which was not money.
Desmond had called a firm in Alderport on the Wednesday — the day after the crash, the day after I woke up and said who are you — and asked for a consultation regarding temporary guardianship of an adult family member following a traumatic brain injury.
He used the phrase cognitive impairment. It is in their intake note. Harriet has a copy.
He had not filed anything. He may never have filed anything. I have gone around and around on whether he actually would have.
Harriet has a view. She has watched this for thirty-one years and she says that the call is the fact, and that whether he filed is a question about his nerve rather than about his intention.
She said: people do not call that number to find out what their options are. They call it to find out how hard it is.
I asked her what the honest answer to that question is, in this state, for a spouse with a documented brain injury and a treating physician who has written the words post-concussive cognitive impairment in a chart.
She said: not very.
But it took him under forty-eight hours to convert my worst joke into a legal strategy, and I know what I know about the man I was married to, and I have stopped arguing with myself about it.
Now Pia.
I have to be careful here because there is a version of this where she is a villain and that version is a lie.
Pia Brandt did not know I existed.
She believed she had been married to Desmond for six years. She had a ring. She had a story about a small ceremony at her father’s house that she could tell you in detail, and she could tell it in detail because he had told it to her.
There is no marriage. I checked. There is no license anywhere in this state or the two adjoining it.
He never married her. He simply told her they were married, and she was thirty-eight and dying and she believed the only person who came every day.
I found that out in September, in that corner room, when he was downstairs.
I did not tell her. I want that on the record, because Harriet advised me to and I did not do it.
She worked it out herself. She was not a stupid woman; she had been a structural engineer before she got sick.
She asked me one question. She said: he calls you Sylvie in the same voice.
And I said yes.
And she closed her eyes and did not open them for a while.
Then she asked me how long we had been married, and I told her three years, and she did the arithmetic out loud — because she had been an engineer and that is what engineers do with a bad number, they say it in the room — and she worked out that he had been telling her about the small ceremony at her father’s house during the same autumn he was choosing a frame for our wedding photograph.
She said: I want you to know I would not have let him.
