"His friend James seems to think marriage automatically divides it," I said.
"People sometimes confuse what they want with what the law provides," she replied. "Let's not help him by doing the same. We'll make a careful accounting and let evidence do its work."
I liked her immediately. She spoke with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where certainty ended. I told her about the cottage because hiding it from my own lawyer would have been foolish, and she asked questions until she understood how the transaction had been funded. There was no suggestion that I should conceal property from disclosures, and that mattered to me. I didn't want to keep something by cheating. I wanted to protect what legitimately belonged to me and make sure Clare received what legitimately belonged to her.
Dana asked whether I expected Clare to cooperate. I told her Clare wanted everything resolved as quickly as possible, and she stopped writing. "Quickly how?" she asked. I repeated what Clare had said about splitting everything and moving on, and Dana leaned back in her chair.
She had seen rushed settlements before, she explained, especially when a new partner believed money would arrive at the end of the paperwork. Sometimes urgency came from emotional exhaustion; sometimes it came from pressure. Either way, haste could create mistakes that followed people for years.
"I'm not asking you to punish her by delaying," she said. "I'm asking you not to sign anything you don't understand just because someone else has set a deadline."
That night Clare supplied the deadline herself. My phone lit up while I was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of food I'd reheated twice and barely touched. Her message said James thought we should get the divorce done before the end of the month so everyone could move on. She wanted her half of the savings in one lump sum, not installments, and James had assured her that was standard. She added a line about hoping I wouldn't become bitter.
I read the message three times. James says, James thinks, James assured her. I opened our conversations from the previous months and began scrolling backward.
There was James says about the local property market, James says about people being trapped in safe careers, James says about the importance of investing in yourself. At first I'd assumed she'd found a podcast host or a business mentor whose opinions she liked. Now I counted the references carefully. Thirty-one times in a few months, and I hadn't once asked who James was.
The messages took on new shapes when I looked at them again. In April, she'd complained that ordinary people were too frightened to take risks. In May, she'd wondered aloud whether I could sell one truck and expand into something more glamorous than landscaping. In June, she'd said some couples stay together only because the financial arrangements are convenient. I'd answered most of those messages as though they were abstract observations, never imagining another man was feeding her the language and waiting to see whether it took root.