in the world, and whatever cautionary tale could be gleaned from Carolyn’s death will be forgotten. You’ll go to work and be there past ten. I won’t be home when you roll in, because I’ll be out chasing my dream. It’ll be the same as it’s always been.”
“Maybe we should think about changing that, then.”
“Maybe. But what would that even look like? You want to go back to the FD? Should I give up on singing? Is that going to make either of us happier?”
“Are you not happy now?”
She exhaled deeply, which answered my question. I knew that this was not the best period of our relationship, but until that moment I hadn’t thought Anne was unhappy. Perhaps no one ever does until it’s too late.
“No, it’s not that, Clint. I’m happy. I’m just not enamored by our circumstances at the moment. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m really trying to say. I’m just a little freaked out about all of this. I can’t get out of my head that no one dies in the bathtub unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless they want to.”
It was further testament to my failure to see the obvious at times, but I was so fixated on my immediate conclusion that Carolyn’s death had been a tragic accident that I hadn’t given any thought to the idea that she might have committed suicide. That would make much more sense than an accidental drowning, of course. She might have taken a handful of pills and then slipped away peacefully in the warm water. But despite the logic, I didn’t want to believe it.
“Why would Carolyn kill herself? She was a newlywed, good career, new house. The world was her oyster.”
“Yeah, I know,” was all Anne said in response.
“You think she wasn’t happy with her life? Suicidally unhappy?”
“How can you ever know?”
“She didn’t leave a suicide note,” I said, even though I knew from my FD days that many suicides don’t leave notes. For some people, the act itself is the only communication necessary.
Anne let my comment be the last word, but the thought that Carolyn had taken her own life had taken root. I had always imagined that Carolyn had been the one who put the whirlwind nature of Nicky’s transformation in motion, with him trying to apply the brakes but failing. But perhaps I had it all wrong. Maybe that transformation was exactly what Nicky craved, and in his rush to get there, he pushed Carolyn into a life she didn’t want, until she thought death was her only escape.
6.
I hadn’t been back at the office since I got Nicky’s call that Carolyn was dead. But when I returned the next Monday, it was as I’d left it. If any clients—or, more importantly, prospective clients—had called while I was away, they hadn’t left a message.
Even without any new messages or clients, I had a full slate of after-hours events scheduled. Two bar committee meetings, a memorial service for a recently departed judge I’d never heard of, and drinks with a law school classmate who’d been promoted to deputy counsel at a small brokerage firm, making him ripe for future business. As Anne had predicted, I was back to living my life as if Carolyn had never died.
My one paying client at the moment was Ruth Lewis, a woman who had been indicted for writing checks made out to cash and forging her boss’s name. She had come to me in the circuitous way that I got most of my clients in the early part of my career—by referral from another lawyer. In her case, a lawyer who handled the divorce of the friend of a friend of Mrs. Lewis and gave her my name because he owed me a favor on account of my helping his nephew with a DUI.
A less likely looking felon than Ruth Lewis would have been hard to imagine. A flea of a woman, with an old-fashioned bouffant hairstyle and even more dated eyeglasses, she was sixty-eight years old and unwed, although she had been married briefly in her early twenties. She had adamantly refused to discuss the circumstances that led to her being not married, and given how many years had passed, I didn’t think it would be relevant. I did ask her to confirm that her husband hadn’t died under mysterious circumstances, which she did with an “Oh my, no.”
This was our second meeting. Our first was at her arraignment, two weeks earlier, where I got her released