My husband said I'd "let myself go" after 27 years of marriage — so he moved in with his girlfriend. Ninety days later he was pounding on my porch, screaming, "How could you?!"

Aaron got there first.

Thirty-one, taller than his father, same jaw, none of the same talent for sleight of hand. He hugged me at the door the way he had since he was little — all the way, no holding back — and I hung on a beat longer than I meant to.

"You look good, Mom," he said, leaning back to check.

"I feel better than I did."

Kristen came twenty minutes later. Quieter than her brother, more careful picking her words, and I could tell from the way she lowered herself into the kitchen chair that she'd been turning our phone call over and over since it happened.

I made coffee. I set the envelope in the middle of the table. I sat down across from both of them.

"Before I show you anything," I said, "I want to ask you something. When your father called — did he ask either of you to do something? Say something? To me, or to anybody else?"

Aaron glanced at his sister. Kristen looked at her hands.

"He asked me to talk to you," Kristen said. "To get you to be 'reasonable' about the settlement."

"He asked me if I knew who your lawyer was," Aaron said. His voice was flat. "He wanted her name."

I nodded slowly. "Okay. Then I'm going to lay some things out, and I need you both to read all the way through before you say anything."

I put the pages down in order. The expense reports. The reconciliation sheets. The email to Brooke.

They read in silence.

Aaron finished first. He set the last page down like it was fragile and stared at the wall over my head.

Kristen read slower. When she got to the end she didn't put the pages down. She held onto them.

"The email," she said. "He was asking her to lie."

"Yes."

"For the divorce."

"Yes."

She set the pages down. Her hands were very still.

"How long have you known all this?"

"The account, three days. The rest of it came to me this week."

"And before the box? Before any of it?"

I looked at her. "I knew he left me for another woman. I knew he thought I'd let myself go. That was the whole list."

Aaron made a sound that wasn't quite a word.

"He told me," he said slowly, "that you'd been struggling for years. That you'd stopped taking care of yourself. That he'd been worried sick about you long before he left." He stopped. "He made it sound like walking out was practically a mercy."

The kitchen was dead quiet.

"Look at me," I said.

He did.

"Does that sound like anything you ever saw in this house? In twenty-seven years?"

He shook his head. Once. No hesitation.

Kristen reached across the table and put her hand over mine. "What do you need from us?"

"Nothing. I don't need you to do a thing. I just needed you to know the truth." I looked at both of them. "Whatever happens with the settlement, whatever happens with his job — that's between me, my lawyer, and the process. I'm not asking you to pick a side."

"You're not asking us to pick a side," Aaron said. "You're showing us facts."

"He's still your father. That doesn't change."

"No," Kristen said quietly. "But this does."

She squeezed my hand and didn't let go.

We sat there a while, the three of us, coffee going lukewarm, the pages fanned out across the table between us. Outside, the afternoon light stretched long and gold across the kitchen floor.