Chapter 19 — PRISCILLA

I met Priscilla Mercer on a Wednesday in August, in a Panera off Falls of Neuse, because she called Alma's office and asked for a meeting and Alma said absolutely not and I said yes anyway.

Alma came with me and sat two tables away and did not pretend she wasn't listening.

Priscilla Mercer is forty-six and small and put together in a way that takes ninety minutes every morning.

She had a folder with her.

"I want to say at the front that I'm recording this," she said, and put her phone on the table face up, "and you should record it too."

I did.

"My name is on your lien," she said. "I signed for that LLC. I want you to know that I knew what it was for and I want you to know it before I tell you the rest, because otherwise you'll think I'm here to be forgiven and I'm not."

"Okay."

"Grant told me it was a bridge loan on a distressed property. That's what I signed for. That's what I believed for about four months." She turned the folder around. "Then in November I found this."

It was a printout of an email chain between Grant Mercer and a family law attorney in Charlotte.

Dated August of the previous year.

Two months after the deed of trust.

Subject line: NC — establishing paternity where child born during marriage.

I read it twice.

The attorney's answer was long and cautious and it came down to this: in North Carolina, a man claiming to be the biological father of a child born to a married woman has a very narrow path, and it gets narrower the longer he waits, and it is close to impossible if the husband is an involved parent in an intact home.

Close to impossible if the husband is an involved parent in an intact home.

Grant had asked a follow-up question.

The follow-up question was: What if the mother loses custody and the husband is shown to be an absent or unfit parent?

I put the paper down.

"He wanted Theo."

"He wants Theo." Priscilla folded her hands. "We tried for eleven years. Four rounds. Two miscarriages, one at nineteen weeks, a girl. We were turned down by two agencies because of something in Grant's background that I am not going to discuss with you."

"So the house—"

"The house is the sewer. That's real, that part's all real, he needed your easement and he took it the way he takes things." Her mouth went thin. "But he could have gotten a different easement. He could have redesigned the site. It would have cost him three hundred thousand dollars and a year."

"Then why me?"

"Because you were the one with the easement and a wife who worked for him." Priscilla looked at me. "You were the intersection, Mr. Whitaker. He found a man who had two things he wanted and he took both of them with one operation, and I want you to understand that he did not think of it as two things. He thought of it as efficient."

I sat there in a Panera with a folder in front of me.

"Does Corinne know?"

"That she was pregnant on purpose?"

The floor went out from under the room.

"She wasn't—"

"She thought it was an accident," Priscilla said. "It wasn't. I found the pharmacy records in February. He'd been swapping her pills since the previous spring. She kept them in her desk at the office. He had a key to every desk in that building."

I could not speak for a moment.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Three reasons." She held up a finger, and I thought of Alma. "One, my name is on a fraudulent instrument and I'd rather hand you the file than have your lawyer pull it out of me in a deposition. Two, I have a lawyer of my own now and she told me cooperation is the only asset I have left."

"And three?"

Priscilla Mercer looked at the table for a while.

"Three is that on the nineteenth of September last year, at about eight in the evening, my husband came home from wherever he'd been and he was in a very good mood, and he poured a drink and he said, 'It's going to be sooner than we thought.'"

September 19.

The night my daughter called me at 10:41.

"He was in my kitchen at six o'clock that evening," I said.

"I know that now."

"He watched a seven-year-old holding a baby for two hours and then he took my wife out to dinner and came home and told you it was going to be sooner than you thought."

"Yes."

I want to write down what I did next, because I am not proud of it and it is the only moment in this whole thing where I lost hold of myself in public.

I stood up and I picked up my chair and I set it down again.

That is all I did. I picked a chair up about six inches and put it back down.

A man two tables over looked up.

Alma was on her feet.

I sat down and put my hands flat on the table and I breathed for about a minute, and Priscilla Mercer sat there the entire time without moving, which I have thought about since and decided was a kind of courage.

"Are you going to testify?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Against your husband."

"He is not my husband as of eleven days ago."

She pushed the folder across.

"There's one more thing in there and I want to warn you before you get to it. It's a photograph."

"Of what?"

"Of a nursery." Priscilla stood up and put her purse on her shoulder. "In our house. He had it done in June. Before your son was born, Mr. Whitaker, he had a room painted."