Court Papers in the Locked Drawer of a Community Doctor
I took the photo, the small click of the phone’s screen sounding like a snap of dry kindling. I turned the page.
“August third: Rachel could not remember the name of our neighbor’s daughter. She became defensive when I tried to help her.”
I took another photo, then another. Each page was a monument of quiet lies, a meticulous record of a disease I did not have, constructed by the man who had promised to care for me in sickness and in health. I photographed the entry from June fourteenth, the day he claimed I spent twenty minutes looking for my car at the grocery store, when in reality I had been sitting with Karen in her garden, discussing her mother’s estate.
I photographed the bank logs next, capturing every single Friday withdrawal. The total came to two thousand eight hundred dollars, the exact price of my husband’s campaign to prove me mad.
When I reached the end of the diary, I closed it and placed it back in the drawer, exactly as I had found it. I aligned the medical journals over the top, ensuring the edges matched the green hanging folders beneath them.
