He reaches into a drawer and takes out a stack of papers held together with a big black binder clip and fringed with a rainbow of sticky tabs and sticky notes. The cover says PREMARITAL AGREEMENT MADE AND ENTERED INTO BY AND BETWEEN Cora Anne Jenkins and Adrian Lykaios Maddox.
Lykaios is his mother’s maiden name. I’ve never met her. She left her family and lives in some kind of commune inEurope now. Adrian doesn’t talk to her or about her. The story I gathered from Kendra was that their father was a serial cheater, and at some point, she had enough and bailed on all of them.
Was Delaney a setup? Is Adrian trying to get me to bail on my kids, so he can replace me with a better wife who doesn’t need coaching on forks and spoons? It’s not going to work. I’d never abandon my kids. If I died, I’d haunt them. I’d be a ghost mother.
Drake sighs and runs a thumb through his sticky tabs. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you sent me a surrogacy contract, not a prenup. Can I ask who represented you on this?”
“Brian McDonough. From Winthrop, Winthrop, and Blount.”
“McDonough from Winthrop, eh?” Drake tugs his laptop over and types what I presume is a quick internet search. “Hmmm. Yale. Duke Law. Summer associate at Nicolet and Burgess. That’s the firm that represents your husband’s family, right? Nicolet and Burgess?”
I nod again. The knot in my stomach coils tighter.
Drake shakes his head. “Let me guess. Your husband connected you with McDonough. The only thing you had to do was show up and sign.”
“Y-Yes.” I didn’t know any lawyers, let alone have the money to pay one. Adrian said not to worry. He’d take care of it.
“And this McDonough? He counseled you that it was a fair deal?”
“He said I could negotiate, but at the end of the day, I had to consider what leverage I really had. He said if I pushed back, Adrian might think I was just about the money. He said I needed to think about that.”
Drake scans his laptop screen and snorts. “And I see thatnow McDonough is with Nicolet and Burgess.” He sighs, leans back in his chair, and crosses his leg, propping an ankle on his knee. His pants rise, flashing navy socks with whimsical owls on them. They make him seem less intimidating. I’m sure that’s the point.
“If we weren’t talking about Winthrop, Winthrop, and Blount, and if your husband wasn’t Adrian Maddox, I’d say we go after Brian McDonough for malfeasance of counsel, but they’ll have crossed their T’s and dotted their I’s.” I’m not quite following, but I don’t want Drake Chambers to know how lost I am, either, so I keep nodding.
“Invalidating an agreement is always the hardest outcome to achieve, though, and we’ve got a lot of lines to pursue before we go for a Hail Mary.” He pauses.
I nod yet again.
His blue eyes narrow on my face. “You know, what?” he says in a gentler tone. “Let me back up a few steps. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s not every day a guy from South Jersey has a Maddox stroll into his office. Forgive me?” He flashes his white Ken doll teeth.
“Of course.”
“What I’m saying is that Brian McDonough did not look out for your best interests with this agreement, my guess would be as a quid pro quo with your husband’s law firm. That’s illegal. It’s called malfeasance of counsel, and if push comes to shove, we might need to prove that to get the whole thing thrown out, but that’s really hard to do, so we’re going to try some other things first. Okay?”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. I don’t want to ask the next question, but I can’t go on having this conversation with him not knowing that I’m totally clueless. “It’s just—can you tell me what’s in it? I didn’t exactly—I didn’t understand it.”
I’m staring at his scorpion, so I don’t see his expression, I just hear the pregnant pause before he answers. His voice isexcruciatingly kind. “Well, to be honest, it reads more like a surrogacy contract than a prenup. Usually, with men like your husband, the focus of agreements like these are on assets, and there’s plenty about finances here, but the more unusual provisions relate to your children.”
The knot in my stomach rises to lodge in my throat. “What about my kids?”
“Well, as you know, there are the cash bonuses for the children. Fifty million for the first born. Twenty million for each live birth thereafter. Fifty million for the first male if the first born is female.”
My eyes bug. I had to sign a stack of papers after both births. Was I getting paid? If so, where is the money? “So there are trust funds for the kids?”
“Yes, in addition to the cash bonuses.”
In addition to?
“And then there are the scaled payouts for each year you stay with the family, doubling each year, exponentially, and maxing out when the youngest child turns eighteen.”
“I get paid to stay with Adrian?”
“To stay with the family, yes.” Drake is really frowning now. “Cora, you do know that you signed away custody of your children in case of separation or divorce, don’t you?”
My heart drops like a stone. “No. I’d never do that.”
Drake flips through the papers to a red tag, flips the document, and slides it in front of me. A passage is highlighted in yellow.
