Beloved Liar (The Reed Rivers Trilogy 3)

Tragically, when Eleanor woke up and went to check on her boys, she found Reed still fast asleep in his crib... and Oliver nowhere to be found. She testified she looked high and low for her missing son, becoming increasingly panicked, and finally found him in an unthinkable spot. The poor woman described her desperate dive into the swimming pool. She testified about how she pulled Oliver from the water and tried frantically to resuscitate him... But it was too late. She testified, “I had no idea Oliver knew how to open the lock we’d put up high on the sliding door. He’d pulled up a chair to reach it. He’d never done that before!”

A week after Oliver’s death, Eleanor tried to commit suicide. She was hospitalized thereafter for a week, and, then, sent to a long-term “mental care” facility in Los Angeles for the better part of a year. While she was away, Terrence was Father of the Year, according to him. Although, according to Eleanor, it was Amalia, not Terrence, who cared for Reed during this period. But since nobody called Amalia as a witness in the divorce case—yet another grievance for Eleanor in the later malpractice lawsuit—the divorce judge, once again, sided with Terrence, even going so far as to praise him for being Reed’s “rock” during this time.

Poor Eleanor. She testified in the divorce, “I fully admit I wasn’t capable of caring for Reed during the first year after Olly’s death. But I knew Amalia was there for him, and that I needed to focus on getting better so I could get out and be a good mother to him. So that’s what I did. I got the help I needed. And then I came home and took care of my son for the next six years. I’m not a perfect mother, but who is? Judge, I want to be with my son. I want to be his mother. Please, please, let me do that.”

It wasn’t enough to convince the judge. Not when Terrence, a man regarded as a “pillar of the community” testified that Eleanor was “useless and non-functional” when she returned home from her year away, and then remained that way for the entirety of the six years preceding the divorce.

In the end, Eleanor got bitch-slapped at every turn by Terrence and his team of lawyers. And then by the divorce judge. And then she got bitch-slapped again in the legal malpractice case. The same way, it seems to me, if I’m reading between the lines correctly, she’d gotten bitch-slapped by Terrence during their marriage.

After the judge in the divorce case granted Terrence full legal and physical custody of Reed, Eleanor swallowed a bottle of pills. It was the same thing she’d done after Oliver died seven years prior. And, again, it ultimately led to her institutionalization in a shitty facility in Los Angeles. Against all odds, she bounced back after about a year and came out with her boxing gloves on. She filed a legal malpractice action against her divorce attorney, the one I’ve just read, as some sort of last-gasp attempt to prove she’d been railroaded in the divorce, and that she did, in fact, have the wherewithal to care for Reed.

But when the judge in the malpractice lawsuit ruled against Eleanor, the same way the divorce judge had, it was game over for Eleanor’s mental health. She snapped for the last time. Once again, she tried to end it all. And wound up in that same, shitty Los Angeles institution. This time, for good, until her hard-working, loyal, and generous son moved her to a posh facility in Scarsdale.

Was Eleanor capable of caring for Reed at the time of the divorce, as she insisted vehemently at trial? I have no idea. All I know is it strikes me as awfully unfair that Terrence had Amalia’s full-time help with Reed, and yet the judge expressly commented in his ruling against Eleanor, “A woman shouldn’t need a paid nanny to help her care for her own children.”

Also, I can’t help feeling irate that the judge believed everything Terrence said, without question, given that, a mere two and a half years later, the FBI raided Terrence Rivers’ sprawling mansion at dawn and arrested him in his underwear for staggering, truly evil financial crimes, thereby rendering his thirteen-year-old son, Reed, whom he’d fought so hard to claim for himself in the divorce, an effective orphan. Was Terrence Rivers any less of an “unfit parent” for mercilessly stealing from countless innocent families who’d trusted him, as Eleanor was for taking a nap, along with her two sons, when she had the stomach flu? I mean, assuming Eleanor’s version of the story was true. Which, granted, I don’t know.

I scrub my face with my palms, overwhelmed and aching for Eleanor. And Amalia. And Oliver. And, of course, for my beautiful liar, Reed. I’ve always found his hard outer shell immensely attractive, because it’s what makes the rare glimpses of softness and vulnerability all the more breathtaking. But now, I’m realizing Reed’s patented poker face, the steely mask he wears so well and often, must have been forged early on in his life as a coping mechanism. A way to survive the chaos. The abandonments. The lack of control he must have felt, at all times.