He's going to bring proof or things dressed up to look like proof. What proof could he have? There's nothing to find. There's always something. Eleanor had learned that the hard way.
His lawyers will find people willing to say we barely knew each other, that the wedding was rushed, that I came here with nothing and married the first man who offered me a roof, which she paused, happens to be exactly true on the face of it. Every fact he needs is real. He doesn't have to lie. He just has to arrange the truth to look ugly. Nathaniel scrubbed a hand down his face.
"Then how do we fight it?" "With a different truth." Eleanor leaned forward. He wants to prove our marriage was made for money and convenience. So, we prove it's real.
Not that it started as a love match, it didn't. And lying about that would only hand him the rope to hang us with. We prove that whatever it started as it became real, that it is real. A judge can argue with a person's reasons. He has a harder time arguing with a family that plainly works.
And how do we prove that? Eleanor was quiet a moment. "We don't have to prove it to the judge," she said finally. "We have to let the judge see it." There's a difference.
You can't argue a child into loving someone. You can't argue grief into healing, but you can put it in front of a man and let him see it with his own two eyes and then dare him to call it false. Nathaniel studied her across the lamplight. You think Clara would speak in front of the county? I'd never ask her to.
Eleanor said it flat and immediate. She's 10 years old. She's been through enough. I won't put her in front of a courtroom to save my own place in this house. If it comes to that, if the only way to keep this family together is to use the children as a spectacle, then Charles Whitaker's already won.
Because that would make me exactly the kind of person he's claiming I am. Someone who uses people to get what she wants. Something in Nathaniel's face eased, and Eleanor realized he'd been testing her the same way she'd tested him, both of them still learning whether the other could be trusted with the tender parts. "You mean that?" He said.