Chapter 7: The Moment He Realized He Had Lost
He came to Carol's house at ten o'clock in the morning.
I saw him through the front window before he knocked.
He was wearing the same shirt from the night before.
His hair was not combed.
He stood on the porch with his hands in his jacket pockets and he looked, for the first time I could remember, uncertain.
He knocked twice.
Carol looked at me.
"Ruth said you don't have to speak to him at all."
"I know." I stood up from the kitchen table.
"I want to."
Ruth put her hand flat on the table.
"I'm right here.
You say anything you need to say.
The moment he becomes threatening, you stop and you walk back into this kitchen."
I went to the front door and opened it.
He looked at my face and something moved behind his eyes.
Not guilt.
Something closer to recalculation.
"We need to talk," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"We do.
But not the way you mean."
He glanced past me into the hallway.
"Is someone here with you?"
"Several people."
His jaw tightened.
"What have you done?"
"I went into the basement," I said.
"Like the woman on the phone told me to."
His face went completely still.
"I found the photographs," I said.
"I found the documents.
I found Diane." I watched his expression move through several things in quick succession before it settled into something careful and controlled.
"And I found the recording your mother made.
The one where she explains exactly what you were planning to do with my grandfather's property."
He said nothing for a long moment.
Then he tried.
"You don't understand what you're looking at," he said.
"Those documents are out of context.
My mother was protecting the family.
She was—"
"She named amounts," I said.
"She named your lawyer.
She said that if I became a problem, you would handle me quietly and completely." I looked at him steadily.
"I'd like to hear you explain the context for that."
His hands came out of his pockets.
"You need to stop.
You don't know what you're starting.
My mother has connections you don't understand.
If you push this, she will make your life—"
"She'll make my life what?" I said quietly.
He stopped.
Behind me I heard Ruth's chair scrape back from the kitchen table.
He heard it too.
His eyes moved to the hallway again.
He was counting people he couldn't see.
"This is a mistake," he said.
But the certainty was gone from his voice.
What was left sounded like a man trying to remember his lines.
"Ruth," I said, without turning around.
Ruth appeared at my shoulder.
She was holding her phone, screen facing outward.
On it was an email.
"I've already been in contact with the financial crimes division," she said pleasantly.
"And with a colleague in Portland, who has been very interested in what I had to share this morning." She looked at him with the calm, steady gaze of someone who has done this many times before.
"You should call your attorney.
Not the one your mother hired.
A different one."
He looked at me one last time.
"I loved you," he said.
And I could not tell, even then, whether any part of it was true.
"I know you didn't," I said.
May you like
"That's the part that took me longest to understand."
I closed the door.
