Chapter 9: Just the Two of Us
Daniel was home when I got back.
That surprised me.
He usually left early and came back late — a habit that had started, I now realized, around the same time Evelyn's accusations had begun.
Easier to be somewhere else than to be in a house where the tension had no name yet.
He was in the kitchen.
He had made dinner.
Nothing elaborate — pasta, bread, a bottle of wine open on the counter.
But he had made it, which was itself a kind of sentence.
I set my bag down.
"I met with Ray this morning," I said.
Daniel turned from the stove.
"I know.
He called me."
"What did he say?"
"That he gave you the account records." Daniel turned back to the pasta.
"That he's cooperating." A pause.
"That my mother did more than he knew."
I sat at the kitchen table.
"Do you believe him?"
"I believe that he's scared," Daniel said.
"I believe that scared people sometimes tell the truth." He brought two plates to the table and sat down across from me.
"I also believe that he helped her.
Whatever she did alone, he made possible."
"Yes," I said.
"He did."
We sat with that for a moment.
"I owe you an apology," Daniel said.
"Yes," I said.
"You do."
He looked at me.
He had been rehearsing something — I could see it in his face, the careful arrangement of words.
But whatever he had planned, he let it go.
"I saw her grab your hair," he said.
"I stood there."
"You did."
"I've been standing there for three years," he said.
"Every time she said something cutting.
Every time she made you feel like a guest in your own marriage.
I told myself she was difficult, that's just how she is, that you needed to give her time." He picked up his fork.
Set it down.
"I was a coward."
"Yes," I said.
"You were."
He nodded.
He'd expected that.
"I don't know how to fix three years," he said.
"You don't fix three years," I said.
"You start with today."
"What does today look like?"
I thought about it.
Patricia.
Ray.
The Kowalski family whose name was on the last page of the account records.
Gerald, somewhere across town, sitting with the wreckage of a marriage and a brother.
"Today looks like you being honest with me," I said.
"Not just about this.
About everything.
About what you knew, what you suspected, what you chose not to see."
"That's going to be a long conversation."
"I know."
"Are you willing to have it?"
I looked at him across the table.
He was not the man I had married in the sense that the man I married had never been fully visible.
He had been present but partial — there in body, elsewhere in the parts that mattered.
I didn't know yet whether the man sitting across from me now was different or just frightened.
"I'm willing to start it," I said.
"I'm not promising where it ends."
He nodded.
"That's fair."
We ate.
It was quiet, but not the cold quiet of the night before.
Something had shifted — not resolved, not healed, but opened.
Like a window that had been painted shut for years, finally cracked.
After dinner, Daniel cleared the plates.
He came back to the table and sat down.
"My mother," he said.
"What's going to happen to her?"
"That depends on what Patricia's department decides.
And on what the Kowalski family wants to do."
"Could she go to prison?"
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"That's not my decision to make."
"Do you want her to?"
I thought about the tiles.
My knees.
The sl@p.
The thirty faces.
"I want her to face what she did," I said.
"What form that takes — I'll leave that to people whose job it is."
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
"Gerald called me this afternoon," he said.
"He's filing for divorce."
I hadn't expected that.
Not so soon.
"He said he's known for a long time that something was wrong," Daniel said.
"He said the photographs were almost a relief.
Because at least they were real.
At least they were something he could point to."
I thought about Gerald's hands on the table.
The envelope he had been carrying for weeks.
"He's a good man," I said.
"He is," Daniel said.
"Better than I've been."
"You can be better," I said.
"That's the difference between you and your mother.
She chose not to be."
Daniel looked at me for a long moment.
"I love you," he said.
"I know that doesn't fix anything."
"No," I said.
"It doesn't.
But it's a place to start."
He reached across the table.
I looked at his hand for a moment.
Then I put mine in it.
Not because everything was resolved.
Not because the hurt had gone anywhere.
May you like
But because some things are worth the long, difficult work of repair — and I needed to know, for myself, whether this was one of them.
We sat there until the wine was gone and the kitchen light was the only one left on in the house.
