Chapter 8: Everything She Should Have Said First
The mother opened the door before she could knock.
"I saw you sitting in the car," she said.
"I thought you might come back."
"I need to tell you something."
The mother stepped aside.
She walked back into the dining room.
The tea things had been cleared.
The folder was still on the table, but closed now.
The envelope and the letter were gone.
She sat down.
The mother sat across from her, same chair as before.
"There's a message thread," she said.
"From my number.
Fourteen months of transfers and instructions.
It looks like I was planning to strip the joint accounts before I filed." She put Petra's phone on the table and turned it to face the mother.
"I didn't send those messages.
My cousin Roland did.
He had access to my phone account.
He moved two hundred and sixty thousand dollars under my name and lost most of it in bad investments.
He was trying to help me and he did it without my knowledge and he made it look like I was behind all of it."
The mother looked at the phone.
She did not pick it up.
"Does Daniel know about this?" she said.
"I don't know.
If someone sent this to my friend anonymously, they may have sent it to him too."
"They did," the mother said.
"He received the same thread four months ago."
She absorbed that.
"That's why he moved the remaining joint funds," she said.
"He was protecting what was left.
Yes." The mother's eyes were steady.
"He thought you had been systematically draining the accounts.
He didn't understand why you would do it so openly, but the evidence was in your name."
"He thought I was that careless."
"He thought you were that confident," the mother said.
"That you assumed he would never look."
She pressed her hands flat on the table.
"I need to reach him," she said.
"I need him to know about Roland."
"Why?"
The question was not hostile.
It was genuine.
"Because he deserves to know the truth," she said.
"Because he wrote me a letter that was honest and fair and I want to give him the same thing back.
Because whatever I did wrong in this marriage — and I did things wrong — I didn't do that.
And I don't want him to spend the rest of his life thinking I did."
The mother was quiet for a long moment.
Then she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and placed a phone on the table.
Not her own phone.
A different one.
Older.
"He left this here," she said.
"He said if you came back — if you actually came back and told the truth — I should give you the number."
She looked at the phone.
"He planned for this too," she said.
"He hoped for it," the mother said.
"There's a difference."
She picked up the phone.
The screen showed one contact.
No name.
Just a number.
She looked at the mother.
May you like
"Go ahead," the mother said quietly.
"I'll give you the room."
