Chương 11
“Claire kind of said the same thing.”
“I noticed.”
“Maybe you should work on that.”
“You taking appointments now?”
“Fifty dollars an hour.”
“You’re expensive.”
“I know who my father is.”
That made me laugh.
She smiled too.
The moment lasted until her phone buzzed again.
This time she picked it up.
Claire had sent two messages.
Sophie read them silently.
Her expression hardened.
“What?”
“She says she’s sorry.”
I waited.
“And?”
“That she shouldn’t have let Grandpa do that.”
“That’s true.”
“She says she froze.”
“That’s what she told me.”
Sophie scrolled.
“She wants me to know she never wanted me to feel unwelcome.”
The last word came out differently.
I could hear the disbelief in it.
“What do you want to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay.”
“She did make me feel unwelcome.”
“I know.”
“No.”
Sophie set the phone down.
“You knew she wasn’t warm to me.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t know the other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
She stared at the table.
My stomach tightened.
“What other stuff, Soph?”
“It wasn’t one big thing.”
“That’s usually how this starts.”
She rubbed her thumb against a smear of sauce near her plate.
“She’d make comments.”
“About what?”
“My clothes.”
I waited.
“My friends.”
Another pause.
“My mom.”
“What did she say about your mother?”
“Just stuff.”
“What stuff?”
Sophie sighed.
“That I got my disappearing act from her.”
I felt my face go still.
“When?”
“A few months ago.”
“What happened?”
“I forgot to text that I was staying after school.”
“That’s it?”
“She said you spent enough of your life chasing women who didn’t think about how their choices affected you.”
I looked away.
The elderly couple at the next table were arguing about whether they had ordered fried rice.
It struck me as absurd that a normal disagreement could continue three feet away while something inside me rearranged itself.
“Anything else?”
“She apologized after.”
“To you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she say anything like that again?”
“Not about Mom.”
I nodded.
Sophie watched me carefully.
“I didn’t tell you because you would’ve fought.”
“We should have fought.”
“I hate when you and Claire fight.”
“We barely fought.”
“Exactly.”
I looked at her.
She pushed noodles around her plate.
“You both get quiet and weird for days.”
“That counts.”
“It’s worse.”
I did not know what to say to that.
She did.
“You think yelling is the dangerous part.”
I stared at her.
“For you, the dangerous part is when nobody says anything.”
The sentence stayed with me through the drive back to the hotel.
At three thirty, I finally turned my phone back over.
I had twelve missed calls.
Three were from Claire.
Four were from unknown numbers.
One was from Eric.
Two were from Nathan.
One was from Martin.
The last was from a Cincinnati number I recognized after a few seconds.
Jenna Morales.
I did not call her back immediately.
I called Rebecca.
She answered with a weary, “Please tell me you didn’t contact anyone.”
“I didn’t.”
“Good.”
“Jenna called me.”
Rebecca became alert.
“Did she leave a message?”
I checked.
“Yes.”
“Listen to it before doing anything.”
I put the phone on speaker.
Jenna’s voice filled the hotel room.
“Mr. Whitaker, this is Jenna Morales from the Louisville dispatch office.”
She sounded controlled.
Almost formal.
“I’m calling because Marcus Hill contacted me about an internal review.”
There was a pause.
“I told him I didn’t want to make a statement.”
Another pause.
Then her voice changed slightly.
“But I changed my mind.”
Sophie looked at me.
Jenna continued.
“I don’t want to talk to HR first.”
Rebecca exhaled softly through the phone.
“I want to talk to you.”
Jenna paused again.
“Because I need to know whether you actually didn’t know what was happening, or whether everybody has been lying to me about that too.”
The message ended.
I stared at the phone.
Rebecca said nothing.
Neither did Sophie.
For once, silence did not feel like restraint.
It felt like a debt coming due.
I listened to Jenna’s message twice more before calling her back.
Rebecca stayed on the line from her house, but I asked her not to speak unless Jenna wanted her involved.
Sophie sat near the hotel window with her headphones around her neck, pretending to read.
The call rang four times.
Then Jenna answered.
“Mr. Whitaker?”
“Yes.”
Her voice tightened slightly.
“Marcus said you might call.”
“If now is a bad time, I can—”
“No.”
She stopped me.
“I called you.”
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“You said you wanted to know whether I knew.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t.”
Silence.
I could hear faint television noise on her end.
“That’s your answer?”
“It’s the first one.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t know about Nathan’s messages to you.”
Another silence.
“I didn’t know your supervisor suggested transferring you instead of dealing with him.”
“Okay.”
“I should have.”
That changed something.
Not much.
Enough that Jenna breathed differently.
“You should have?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because there were warning signs around members of that family for years, and I made it harder for managers to act on them.”
She did not answer.
“I never told anyone to protect Nathan.”
“People said you did.”
“I believe them.”
That surprised her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I didn’t have to give a direct order.”
I looked at Rebecca’s name glowing on my phone screen.
“I made exceptions for people related to my wife.”
“You mean Claire?”
“Yes.”
Jenna said nothing.
“I questioned discipline when I should have stayed out of it.”
My mouth felt dry.
“I approved things I would have rejected for other employees.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted peace at home.”
The excuse sounded worse once spoken aloud.
Jenna gave a small, humorless laugh.
“That worked out well.”
“No.”
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then she said, “Do you know what Nathan told me?”
“No.”
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“He said I could complain if I wanted, but everybody knew who his family was.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
