Chương 6
“Your father’s face when something broke at work.”
“I don’t have his face.”
“You absolutely do.”
“He had eyebrows like angry caterpillars.”
“So do you right now.”
I rubbed my forehead.
“Please don’t make me laugh when you have stitches.”
“Why?”
“I’ll feel guilty.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
She took another spoonful.
I stared at Jason’s unread messages.
For the first time that night, I was tempted to call him.
Not because I missed him.
Because I wanted to hear his voice when I mentioned Meridian Strategic Holdings.
I wanted the pause.
The stammer.
The lie, if there was one.
That desire frightened me.
It was too close to setting a trap.
Too close to making the truth serve my anger.
I locked the phone.
Mom noticed.
“Good choice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Those are often the good ones.”
I carried her empty bowl to the sink.
At eleven fifteen, a detective from the NYPD called.
She introduced herself as Detective Nora Alvarez and asked whether my mother was medically able to speak.
Mom said yes before I could answer.
Alvarez asked us to come to the precinct the following morning rather than send officers to the apartment.
“That works,” Mom said.
I frowned at her.
“What?”
“You need sleep.”
“I’m not the witness.”
“You’re also staying here.”
Alvarez heard us.
“Ms. Vance, I’ll likely need a statement from you too.”
“I understand.”
“And don’t discuss specific recollections with other witnesses before we speak.”
Mom and I looked at each other.
“We already have,” I admitted.
“That happens.”
Her voice carried the exhaustion of someone who had given this instruction thousands of times and watched it fail thousands of times.
“Just don’t rehearse anything.”
“We won’t.”
After the call, I made up the couch.
Mom objected.
“You’re taking the bed.”
“No.”
“You have a bad back.”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“You still have a bad back.”
“I slept on a floor for six months in college.”
“And complained for seven.”
I found an old quilt in the hall closet.
The floral pattern had faded to the point that every rose looked tired.
Mom stood beside me holding her pillow.
“Bella.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to punish yourself by sleeping badly.”
“I’m not.”
“You always do that.”
I stopped unfolding the quilt.
“Do what?”
“When you feel responsible for something, you make yourself uncomfortable.”
“That is not a thing.”
“You slept in that horrible chair at the hospital when your father was sick.”
“There was one bed.”
“You refused to go home.”
“He was dying.”
“Yes.”
The word silenced the room.
Mom looked down at the pillow.
“I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“It’s okay.”
“No.”
“It is.”
She sat on the arm of the couch.
I folded the quilt more slowly.
Dad had been dead sixteen years and still occasionally entered rooms through sentences nobody meant to say.
“I could have told Jason who I was before we got married,” I said.
Mom did not answer immediately.
“You could have.”
“I could have told him everything.”
“Yes.”
“I wanted proof.”
“Of what?”
“That he loved me.”
Mom picked at a loose thread on the pillowcase.
“And did hiding give you proof?”
For some reason, I became irritated.
“You told me not to tell people about the money when I was younger.”
“When you were nineteen and grieving.”
“You said people changed when they knew.”
“They did.”
“So why is it wrong that I protected myself?”
“I didn’t say it was wrong.”
“It sounds like you are.”
She looked up.
“You want me to tell you that Jason fooled you completely and you had no part in not seeing him.”
The words landed harder than anything Patricia had said all day.
I turned away.
“That’s not fair.”
“No.”
She rubbed her thumb over the pillow seam.
“It probably isn’t.”
The apartment went quiet.
I hated her for almost thirty seconds.
It was not a noble feeling.
It was hot and childish and immediate.
Then I hated myself for hating her while she had stitches in her forehead.
“I watched him become worse,” I said.
Mom remained still.
“I saw it.”
“Yes.”
“I kept adjusting.”
“Yes.”
“He made comments about waiters, and I told myself he was stressed.”
She nodded.
“He stopped visiting you with me, and I said he was busy.”
“Yes.”
“He called my old neighborhood depressing.”
Mom gave a small shrug.
“It is depressing in February.”
I laughed despite myself.
Then I sat beside her.
“I kept lowering the standard.”
Her shoulder touched mine.
“That’s different from causing what happened.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Not yet.”
We sat there for a while.
Someone in the building dragged a chair across a floor.
The refrigerator compressor kicked on.
My phone buzzed once on the kitchen counter and neither of us moved.
At midnight, Mom finally went to bed.
I checked on her twice in the first hour.
The second time, she opened one eye and said, “If you come in again, I’m charging rent.”
I retreated.
Then I sat at her kitchen table with my laptop and did the one thing every lawyer had effectively told me not to do emotionally.
I looked backward.
Not through confidential company records.
Through my own life.
Email.
Texts.
Calendar entries.
Photographs.
Three years of marriage reduced to search bars and dates.
I typed Meridian Strategic Holdings into my inbox.
Nothing.
I searched Jason’s name with phrases like facility, draw request, syndicate, and Hudson.
Hundreds of messages appeared, mostly forwarded documents and invitations I had barely read.
I did not open the corporate attachments.
Instead, I searched our personal messages.
At 1:18 in the morning, I found something.
It was from seven months earlier.
Jason had sent me a photograph from an airport lounge.
A whiskey glass sat beside his laptop.
His caption read, Another glamorous Tuesday.
At the edge of the photograph, half visible behind the glass, was a printed document.
May you like
Most of the page was obscured.
One line near the top was legible.
