Chương 6
“Where?”
“At the house.”
Natalie’s first instinct was no.
Her second was also no.
The third took longer.
“Is Richard there?”
“No. Harold got him to go to the club.”
“That is the most Richard sentence I have ever heard.”
Daniel gave a tired laugh.
“Can you come?”
Natalie looked at Lily, who was watching a cartoon with the volume low.
“Not with her.”
“I know.”
“I need a sitter.”
“I can come stay with her.”
Natalie hesitated.
“You can come here, and I’ll go.”
Daniel’s silence told her he had noticed the distinction.
Not we.
Here.
“I’ll be there in twenty.”
The house felt different without Richard.
Natalie had expected triumph.
Instead she felt trespassing discomfort as soon as she stepped through the front door.
The entry smelled faintly of furniture polish and the lilies Elaine kept on a console table. Two framed photographs had been removed from the wall beside the staircase, leaving pale rectangles in the paint.
Elaine was in the dining room.
The ruined cake was gone.
The floor had been cleaned, but turquoise icing remained trapped in the narrow seam between two boards.
Natalie saw it immediately.
Elaine followed her eyes.
“I couldn’t get that out.”
“You didn’t have to clean it.”
“I needed something to do.”
Elaine wore gray slacks and an old cream cardigan rather than the burgundy dress from the night before. Without makeup, she looked older than fifty-eight.
She pulled out a chair.
Natalie sat.
For a while neither woman spoke.
A landscaper’s blower hummed somewhere beyond the tall windows.
Elaine folded and unfolded a paper napkin.
“I should have stopped him.”
Natalie looked at her.
“Yes.”
Elaine nodded.
No excuse.
That mattered.
“I knew he was upset before dinner,” she said. “I thought it was about the sale.”
“It was probably about everything.”
“He knew you’d been here with the inspector.”
Natalie’s eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“Last week.”
“I wasn’t.”
Elaine looked confused.
“He saw a blond woman leaving with the inspector.”
“That was Priya.”
“Oh.”
Elaine pressed the napkin flat.
“He assumed it was you. He kept saying Daniel had found some clever way around him.”
“So he suspected.”
“Something.”
That explained part of the cruelty.
Not all of it.
Natalie leaned back.
“Why Lily?”
Elaine stared at the table.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
The older woman swallowed.
Natalie waited.
Elaine had a habit of answering difficult questions by beginning somewhere else. Daniel did the same thing, though faster.
“When Daniel was six,” she said, “Richard’s brother got divorced.”
Natalie almost interrupted.
She did not.
“The brother remarried a woman with two children. Richard was horrible about it. Not openly, at first. Little comments. Blood matters. People should take care of their own. Things like that.”
Natalie’s stomach tightened.
“Why?”
“His father.”
“Daniel’s grandfather?”
Elaine nodded.
“Richard grew up hearing that family was inheritance, name, responsibility. That you never handed what was yours to someone who came from outside.”
“That sounds medieval.”
“It was Ohio.”
Natalie almost laughed.
Elaine smiled weakly.
Then the smile disappeared.
“Richard’s father left most of the business to Richard and almost nothing to his brother because the brother had adopted his wife’s children. Said he’d chosen another man’s family.”
Natalie stared at her.
“And Richard thought that was right?”
“At twenty-seven? I think he thought anything that made him the winner was right.”
The sentence stayed in the room.
Elaine rubbed the napkin edge.
“Years later, when his brother died, Richard paid for one of those children to finish college.”
Natalie said nothing.
“He never told anybody.”
“That doesn’t erase this.”
“No.”
“Or make it complicated.”
“No.”
Elaine looked up.
“It makes him complicated.”
Natalie considered that.
She did not want Richard complicated.
Complicated people were harder to hate cleanly.
Elaine’s voice dropped.
“Daniel looked up to him more than Richard deserved.”
“I know.”
“And Richard needed that.”
“I know.”
“He still does.”
Natalie looked toward the doorway.
“Then he should not have made Daniel choose between being his son and being Lily’s father.”
Elaine’s eyes filled.
“He did that long before last night.”
Natalie looked at her sharply.
Elaine covered her face with both hands.
When she lowered them, she seemed embarrassed by herself.
“He would say things when Daniel wasn’t around. About Lily. About you. I told him to stop.”
“How often?”
“I don’t know.”
“How often?”
“Enough.”
Natalie stood.
Elaine flinched.
Natalie walked to the window, then back.
“You invited us here.”
“I know.”
“You bought the cake.”
“I know.”
“You put her in that chair next to you.”
“I know.”
“And you knew he said those things?”
Elaine’s face crumpled.
“I thought if he spent enough time with her—”
“She is four.”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t get to use a four-year-old as exposure therapy for a grown man’s cruelty.”
Elaine closed her eyes.
Natalie hated the tremor in her own voice.
She hated that part of herself that wanted Elaine to defend Richard harder so anger could remain simple.
Instead Elaine said, “You’re right.”
Natalie turned away.
The room became quiet except for the leaf blower outside.
A minute passed.
Elaine spoke.
“Richard has never hit me.”
Natalie looked back.
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know.”
Elaine stared at the table.
“He doesn’t throw things at me. He doesn’t scream much. He doesn’t stop me from seeing people. I always thought those were the questions you were supposed to ask.”
Natalie stayed still.
Elaine rubbed her thumb against her wedding ring.
“He just makes the room smaller.”
The words were so plain Natalie had no immediate answer.
“He decides what is sensible,” Elaine continued. “What costs too much. Who is overreacting. Which memory is accurate. If I argue, he waits. He can wait longer than anybody I know. Eventually I get tired and go make coffee.”
She laughed once, ashamed.
“I make a lot of coffee.”
Natalie returned to the table.
“Do you want to stay here?”
Elaine looked around the dining room.
May you like
“I don’t know.”
“Not forever. Today.”
