Chương 9
Rachel’s expression crumpled for one second before she recovered.
She picked up the notebook.
“I wrote down how much money I thought I’d need.”
Daniel said nothing.
“How much rent would be. What school pickup would look like if we didn’t live together. Which things were mine. Which accounts had both names.”
His stomach tightened.
“Did you talk to anyone?”
“No.”
“Did you open another account?”
Rachel hesitated.
“Yes.”
Daniel closed his eyes.
“There’s twelve hundred dollars in it now.”
“How much was in it before?”
“Almost nine thousand.”
“What happened to it?”
“Most went to the card.”
He nodded slowly.
“Do you still plan to leave?”
Rachel looked at him.
“I don’t know.”
The answer hurt because it was honest.
Daniel leaned back.
“When did you stop planning?”
“I never exactly planned.”
“Rachel.”
“I stopped writing about it after your mother died.”
“Why?”
She laughed once.
“Because you fell apart.”
Daniel’s face hardened.
Rachel held up a hand.
“I’m not saying that cruelly.”
“How are you saying it?”
“You were barely functioning. You were going to work, yes. You were paying bills. You were making lunches. You were doing all the visible things. But you’d stand in the laundry room and stare at the dryer for five minutes because you forgot why you went in there.”
Daniel looked away.
Rachel continued.
“Emily asked you to read to her one night, and you read the same page three times.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I know.”
He rubbed his forehead.
“So you stayed because you felt sorry for me.”
“At first?”
Daniel looked at her.
Rachel did not soften it.
“Yes.”
He absorbed that.
“Then?”
Rachel looked toward the stairs.
“Then you got better.”
“Did I?”
“Some.”
“Enough to stay?”
“Apparently.”
“That sounds romantic.”
“This is not a romantic night.”
Daniel let out a breath that might have been a laugh.
Rachel did too.
The old phone vibrated.
Both stopped.
The screen lit.
A white battery icon appeared.
Daniel stared at it.
Rachel said, “It may take a minute.”
He nodded.
Neither moved.
The silence between them changed again.
Not safer.
More specific.
Daniel looked at the necklace.
“Why didn’t you tell me after the debt was under control?”
Rachel traced a scratch in the island with one fingernail.
“Because the longer I waited, the bigger the confession got.”
“You could have said, ‘I did something awful.’”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You were finally sleeping.”
“That is not a reason.”
“I know.”
“You were protecting me?”
“No.”
The answer was immediate.
Rachel looked at him.
“I was protecting myself.”
Daniel nodded.
That, at least, made sense.
She continued.
“I knew exactly what your face would look like.”
“What does it look like?”
“Like right now.”
He almost asked what that meant.
He decided not to.
The old phone vibrated again.
The lock screen appeared.
A photograph of Noah and Emily from nearly two years earlier filled the cracked display. Noah was missing the same front tooth he had in the broken family portrait. Emily wore a swimsuit and swim goggles on her forehead.
Daniel stared at it.
He had forgotten that wallpaper.
He picked up the phone.
The device felt familiar in an almost physical way.
His thumb moved automatically toward the code.
Rachel watched.
He entered it.
The phone unlocked.
A series of old notifications populated.
No service.
No current messages.
Daniel opened the photo library.
Rachel shifted.
He looked at her.
“Do you want to leave?”
“No.”
He paused.
“I mean this room.”
Rachel understood.
“No.”
He opened the most recent photographs.
The necklace appeared immediately.
Front.
Back.
Clasp.
Pendant.
Rachel’s hand holding it against a sheet of white printer paper.
Time stamp: two days before the funeral.
Daniel’s stomach turned.
He swiped.
Another photograph.
Another.
Then a screenshot of an appraisal form.
Estimated resale range.
$9,000 to $13,000.
He looked at Rachel.
“That’s all they thought it was worth?”
Rachel blinked.
Of everything she expected him to say, that was not one.
“I guess.”
“My mother told everybody it was priceless.”
Rachel’s mouth twitched.
“She also thought restaurant dessert was a criminal conspiracy.”
Daniel looked down.
A laugh escaped him.
He covered his eyes with one hand.
The laugh became something else.
Not crying exactly.
His shoulders shook once.
Rachel stood instinctively.
Then stopped.
Daniel lowered his hand.
“Don’t.”
She sat again.
He swiped backward through the photographs.
The images changed from the necklace to ordinary family life.
Emily asleep on the sofa with one sock missing.
Noah holding a tray of burnt cookies.
Rachel on the back patio, hair tied up, squinting into sunlight.
His mother was not in the recent photographs.
That absence hurt more than Daniel expected.
He continued.
There she was.
Eleven months and three weeks earlier.
Sitting in the living room chair that now faced the broken photograph.
Thin.
Wearing the necklace.
Daniel’s thumb stopped.
Rachel looked at the screen and then away.
Daniel enlarged the picture.
His mother was laughing.
Not at the camera.
At Emily, who was partly visible at the bottom edge, one small hand reaching upward.
The pendant was caught between Emily’s fingers.
Daniel remembered the moment.
His mother had said, “You’re going to pull my head off, kid.”
Emily had laughed.
Daniel had taken the picture.
Something else returned.
A sentence.
Not important when it happened.
Important now.
His mother had looked at Emily’s hand and said, “That’ll be yours one day if you quit trying to steal it before I’m dead.”
Daniel stopped breathing.
Rachel noticed.
“What?”
He looked at her.
“Did you hear her say it was for Emily?”
Rachel’s face changed.
“What?”
“The necklace.”
Rachel shook her head slowly.
“I heard her joke about it.”
“No.”
Daniel looked back at the photograph.
“She said it would be Emily’s.”
Rachel stared at him.
“You remember that?”
“I just did.”
Rachel looked at the necklace.
For several seconds neither spoke.
Finally she said, “That doesn’t make what I did okay.”
May you like
“No.”
“I didn’t take it for Emily.”
