Chương 8
“Did she listen?”
“Not often.”
“That probably made you mad.”
“It did.”
“She married my dad.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Richard paused.
“Some reasons were real. He had debt. He changed jobs often. He was impulsive.”
“My mom said he was fun.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“She said you called him irresponsible.”
“I did.”
“Was he?”
“Sometimes.”
Lily waited.
Richard looked at her.
“And sometimes I used his mistakes as evidence that Anna should let me control her.”
“What happened?”
“I offered to help them buy a home.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was not entirely nice.”
“What did you want?”
Richard looked at the passing cars.
“I wanted the property in a trust I controlled. I wanted Daniel to sign financial agreements. I wanted them to live near me.”
Lily frowned.
“That’s weird.”
“Yes.”
“What did Mom do?”
“She told me no.”
“And?”
“I told her that if she walked out, she should not come back when things went badly.”
Lily’s expression went still.
Richard heard the sentence again in his own voice.
It had sounded powerful when he was fifty-two.
Now it sounded like a frightened man trying to make love obey.
“She left,” Lily said.
“Yes.”
“And things went badly.”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t come back.”
Richard looked at her.
“No.”
Lily folded the letters carefully.
“She listened to you.”
Richard had no answer for that.
The Hale Foundation board suspended Victoria the following Monday.
Richard attended the meeting but did not vote.
He had expected the decision to be simple.
It was not.
Several board members argued that one terrible act should not erase eleven years of work.
Others pointed out that Victoria’s behavior had not occurred in private. It had happened at a charity event where the foundation was celebrating a new initiative on childhood food insecurity.
That detail made the story spread farther.
News outlets picked up the video.
The irony was too clean.
Victoria’s name trended for two days.
People discovered old photographs of her at galas, speeches about dignity, interviews about service. Strangers who had never met her called her a monster. Other strangers defended her because they disliked online outrage more than they cared about what she had done.
Richard watched none of it after the first day.
Lily did.
At school, children repeated phrases adults had posted.
One boy asked whether Victoria was going to jail.
Lily said, “For kicking bread?”
He shrugged.
“My dad says rich people don’t go to jail.”
Lily went home irritated by both of them.
Gloria found her at the kitchen counter tearing a napkin into tiny squares.
“You want to talk?”
“No.”
“Good. I’m tired.”
Lily looked at her.
Gloria opened the refrigerator.
“There’s chicken.”
“I don’t want chicken.”
“There’s not-chicken.”
“What’s that?”
“Chicken you complain about while eating.”
Lily smiled despite herself.
Richard arrived twenty minutes later.
He had started coming without the extra security car.
That had been Denise’s suggestion.
He also stopped wearing suits every day.
The first time he arrived in a navy sweater, Lily had stared at him long enough to make him self-conscious.
“What?”
“You look like a principal.”
“I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Nothing.”
That evening he found her quieter than usual.
“School?”
She shrugged.
“Video?”
Another shrug.
Richard sat across from her.
“I can ask the school to—”
Lily looked at him.
He stopped.
“Right.”
Gloria put plates on the table.
“Growth.”
Richard ignored her.
Lily asked, “Is Victoria going to lose her job?”
“Possibly.”
“Because of me?”
“No.”
“Because she kicked my bag.”
“Because of what that revealed about her judgment and behavior.”
“That sounds like lawyer talking.”
“It is adjacent to lawyer talking.”
“Would she lose her job if nobody recorded it?”
Richard did not answer quickly enough.
Lily nodded.
“That’s what I thought.”
The question stayed with him.
At the next board meeting, Victoria appeared in person.
She wore gray instead of emerald green. No diamonds. Minimal makeup. Richard immediately disliked that he noticed, because it meant he was wondering whether the appearance had been calculated.
Probably.
People calculated when frightened.
Victoria sat across from the board and read no prepared statement.
“I was cruel to a child,” she said.
The room stayed quiet.
“I have explanations. Stress. Security concerns. Event pressure. None of them explain the kick. I did that because I was angry that someone I considered out of place was making me uncomfortable.”
Richard watched her.
Victoria looked at him once.
Then away.
“I did not know Lily was Richard’s granddaughter.”
A board member shifted.
Victoria continued.
“And that sentence has become the worst part of what I keep saying, because I hear what it means every time. I am admitting I would have behaved differently if I had known she mattered to somebody powerful.”
Her voice shook.
She stopped.
Nobody helped her.
“I don’t know whether I should keep my job.”
That surprised Richard.
So did the next sentence.
“I know I should not be allowed to decide that.”
The board voted to terminate her as executive director.
The vote was not unanimous.
Richard abstained.
Afterward Victoria caught him in the hallway.
“So that’s it.”
Richard stopped.
“You heard the vote.”
“I meant us.”
“There is an us?”
“I’m your niece.”
There it was.
Not executive director.
Not public scandal.
Family.
Richard looked at her.
Victoria’s father, his younger brother Thomas, had died when Victoria was seventeen. Richard had paid for college, graduate school, her first apartment, and eventually offered her a position at the foundation.
He had told himself he was helping.
He had also enjoyed being needed.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Victoria laughed without humor.
“You know what’s funny?”
“Probably not.”
“Watching you become a completely different man because Anna’s daughter showed up.”
Richard felt the accusation land.
Victoria stepped closer.
“I spent half my life trying to be the daughter who stayed.”
“You are not my daughter.”
“I know.”
Her face tightened.
“That’s the point.”
May you like
Richard said nothing.
Victoria looked toward the boardroom doors.
