Chapter 9 - The Reckoning
I didn't offer her a tissue. I didn't sit beside her on the stairs and stroke her hair. Comfort offered too soon is a sedative that prevents people from feeling the wound they need to heal.
I walked into the kitchen, put the kettle on the stove, and waited for the water to boil.
The sound of the kettle’s low whistle was the first normal sound the house had heard all evening. It filled the cavernous, designer kitchen with the simple, grounded reality of an ordinary night.
I poured two cups of black tea. I brought them into the living room, set one on the small table beside the stairs, and took the other over to David’s wingback chair.
I sat down.
Emily was still sitting on the stairs, staring at the cup of tea.
“What happens now?” she asked, her voice hollowed out.
“Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, Katherine Cross’s office will file the new will with the Surrogate’s Court,” I said. “At ten o’clock, Katherine will file the foreclosure action against Bradley’s firm. By noon, his partners will have expelled him from the partnership to save their own licenses.”
Emily closed her eyes. “And me?”
“That depends entirely on you.”
“Dad gave you everything,” she whispered. “He locked me out.”
“Your father didn't lock you out, Emily,” I said gently. “He locked Bradley out. And he gave me the key so that you couldn't hand it to him.”
Emily looked down at her hands. The diamond engagement ring Bradley had given her—a three-carat stone purchased with money borrowed against David’s commercial credit line—gleamed in the lamplight.
“He never loved me,” she said, the realization settling into her bones like lead. “He loved what he thought Dad was going to leave me.”
“David knew that two months after you brought him home for Thanksgiving,” I said. “David watched his hands. He watched the way Bradley looked at the silverware, the way he asked about the zoning on the East Hampton lot before he asked about your childhood.”
“Why didn't Dad stop the wedding?”
“Because you were thirty-one years old, Emily,” I said. “Because if we had told you he was a fraud, you would have married him out of spite to prove us wrong. Your father knew you had to see the fire yourself before you would stop playing with the matches.”
Emily reached down. With shaking fingers, she pulled the diamond ring off her finger.
She looked at it for a long moment, then placed it on the stair beside her teacup. It rolled slightly and stopped against the riser.
“I don't have anywhere to go,” she said. “The lease on the city apartment is in Bradley’s company name. They’ll seize it by next week, won't they?”
“Yes,” I said. “They will.”
“Can I stay here?”
I looked at the living room. I looked at the fingerprints on the glass cabinet, the spilled Krug on the herringbone floor, the faint smell of cigar smoke clinging to the curtains David had picked out in Paris.
“No,” I said.
Emily’s face crumpled again. “Mom, please.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “And not this month. You need to go to Bar Harbor. The cottage is open. The winter is cold up there. There are no caterers, no real estate brokers, no parties, and no Bradley.”
I set my teacup down.
“You will spend the winter learning who you are when you don't have your father’s name to spend. You will chop wood, you will pay the oil bill from the small allowance David set aside for your maintenance, and you will think about the kind of woman you want to be when you turn fifty.”
“And you?” she asked, looking at me with something approaching reverence for the first time in her adult life. “Will you be here alone?”
May you like
“I am not alone,” I said softly. “David is here. His books are here. His house is here. And for the first time in seven days, I can finally hear him.”
***
