Chapter 18: What Franklin Asked

Colin's footsteps went down the stairs and out into the street, and I sat holding the signed resignation.

Alasdair came to the office door a minute later.

He didn't say "never mind."

He stood in the frame with his phone in one hand and a creased envelope in the other.

"I need to give you two things," he said. "I'd like to give them to you before you tell me what you think."

"Sit."

He sat in the chair Colin had left warm.

"Lorna came here on Thursday with a check," he said. "I tore it up. She told me something I hadn't known, and I recorded all of it."

He put the phone on the desk between us.

"I've had it for two days. I couldn't find a way to hand it to you that didn't hurt."

"Play it."

"Genevieve."

"Play it, Alasdair."

He pressed the screen and turned the sound down low.

I heard Lorna's voice, flat and level.

I heard her say trustee, and no, and the six months Franklin had begged her for.

I heard her say she had held his hand while he cried and had not signed off the money.

When it ended I realized I had gripped the edge of the desk hard enough to whiten my knuckles.

For a moment I did not feel anything at all.

Then it came, slow and heavy, from a long way down.

It was grief for a man I had bathed and fed and read the newspaper to, who told me every night that he was fine.

"He knew," I said. "He knew she wouldn't, and he never told me."

"He told me it was the bank."

"He lied to both of us so we wouldn't hate her."

"Yes."

"It didn't work."

Alasdair's eyes were bright. He didn't wipe them.

"There's the other thing," he said. "I should have shown you this in September."

He held out the envelope.

It was old and soft, and the handwriting on the front sloped uphill. Alasdair.

"It was inside the blue folder, under the clause. I read it the night he gave it to me."

He looked at his hands.

"I kept it back because of what it says."

I took out the single sheet.

It was dated the October before he died, five months before the end.

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