Chapter 21: Ansel's POV: His Father's Grave

Ansel's POV

The cemetery was an hour west of the city, on a hill with old maples, and there was still snow in the shade of the stones.

My father's was small and gray.

HAWKE, it said, and under it, because my mother had insisted: HE KEPT GOOD BOOKS.

I stood in front of it with the green ledger in my hands.

It was a cloth-bound thing with the corners worn through, and every page was ruled in his square pencil.

I had carried it since the week he died.

"Dad," I said.

The caretaker had lent me a trowel from the shed.

He had taken one look at my face and gone back to his raking, a long way off.

I knelt in the cold and cut a square of turf from beside the stone.

"I did it wrong," I said.

The ground was frozen under the top inch, and I broke it with the edge of the blade.

"The woman who signed that statement is the one I ended up loving."

I laid the ledger in the hole with the last page up.

It said, in his hand, four days before the insurer wrote: All lines true.

"She's a lawyer. She's sharp and she's funny and she's been lied to by the same man you were."

"I bought his debt for you. That was the right part."

"The rest I did for me. I kept her in my house with a contract so she'd have to stay, and I called it protection."

I pressed the turf back over the book with both palms.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry I let it get to be about me."

My right hand was shaking.

It had been shaking since the lobby of the Amesbury building, when the doorman told me she was upstairs holding the whole room.

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