Chapter 17: The Ledger

Darius's POV

I did not take my mother the copies by noon.

I took her something else.

At six that morning I let myself into the Foundation office with the spare key I had never turned in.

The building was dark, and the filing room smelled of toner.

The Hardship Fund ledger sat on the second shelf, where it had sat for nine years.

I turned to the January of the verdict.

*Corwin, R. Monthly assistance. $1,500.*

Under it, in the same hand: *Hutton, P. Tuition. Hutton, mortgage.*

I read the page twice.

Then I photographed every line from that month forward, a hundred and eight months of it.

I put the book back exactly as I had found it.

The two older board members sat at the long oak table at ten o'clock.

My mother had called the emergency meeting herself.

The notice said *removal of a director for conduct against the Foundation*, and the director was me.

Twenty staff stood along the wall, because she wanted witnesses.

A reporter from the county paper had a chair by the door.

Her lawyer sat at her right hand, and he had his pen out.

"Darius," my mother said, as I came in. "How nice of you to attend your own hearing."

"Good morning, Mother."

"You have the copies?"

"I have something better."

I walked to the table and set a folder in front of each of the two men.

They were seventy and seventy-four.

They had signed every page my mother put under their pens since before I could drive.

"Open it," I said.

The older one did.

His reading glasses went down his nose.

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