Chapter 14: Ten Years of Checks

Wylie sat on his kitchen floor with the ledger open across his knees.

I stood over him and watched him turn the pages.

He didn't look up.

"Ask it," he said.

"Ask what?"

"Whatever you've been holding since the stairwell. You've had it on your face all night."

I had.

It had been sitting behind my teeth since Tuesday.

"Ten years," I said.

He lifted his head.

"You sat on that board for ten years. You signed her checks and smiled at her galas and sat in the second row."

"I know."

"Not once did you ask why a grieving mother settled with number twelve in secret. Not once did you ask why she never wanted the file opened."

"I asked her to let me see the police report in my second year."

"And?"

"She cried, and I apologized."

"You apologized."

"I was twenty-eight, and she was crying in my father's kitchen."

"I was seven," I said, "and she was smiling in a mall."

The room went very quiet.

He shut the ledger and set it on the floor, and he got to his feet slowly.

"That's fair," he said.

"I don't want fair."

"What do you want?"

"I want to know why a man who notices that her shoes change every year never once asked what else did."

"Because it was my father's wife."

"It was my mother."

"I didn't know that!"

His voice cracked across the kitchen, and neither of us moved.

"I didn't know," he said again, lower. "I thought I was helping a woman find a lost child. I thought I was the one decent person in the room."

"You were the one holding the pen."

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