Chapter 20: The File

I rehearsed it in the loft for an hour, standing in front of the cold piano.

Joanna, your mother knew from the start.

Joanna, there's something I should have told you in the church kitchen.

Joanna, I love you, and I've been holding a secret that isn't mine.

None of them worked.

I was on the fourth version when the front door opened at eleven in the morning, which was wrong.

Joanna never came home before six.

She stood in the doorway in her gray suit, with a manila folder in one hand and her car keys still in the other.

Her face was perfectly blank.

It was the face she wore for bad quarterly numbers.

"Joanna," I said. "I was just going to..."

"My CFO came to my office at nine," she said. "He had a question about a line he couldn't match."

She put the folder down on the counter, very gently.

"It's the family office ledger for the closing," she said. "Every payment since the first of the month."

"I can explain."

"Can you?"

She opened the folder and turned it around to face me.

There was my name, and the first twelve thousand, and the three thousand after.

Under it was a column of small black print.

Authorized by Marjorie Breckinridge.

Beside the three thousand dollars, her mother had written a note in the margin in blue pen.

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