After a Year of Silence novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: On the Record
I gave my comment at six thirty, in the glass conference room, with the door open and Miles beside me.
The reporter set her recorder on the table between us and pressed the red button.
"Ms. Linwood, did you hide your marriage to keep your job?"
"I hid it to keep my name on my work," I said. "I made that choice three years ago. Nobody forced it on me, and he asked me four times to change it."
"Who is 'he'?"
"My husband. Quentin Brightwell. Put his name next to mine, spelled right."
She wrote it down.
"On Monday you pushed him in front of forty employees," she said. "Do you regret that?"
"He grabbed my hand and my waist without asking, and I said no with my hands," I said. "I don't regret it. I regret that he thought he'd earned the right."
"And now?"
"Now he asks first."
Miles made a small noise beside me that might have been a cough.
The reporter turned a page.
"Ms. Bradstreet says you had a personal reason to resent the company's chief executive. That you blamed him for something."
"I blamed him for something true," I said. "My father died last year while Quentin was in London. He did not come home. I was angry for a year."
"And you are still angry."
"Yes."
"Then why are you defending him?"
"I'm not defending him," I said. "I'm telling you what he did and didn't do. He didn't come. He also didn't know. The person who decided what each of us was told is the woman who gave you her version last night."
The reporter put down her pen.
"That's a heavy accusation."
"The board chair fired her in front of the whole floor for it. You can ask the chair. You can ask the forty people who watched her carry out her coffee."
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