Chapter 7: What I Want

Odette came through the door of my shop with a tray of coffees and the broken glass crunching under her shoes.

"Oh my God, Tilda!" she cried. "Are you hurt?"

Every head in the room turned.

The two officers stood by the register with their notebooks open.

Odette saw them, and then she saw the laptop on the counter with her own face frozen on its screen.

Her smile held for a second.

Then it went out.

"Ms. Kern," the tall officer said. "Can we have a word outside?"

"Of course," she said. "Of course. I just brought coffee."

I took one of the cups from her tray, and she let me.

"Thank you," I said. "That was kind. Black?"

"Black," Odette whispered.

I drank some of it while she watched me.

It was black, no sugar.

She had remembered.

The police left with her at six, with the footage on a drive and a promise to call my lawyer.

Gavin went out the back, taking his coat and his smile with him.

I stood in the wrecked front room, holding a paper cup, and understood that I could not do this alone.

That evening I sat in a corner booth at a steakhouse on the east side, wearing my navy dress and a clean bandage on my wrist.

Emmett had called three board members and asked them to come.

They sat across from me: a retired judge, a woman who ran a regional bank, and a gray-haired man who had known my father forty years.

I put my phone on the table and played the recording of my mother.

Then I laid down the forged term sheet beside a copy of my real signature.

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