Chapter 13: What He Owned

My father drove us home with both hands on the wheel and did not ask me one question.

Teddy sat in the back in his bedsheet, holding the ghost eyeholes in his lap.

At the gate on Round Hill Road, my father stopped the car and looked at me for a long moment.

"Whatever it is," he said, "it can wait until the sun is up."

"Thank you, Dad."

"Don't thank me. Go and take that dress off before it gets any sadder."

I went upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed in the black gown.

I did not cry.

I sat there until the clock on my dresser said ten minutes past two, and then I heard an engine in the road.

It stopped at the gate and did not start again.

I knew that engine.

I put a coat over the gown and walked down the drive in my bare feet, because I was too angry to look for shoes.

Lawrence was standing on the other side of the iron bars with his hands at his sides.

He had not touched the gate or the buzzer.

His tie was gone, and his collar was open, and the scar through his eyebrow looked raw in the lamplight.

"I'm not going to ask you to let me in," he said.

"Good."

"I'm going to ask you to listen for ten minutes, and then I'll go."

"You've had five weeks."

"I know how many weeks I've had."

He said it so quietly that the wind almost took it.

"Ten minutes," I said. "Start."

He looked past me at the dark house.

"When I was fourteen, my father ran a boat finance company in Stamford," he said. "Eleven employees. He knew every one of their kids."

"Preston's father bought a controlling piece of the company that held our credit."

"He told my father it was a partnership."

"It wasn't."

His voice stayed flat.

"In March he called every loan we had on the same morning. It was legal, and it was in the paperwork."

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