“If I do not like what I find?”
I picked up the key.
“You will certainly not like it.”
“If I cannot live with it?”
He looked down at his plate.
“Then I will not blame you,” he said. “But I think you’ll see that I had good reasons for doing what I did.”
What was that supposed to mean?
I left the table.
The brass key felt heavier than it should have as I climbed the stairs to Richard’s office.
“You will certainly not like it.”
I had not been inside that room in years.
He kept it locked, and I had told myself it was because of his clients’ tax records.
The drawer slid open without resistance.
The blue folder sat right where he’d said it would be.
I sat down in his leather chair and opened it.
The first page was a bank transfer from 2001.
I had not been inside that room in years.
Forty-two thousand dollars.
It had been moved from a business account I did not recognize into our personal checking.
The memo line read, “loan repayment.”
I flipped the page.
“loan repayment.”
Another transfer.
Then another.
Every page answered one question and created two more.
The account name belonged to Richard’s old partnership.
The business that had failed.
The memo line read, “loan repayment.”
My mother’s hospital invoices were paper-clipped behind the transfers.
The dates matched.
Every single one.
Then I saw a newspaper clipping about Richard’s former business partner, Thomas.
He had died of a stroke in 2004, leaving a widow and a teenage daughter with nothing.
The article showed a photo of Thomas’s family.
The girl in the picture was Heather.
The dates matched.
I walked downstairs with the folder against my chest.
Richard was waiting in the living room, his hands clasped between his knees.
He looked up when he heard me.
For the first time in twenty-three years, I saw fear in his face.
“You’re a thief,” I said.
“Linda—”
I saw fear in his face.
“You took everything Thomas had. You let his wife sell the house. You let Heather drop out of college.”
“Sit down,” he said.
“Don’t tell me to sit down.”
