Chapter 8 - THE SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS
“I can explain.”
There may be no more dangerous sentence in a family.
Mom sat at the kitchen table while six people waited for her explanation.
She looked at Daniel first.
“I didn’t know the money came from Marcus Bell.”
Daniel said nothing.
Dad did.
“Who did you think it came from?”
“Vale Industrial.”
“For what?”
Mom looked at me.
“To keep quiet.”
My entire body went cold.
“About Daniel?”
“Yes.”
Dad stood.
“You took hush money?”
“I thought it was severance compensation.”
“You didn’t work there!”
“It was because of you!”
Dad stared.
Mom’s voice rose.
“You lost your job after the fire. They blacklisted you. We were three months from foreclosure!”
That part I didn’t know.
Dad sat back down slowly.
“You told me your mother loaned us the money.”
“She did loan some.”
“How much?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“And the rest?”
Mom looked at the table.
Dad understood.
“Oh my God.”
She started crying.
“They told me signing the agreement only meant I wouldn’t discuss rumors about Daniel or Vale Industrial publicly.”
“Who brought it?”
“A lawyer.”
“Name?”
“I don’t remember.”
Daniel slid the ledger toward her.
“Marcus Bell?”
She stared at the photograph clipped to the copy.
Then nodded.
“Yes.”
Dad swore.
“You sat in our kitchen with him?”
“I didn’t know!”
“When?”
“After you had gone to work.”
Daniel’s expression hardened.
“What questions did he ask?”
Mom began remembering.
“Whether Emma had contacted us.”
My stomach tightened.
“What did you say?”
“That she hadn’t.”
“Had I?”
“No.”
“Anything else?”
Mom looked sick.
“He asked whether I knew where you lived.”
The room went completely silent.
“And?”
“I said no.”
This time I believed her.
Because she had known where I was in Ohio.
But by then I had already moved out of state.
She could have given him Marissa’s address.
She hadn’t.
Mom looked at me.
“I may have failed you in every other way, but I never gave him your location.”
I believed that too.
Life was becoming exhausting in its refusal to make anyone completely one thing.
Dad looked at the amount again.
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“We used it to keep the house.”
“Our house?”
“Yes.”
I looked around.
The same living room.
The same porch.
The same house I had been thrown out of.
Paid for, in part, by money connected to the people hunting Daniel.
The irony was sickening.
Daniel surprised everyone.
“You should keep the house.”
Mom stared at him.
“What?”
“You didn’t understand where the money came from.”
Dad shook his head.
“That doesn’t make it clean.”
“No.”
Daniel’s expression softened.
“But destroying yourselves now won’t change what Bell did.”
I watched him.
Ten years ago he had been impulsive.
Sharp.
Angry at injustice.
The man standing here now had learned something harder than anger.
Proportion.
Dad looked at me.
“What do you want us to do?”
I almost laughed.
For the first time in my life, my father was asking.
Not telling.
“I don’t know.”
That was the truth.
“And I don’t need to decide today.”
He nodded.
No argument.
Daniel’s phone vibrated.
He glanced at it.
His face changed.
“What?”
He looked at me.
“Someone else is coming.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
Margaret Mercer.
I had not seen her since I was nineteen.
She had loved me once.
At least I thought she had.
Then Daniel disappeared and she never contacted me.
I assumed grief had swallowed her.
Daniel looked uncomfortable.
“There’s something you need to know before she gets here.”
My stomach tightened.
“What?”
“After the fire, your mother called mine.”
I turned toward Mom.
Her face collapsed before he finished.
Daniel continued.
“She told Margaret you were pregnant.”
I stared.
Mom whispered, “Emma…”
May you like
Daniel’s jaw tightened.
“And she told my mother you had decided not to keep the baby.”
