Chapter 9
Mark was in the kitchen when I came out of the study. I still had the image of the empty drawer in my mind: the pale rectangle where the original inventory had been, the dust disturbed around it.
“Did you take Aunt Ruth’s inventory?” I asked.
He glanced up from his phone. “What inventory?”
“The handwritten one from the lower drawer. It’s gone.”
His expression shifted—not surprise, exactly, but irritation at being asked.
“You probably moved it,” he said. “You’ve been pulling papers out of every file in the house.”
“I put it back where it belonged.”
“You’re tired, Susan. You’ve been upset about all this. You could have put it anywhere.”
The words landed with the practiced softness of a hand pressing down on a lid.
“I know what I did,” I said. “And I know what was in that drawer.”
“Then you should know you’re the one who manages the household records.”
He looked back at his phone, as if the conversation had been settled by assigning me responsibility for the mess. For a moment, I could almost feel the old reflex tugging at me: apologize, search again, make the inconvenience mine.
Instead, I held his gaze.
“If you find it, don’t touch it. Tell me.”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “You really think I took it?”
“I asked you a question.”
“And I answered. You misplaced it.”
He walked past me. His shoulder brushed mine—not hard enough to call a shove, but hard enough to make clear he expected me to step aside.
I didn’t.
He had to angle around me to get through the doorway.
My phone rang before I could follow him. The number was unfamiliar, but the voice that came through was not.
“Susan? It’s Peter.”
The barbecue returned in a flash: four men near the grill, Mark’s easy laugh, Peter’s uneasy one. I remembered the way Peter had gone quiet when Mark began listing all the ways he thought I had failed.
“I’m sorry to call like this,” he said. “I should have said something sooner.”
“About what?”
“I heard you’re trying to stop the parcel sale.”
My fingers tightened around the phone. “Who told you that?”
“Caleb. Not directly. I called him after the barbecue. I wanted to know what Mark was talking about.”
He paused. Behind his voice, I heard the faint rattle of a car window.
“Caleb said he’d been working on securing the parcel for a while,” Peter continued. “He said it was supposed to be locked down before Mark made any separation public.”
The kitchen seemed to tilt—not from surprise, but from the cold precision of the timing.
“When was this?”
“Before the barbecue. I wrote the date down because Caleb gave me his card and asked me to call him about another deal. I still have it.”
“Peter, why are you telling me now?”
A breath scraped through the phone.
“Because I knew something was wrong, and I didn’t want to get in the middle of it. I told myself it was just Mark venting. But I heard what he said about you, and I stood there.”
He didn’t try to dress up his silence as courage.
“I’m not asking you to make it right for me,” I said.
“I know. I want to tell Miriam what Caleb said. I’ll bring her the card. It has the date on it.”
At Miriam’s office, Peter held the card carefully between two fingers. It bore Caleb’s name and business number; on the back, Peter had written a date in blocky black ink.
“I put it down as soon as I got home from lunch with him,” he told Miriam. “I remember because he said Mark wanted the whole thing handled before he announced he was leaving.”
Miriam studied the card, then looked at Peter.
“You’re willing to confirm that?”
Peter’s jaw worked. “I am.”
“Caleb is a friend of yours?” I asked.
“He was.” Peter lowered his eyes to the card. “Or I thought he was.”
“And Mark?”
Peter looked at me. “Thirty years.”
The quiet that followed held all the years none of us could put back into place.
“I heard Mark at the barbecue,” Peter said. “I should’ve stopped him. I didn’t. I can at least tell the truth now.”
Miriam made a copy of the card and returned the original to him. Peter tucked it into his wallet, but not before I saw how his thumb pressed hard over the date, as if he were trying to keep it from fading.
When I got home, Mark was waiting in the hall. His phone rested in his hand, screen dark.
“You took Peter to Miriam?”
I set my purse down. “He went because he wanted to speak.”
“You’re dragging our friends into this now?”
“He contacted me.”
“Same thing.” His voice rose just enough to carry toward the rooms beyond the hall. “You keep doing this, and the children will remember who destroyed their family.”
The old fear rose first: the children hearing, the years dividing, their faces turning toward one of us and away from the other. Then I felt something firmer underneath it.
“They shouldn’t have to choose between us,” I said. “But they don’t deserve to be handed your version and told it’s the truth.”
Mark’s mouth tightened.
“You’re making this impossible.”
“You made a plan for my property without asking me. You don’t get to call my refusal a betrayal.”
For one beat, he looked as if he might answer. Then he turned away and walked toward the back of the house.
My phone rang as his footsteps faded. Miriam’s name flashed on the screen.
I answered.
“Susan,” she said, “the buyer has moved the closing forward.”
I braced my hand against the wall.
May you like
“How soon?”
“Forty-eight hours.”
