“It is you,” she said. “I told myself the whole drive it wouldn’t be. That it would be some retired exec from the shipping firm. Or an accountant who covered for him. Or maybe a juror with a heavy conscience.”
She shook her head slowly. “When the checks started the month after the funeral, I thought, who does that? Who in the world looks at what’s left of a family and decides to . . .” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “And then I saw your name in a legal notice. In a town I’d never heard of. The same town my money is coming from.” She let out a breath. “You don’t have a forgettable face, Mr. Steele, particularly after I stared at it for weeks.”
“Mrs. Perry?—”
She interrupted, “I’ve reverted to my maiden name, Carter. I changed the children’s last names to Carter, as well. None of us need to be associated with my former husband’s sins.”
He nodded and corrected himself, his voice rough with emotion, “Ms. Carter. There’s no version of ‘I’m sorry’ that isn’t an insult to you. So I’m not going to say it. I’m going to say I’ve owed you a conversation for three years, and I was a coward to avoid it for this long. I’m grateful that you’re braver than I am.”
“Come sit on the porch, both of you,” Grace said quietly, “before one of you falls down.” She led them into the kitchen. He ushered Sunny out to the porch, and Grace brought out the coffee and cinnamon rolls.
Sunny took the chair; he took the end of the couch. She held her coffee cup in both hands without drinking it, as if she mostly wanted something warm to hold.
“I came to say some things,” she said. “I rehearsed them. Now I’m here, and they’re all jumbled up in my head.” She took a breath. “So I’ll just say them out of order. Is that all right?”
“Say them however you want to,” Reno replied.
“Winston told me, three or four times during the trial, that he was never going to see the inside of a prison.” She said it flatly, like a fact she’d long since stopped flinching from.
His gaze dropped to her fingers, which she twisted together until they turned red. “I thought he meant he was going to win the case. By the second week, when it became clear he’d done all the things he was accused of, I understood that he really meant he would run before he went to jail.”
Reno listened with intense focus, but out of the corner of his eye noted that Grace was also listening intently.
Sunny continued, “I knew he had a secret bank account, somewhere. But I had no idea where and no idea how much money was in it. He had a passport in a fake name that I did find. But I never confronted him about it. I sat in that courtroom every day doing the math on whether he was going to take us with him or leave us behind.”
Grace made a tiny, involuntary sound of sympathy.
“Somewhere in the third week, when I knew for sure the kind of man he really was, I also knew the answer to my question. He was going to leave us behind.”
Reno winced. That had to have been impossibly hard, to sit there, learning in front of a courtroom full of strangers what a terrible person her husband was.
Her mouth twisted. “I’d been married to him eleven years and I had no idea who he really was and what he was capable of until a stranger—you—,” she glanced up briefly at him, “laid out exactly who he was for that jury and me.”
The porch was very quiet.
“The man you took apart on that witness stand,” Sunny said, and now she did look right at Reno, dead level, “I’d been trying to see him clearly for eleven years. And I couldn’t. I loved him and you didn’t, and so I kept finding reasons for the things I couldn’t explain. He’s stressed. He’s ambitious. Everybody cuts corners. I was so naïve back then. It never occurred to me to wonder how a man that made a half million dollars a year lived a ten million dollar a year lifestyle.
“At the end, when you stood up and said . . .” Her voice caught. She steadied it. “You said he was a man who took whatever he wanted from whoever was nearest and called it success. And I knew you were right. You said he’d looked every person who trusted him in the eye and lied, and gone home and slept fine. And I knew from sleeping beside him for eleven years that you were right about that, too. You said he wasn’t a man who’d made a mistake. He was a man who’d made a choice, over and over, for years, and the only thing he was sorry about was getting caught.” She took a shaky breath. “And you were right about that, too.”
“I remember,” Reno said. He remembered all of it. He’d gone for the jugular. He’d been proud of it for about twelve hours until he’d gotten the call that Perry was dead, and he’d been ashamed of it for three years.
“You said to his face, in front of God and the jury and me, every single thing I had been trying to make myself say to him as the trial progressed and could not.”
Tears trickled down her cheeks now, but her voice held. “I couldn’t say what you had the courage to look him in the eye and say. He was the father of my children. By the end of the trial, he was a complete stranger to me and I was scared of him. I didn’t know what more he was capable of doing. Maybe he could harm me or the kids if I confronted him. And so I kept my mouth shut.”
Another soft, sympathetic sound slipped out of Grace, and Sunny sent her a tiny, fleeting look of gratitude. Then her gaze swung back to Reno. “You stood up in that courtroom and you said everything for me. Clean. Out loud. Where I could hear it and where he had to sit there and listen to it.”
Reno could not have spoken right then if the house had been burning down.
“That’s why I came looking for you,” Sunny said quietly. “Not because of the money, though God knows that money is the reason my kids never knew how close to the edge we came.”
Relief flooded him. It had been enough to keep a roof over her head and food in her children’s mouths. He’d worried about that a lot. Was he sending enough? Had he kept the sharks in her life at bay?
She continued, “I came because a stranger has been telling me every single month for three years, that what happened to us mattered to him or her. And I wanted to look at that person and say thank you.”
She wiped her face with both hands, impatient with the tears, and a wet laugh broke out of her. “And it turns out that stranger is the one man on earth who knew exactly who Winston was. Of course it’s you. Of course it is.”
“Sunny.” He had to stop and breathe through it. “I’ve spent three years certain I drove your husband to what he did.”
