But the hair did look really wonderful. Hannah imagined him combing it in prison and shuddered.
Kendall turned and made eye contact with her through the window. He beckoned for her to join him by the pool. Shivering, Hannah cut out the back door and sat on the concrete with her feet in the pool. She studied the way her feet glowed in thepool light. Kendall was telling her about something that had happened to him today. It was something to do with traffic and how someone had wronged him somewhere. She was supposed to laugh and tell him that everyone in the world was worse than him. She might have done that on any other day.
But instead of answering, she allowed silence to fill the space between them. She swallowed the lump in her throat, then turned her head to look at him. He was on his phone again, scrolling. She wondered whether the better course of action was to tell him what was going to happen or to let it happen organically. But she thought she might go crazy if she didn’t say something.
And wasn’t it the right thing to do? Didn’t she owe him that, at least?
With a quiet, raspy voice, she asked, “Why did you do it?”
Kendall allowed his phone to drop the slightest bit so that he could peer over it at her. His eyes were suddenly hollow and strange. “I beg your pardon?”
Hannah got to her feet, which were now cold from the water. “I know about the money.” She raised her chin. “I know where it came from.”
Kendall stood up to match her. But he was six foot four and nearly two hundred pounds, and Hannah was suddenly terrified of his physicality, of how he could pick her up and snap her in two if he wanted. She’d never really fathomed that before. She told herself to stand her ground.
Kendall let out a strangled laugh. “You don’t know anything.”
“I do.”
A flicker of fear passed over Kendall’s face. Another awful moment of quiet passed between them. “Do you remember what I told you when we got married?”
Hannah raised her eyebrows. “I do.” She remembered him saying, "I love you, and I’ll always love you." But she didn’t recall anything else.
“I told you I would always find a way to make you happy,” Kendall boomed darkly. “And haven’t I done that? Don’t we have the finest and most beautiful house on the block? Don’t we take wonderful vacations? Don’t you have better clothes than all your friends?”
Hannah flared her nostrils. “I never asked for any of that.”
“You did,” Kendall declared, one of his hands in a fist. “You didn’t ask for it in so many words. But you asked for it in all the ways that women ask for things.”
Hannah shook her head, feeling volatile and unsure of herself. Maybe bringing this up was a mistake. “I never meant for you to steal from people,” she said. “You remember what I was like when you met me.” She’d worn ratty secondhand clothing. She’d always taken the bus.
Kendall seemed to think twice about her tactics of threatening her. He fixed his smile and slid his fingers through his hair. “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,” he said. “Maybe if we sit together in front of my computer? Maybe if we go over the numbers together?”
Hannah couldn’t move. But she asked again, because she couldn’t get beyond it. “Why did you do it?”
Kendall really exploded then. His face turned tomato red, and he pointed at her, as though he wanted to teach her a lesson. “You always think you know best, Hannah, but you never really do. Get off your moral high-horse and come back to the real world.” With that, he stormed back inside, where he stomped upstairs, entered his study, and slammed the door.
When the storybroke the following morning, Hannah was at a coffee shop she didn’t usually frequent. She wore a baseball hat and sunglasses and reread her article on the newspaper app on her phone, both amazed and absolutely irate with herself for throwing her husband’s name into the ring like that.
When Minnie called her at half past eight, sobbing, Hannah couldn’t bring herself to ask why she wasn’t at school.
“Why did you do it, Mom?” Minnie demanded. “I don’t understand why you did it!”
Hannah’s heart shattered. “Where are you? Let me come pick you up.”
“No!” Minnie cried. “I want to be with Dad!”
Hannah shot out of the coffee shop and hurried home, praying that Minnie and Kendall were there, that they could have a family meeting and discuss the next steps. But just as Hannah hurried up the driveway, she could see Minnie running back and forth through the house, calling out, “Dad? Dad, where are you?” Hannah knew before she entered the house that her husband was gone. She knew, long before she read the note he’d left her in his study that told her what he really thought of her (what, apparently, he’d thought of her for a long, long time), that Kendall had left Miami to escape legal ramifications. He’d probably had a plan set up for years, one that he’d follow if everything crashed in around him.
Hannah guessed that he’d never imagined his wife being the one to corner him. She tried to feel some amount of pride for having done it, for going with her professional instincts rather than saving her husband’s livelihood. But she felt hollow and scared.
2
Now that she’d escaped home, Minnie couldn’t bring herself to go back to school. She couldn’t imagine ever going back. Her mother, Hannah, called into the high school office and said that Minnie needed a few days off, that she could do everything on the computer, and that Hannah herself would monitor the situation and make sure all her tasks were finished and all her books were read. Minnie listened to her mother’s call from upstairs, sitting with her head on her knees on the top step, her heart pounding. There was a sense of unreality to everything. Just last night, Minnie and her father had been playing Ping-Pong, eating sushi, and laughing together. Now, her father was gone. It was all her mother’s fault.
Minnie had been in first period English class when she’d learned about her mother’s article. Cold, hard stares had come from all over the classroom. A kid Minnie didn’t know well had asked if she knew her mother was a narc. Minnie had pretended to know what that meant and told him to shut up, which had led to even more rancid comments from other classmates. She’d hurried to the bathroom to check her cell phone. She read the first few paragraphs of her mother’s article, which placed blameon numerous higher-ups in the political system and demanded that the legal system pay attention to what they were up to. By the time she’d read her father’s name, Minnie had begun to sweat. She’d felt her life falling apart.
Now, after her call with the school, Hannah appeared at the bottom of the stairs, her fingers laced together. “Minnie, will you come downstairs? I really want to talk to you.”
