Her voice went flat.“And I want to be clear, here.It turns out I have a real gift for finding lies buried in numbers.I went back to college, night school, after he was caught because I wanted to understand exactly how a man could sit across a table from me for nine years and be a fraud all the way down to his bones while I never once suspected a thing.”
She took a deep breath to steady herself.
“The week federal agents came to the house to arrest him, we had just thrown a huge fundraiser in our home for one of the funds he was bleeding dry.I planned the whole thing myself and he hosted it with what I believed to be absolute sincerity.He fooledeveryone.Including the woman who slept beside him every night.I truly thought I knew him.”A pause.“What a fool I was.”
True to his word, Hank remained silent, but she saw his jaw starting to work the way it did when he was holding back thoughts he knew better than to speak.
She continued, “People always picture a man who can wipe out other people’s whole retirements without a hint of remorse, who can rob a huge company into serious financial trouble purely for his own gain, as a brute.But he wasn’t.He was worse than that.He was pleasant.A perfectly pleasantmonster.”
Her mouth twisted on the word.
“He managed me the way he managed a fake balance sheet.He used charm where charm worked, and cold silence where it didn’t, until I learned that speaking any truth in that house always cost more than it was worth.”
She let out a short, humorless laugh.“It’s the reason I can’t seem to stop saying it now.You’ve seen it.The whole town’s seen it.It’s his only decent legacy to me.That and the children.They’re the reason I survived what came next.They’re my whole life.”
She smiled then with genuine love at the thought of them.
She told him how it came apart.How the company’s CEO began to suspect something was wrong and hired a hotshot corporate lawyer named Reno Steele to quietly investigate his senior executives.
Something moved in Hank’s face at his brother’s name.But he’d given his word and he held his peace.She was grateful for that because she couldn’t have stopped now if she’d wanted to.It was all flooding out of her and no dam existed that could hold back everything she’d bottled up inside for all this time.
“Your brother took two years building his case.And then he charged Winston with a long list of financial crimes and took him to trial.Winston had been getting away with everything for so long that he’d gotten arrogant.He was convinced he would beat the charges and humiliate Reno.He told me going into the courthouse the first day that he would never go to jail.I believed him to be innocent, even then.”
Even now, she shook her head at how naïve she’d been.
Hank’s hand twitched on the table, reaching toward her and then pulling back as he honored his promise not to interrupt her in any way.
“The trial took three weeks.As it progressed it became clear to everyone in the courtroom that Reno had him dead to rights.But Winston kept insisting to me that he wasn’t going to jail.About a week before it ended, I was straightening up Winston’s office in our home and I found a fake passport in his desk.It was his picture but a different name.And that’s when it hit me what he was really saying.He was planning to flee the country if he was found guilty and sentenced to any jail time.”
She saw the question raging in Hank’s eyes and said kindly, “I know what you’re dying to ask me.And no, I didn’t say a word to him about the fake passport.I put it back where I found it and pretended it didn’t exist.”
She tilted her head to one side, and said thoughtfully, “I still don’t know if that’s because I was so conditioned not to confront any hard truths or because I was so terrified of the answer if I asked him the obvious question.Was he planning to take the kids and me along with him or not?”
She sighed.“At any rate the jury found him guilty of all charges.Even then he was defiant and kept telling me and all our friends he wasn’t going to jail.Of course I knew by then what he really meant.The night after the verdict came down, I finally worked up the courage to ask Winston if he taking us with him if he ran.”
It was still painful to think about that night, and she paused for a moment while the familiar gut punch came and slowly dissipated.
After all this time, her voice still sounded hollow as she said, “He laughed at me.Called me a stupid cow.Then he said,Of course I’m not taking you and the children with me.I could never hide all of you.Besides, I’m going to start a new life for myself.You’re part of the old life.The one that went wrong.“
She took a wobbly breath, and Hank did reach out then.He gave her hand a brief, supportive squeeze and then pulled his hand back to let her finish.
“I was in total shock.He left for the courthouse the next morning, and I followed a while later with the children.At the sentencing hearing, your brother stood up and tore into Winston something fierce.It was a sight to behold.Reno said everything I was too afraid to say to Winston.Things I didn’t even have the words any more to speak out loud.And Reno let me know I wasn’t wrong to see a monster when I looked at my husband.”
She fell silent for a moment.“For the record, I’m grateful to Reno for exposing my husband’s crimes and prosecuting him.But mostly, I am eternally grateful to your brother for being my voice at a time in my life when I had completely lost the ability to speak for myself.”
She plowed on.“We’re almost to the end of the tale.He got the maximum sentence for each of his crimes, and it totaled up to over thirty years in prison.Winston’s lawyers pleaded for a twenty-four-hour reprieve for him before he had to report to jail so he could say goodbye to his young children.The judge granted it.”
She realized she was wringing her hands until they’d turned bright red.She laid them both flat on the table, palms down.Then she looked up at Hank bleakly.
“I knew exactly why Winston had his lawyers ask for that reprieve.He was going use it to flee the country.I got in my car and drove home with the kids while he was tied up at court signing various documents.I left the kids in their car seats and marched into his office.I found a one-way airline ticket tucked inside his fake passport, and I cut them both up in tiny pieces and left them on the kitchen counter for him to find.Then I got in the car and drove to my parents’ house because I was scared to death of what he would do to me.
‘I have no idea what he did that afternoon, but that evening, he went to visit his mother, and then he drove to the shipping company and killed himself in the parking lot.”
Hank winced, and she gave him a moment to work through his initial reaction.
Then she continued.“He got his way and didn’t go to jail.He was too big a coward to face his crimes, and his ego was too fragile to withstand the humiliation.He chose to die rather than face his crimes and face himself.And he didn’t give a damn about the mess he left behind for me, sorry for the bad language, but there’s not a nice word for it.”
Hank smiled tightly, obviously not the least bit concerned about her swearing in the face of the other things he was feeling at the moment toward her deceased husband.
