Sunny managed a weak smile of thanks and went.
She drove across town with the yellow legal pad riding on the passenger seat like a deputy.The big house stood in the middle of its block the way it had stood for a hundred and ten years, tall and square-shouldered in the washed-out light, every window she’d reglazed throwing the afternoon back at her.The porch she’d watched three Steele brothers rebuild board by board held her weight without a creak.
The front door was unlocked.It was always unlocked when the doctor was in.She let herself in the way she had a hundred times, into the smell of beeswax and old oak, and found him exactly where she’d known she would find him, at the big desk in the office, doing paperwork that could have waited until Monday.
He came to his feet when he saw her.“Sunny.”Careful.Courteous.The voice he used on patients who hadn’t gotten their biopsy results yet.
“Sit down, Hank.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch.
“You told me once to sit down before my legs gave out from under me,” she said.“It was good advice.I’m returning it.How about we go to the kitchen?”She might have said it as a question, but she meant it as an order, and he heard the difference.
His eyebrows rose a little bit more.
Without waiting for him, she walked down the hall, took the kettle off his stove, filled it at his sink, and set it on the burner.The click and bloom of the gas lighting was the loudest sound in the house.When she turned around, he was standing in the kitchen doorway watching her, and something moved across his face and was gone before it finished arriving, the brief expression of a man watching a light come back on in a window he’d given up on.
He sat at his own table.She stayed on her feet because some things were easier said moving, and she’d learned that from him.
“I’m a forensic accountant,” she said.“When something doesn’t add up, I don’t guess at it, and I don’t take anybody’s word for it.I re-do the audit, run the numbers again, myself.So I want you to know that I’ve spent the last two weeks auditing you, Hank Steele, and I’m here to report my findings.”
He held still, the way he’d said once the brave ones always did.
“Item one.A stove that went cold three nights running in a house where the kettle had been on every night for three months.Item two.A final invoice paid early, in full, by a man who never once in his life processed a bill for his own medical practice on time.Item three.A speech delivered with your back against that bookcase, every word of it kind, every word of it true, all of it adding up to a door being held open for me to leave so politely I almost missed that you were standing behind it where I couldn’t see you anymore.Item four.”She tipped her chin toward the office.“A lamp that burned in that window every evening for weeks, turned off the same night I drove away with your check in my purse.”
“Sunny.”
“I’m not finished.You don’t get to talk yet.Those are the facts in evidence.I haven’t gotten to my findings yet.”
His eyebrows inched up even higher.
She set both hands flat on the table and leaned on them, looking him in the eyes from arm’s length.“Your books are clean.I went looking for the lie in you, Hank.I tore your ledgers apart looking for the lie you were hiding.The last time a man went quiet and careful and right-sounding on me, he turned out to be a fraud all the way down to his bones, and I swore I’d never miss it again.”
She resumed pacing.“But there’s no fraud in you.None.And believe me, I looked hard for any hint of it.Winston pulled away from me to hide something.It took me a while to figure out you pulled away from me togiveme something.”She turned and headed back across the kitchen.“You paid for what you gave me out of your own heart and called it a gift.But that’s not how hearts or gifts are supposed to work.They’re not the same entry.They’re not even supposed to be recorded in the same book.”
The kettle ticked on the stove, warming.
“Now for the part you don’t know.”She pulled out the chair beside him and sat, finally, and laid the legal pad on the table between them.
“I signed the bank papers accepting Winston’s money yesterday.Reno already faxed copies of the originals to the bank and will mail them the originals tomorrow.The money’s mine, Hank.It’s done.Which means everything you wished for me in that terrible little speech of yours came true.There’s not one have-to-do-to-survive left in my ledger.No rent I can’t make, no job I can’t afford to lose.No debt, no fear, nothing leaning on me anywhere.For the first time since I was twenty-three years old, I’m standing in the clear, exactly the way you wanted me to be.”
She turned back the legal pad, past the page with a dead man’s alias and her search for his hidden money on it, to the page behind it.She turned the pad to face him.
At the top, in ink:What I want.
Below it, in ink:To stay.
“I wrote that Saturday night,” she said, “with three million dollars sitting in an envelope six inches from my hand, and every road on the map available to me.So hear this part the way I mean it.I don’t need you, Hank.”
His jaw took that line like a fist, crumpling then tightening in pain.
She plowed on, though, because the medicine would only work if he swallowed all of it.
“I don’t need your job.I don’t need your house.I don’t need your kettle or your porch or your steady hands carrying the heavy end of my life.Need is gone.Winston paid me in full for what he put me through, and you’re the one who handed me the key to his money.”
The poor man looked on the verge of vomiting.Thankfully, it was time to put him out of his misery.She hoped.
“And Hank, I’m still sitting at this table.”
