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I stare down at one of the larger drawers to the right of me, and that cold sensation returns.
Sickness churns in my stomach again.
Closing my eyes brings to mind memories of opening the drawer, one I wasn’t supposed to touch, lest my father would punish me. Curiosity had gotten the best of me, though.
“I opened it,” I confess aloud. “You warned me to stay away from your desk, and I didn’t listen.”
When he doesn’t say anything in response, I swallow back the fear climbing my throat.
Don’t look away.
Hand trembling, I open the drawer. Files are still stored inside. The first I pull out is Brie’s. By the light of the lantern, I flip through to notes from her sessions with my father, learning how her mother had died in a car accident. A drunk driver who sped off. Neither Brie, nor Maw Maw, ever talked much about her mother, which was fine, because I never talked much about my own. It made me comfortable being around Brie, knowing we both shared that hole in our hearts.
Replacing the file in the drawer, I pull out the next one and frown at the name scrawled across it. “Russ?”
Flipping it open lands me on the progress notes for a troubled man. A drunk. One who wanted nothing more than to end his own life. Reading through my father’s notes brings me to the realization that Russ was hanging on by an exceptionally fragile thread, every day. The temptation of his own demise hounding him as relentlessly as his urge to drink and escape it. In my reading, I begin to understand the depths to which he’d spiraled, where he actually came to believe, with all his heart, that his family was better off without him.
“I didn’t make the connection right away,” my father says from across the room, where he continues to watch me peruse the files.
“What connection?”
“He was the drunk who murdered Brie’s mother.”
It’s as he says the words that I recall a voice through the walls. A man’s voice. Tearful and brimming with agony, confessing those very words to my father: I left her there to die.
“He once told me you saved his life.”
“I gave him another means of escape. A reason.”
“What reason?”
“You.”
“He had a son, though. A family.”
“One who didn’t want him, and as you read, he felt they’d fare better without him. He was a good man, but he made a number of mistakes. Ones he didn’t feel he could atone for.”
“Why didn’t he ever go to Brie. Or her grandmother? Why didn’t he confess?”
“C’mon, sunshine, you know the reason.”
Shaking my head, I skim through the rest of the notes. “Russ never told me anything about his past.
“You didn’t have to know his past. If he’d confessed to the authorities, you’d be dead now, too.”
“He couldn’t have known his fate. He couldn’t have anticipated that he’d one day be raising your daughter.”
“No, I suppose he couldn’t. That’s the thing about fate, isn’t it? We don’t really know what consequences await us. Or redemptions, for that matter.”
A tear spatters against the worn scribbles on the page, distorting the ink as I stare down at the notes, trying to absorb the sadness and desperation in Russ’s story.
I file away the chart and pull another, and as my fingertips grip the envelope, a cold dread fills my chest.
I set the file out on the desk, noting only a first name written on this one.
Vivienne.
As I read through the notes, I find she was a woman who came to my father in secret. Troubled. Didn’t even have the money to pay him, as noted in her lack of billing, but he met with her, anyway. For months, if the thickness of the chart is anything to go by.
