Chapter 13
Sunny came back to the house after the children were down, the way she did most nights now, on the thin excuse of oiling a pocket door that still got stuck in its original track occasionally.
Hank not only had the kettle on before she got there, but her tea was finished steeping before she shrugged off her jacket.
She gazed at his newly tiled kitchen, redone with old, gently wavy, white tile backsplashes.
A master tiler had just finished grouting and sealing a magnificent floor mosaic consisting of tiny white and blue tiles in the motif of an elaborate Persian carpet.
The oak kitchen table was round and seated ten people with ease.
It currently had eight wonderfully mismatched chairs around it.
She’d let Madison bid on it at an auction two weeks ago, and the only other serious bidder, an antique buyer from Jackson Hole, had dropped out when Madison shot him her best sad puppy eyes and asked him please to let her have the pretty table.
The child had positively stolen it from him and was still smug about it.
As Hank pressed a mug of hot, lightly sweetened tea into her hands, it dawned on her that she’d built this trap herself and walked right into it.
When she’d turned her attention to the kitchen and asked Hank what he wanted in here, he’d merely shrugged and told her to do whatever gave her joy.
And she had. Stepping into this space that was frankly her dream kitchen felt like getting a hug from the house . . . and from its owner.
It was a good trap. That was the whole trouble with it.
A warm house, an inviting kitchen, a quiet man, her children who’d started referring to Natalie’s place as the rental and this place as the house instead of Hank’s house.
She’d let each and every one of them lull her into feeling comfortable. Safe. Like she belonged here.
And all the while she’d ignored the biggest reason of all not to let down her guard and feel at safe or at home anywhere. Her husband.
What brought her back here tonight started as a small thing. While tucking in the twins this evening, Harris asked her, half asleep, if someday they’d all live in the big house together, her and his siblings and Madison and Hank.
Shocked, she’d mumbled something along the lines of, “Maybe, Baby. We’ll see.”
Pacing her living room afterward, she’d realized she was letting her children fall in love with a future she was building over a hidden fault line.
Of all women, she knew exactly what it was to live in a lovely house secretly filled with rot, out of sight beneath the floor, destroying it from the ground up.
She’d grabbed her coat and keys and driven over here before she could lose her nerve and back out of doing what needed to be done.
“Hank, I need to tell you who my husband was,” she blurted before she could lose her nerve. “And I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say a word because if I stop, I won’t ever start again.”
Without saying a word, he pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and held it for her as she sat. Then he sat down beside her, gave her the whole of his still attention, and said evenly, “All right. I’m listening.”
She was too nervous to stay seated. She stood up, moving around the kitchen, touching the cold soapstone counters, the brass and white enamel knobs on the stove.
“His name was Winston Perry. My married name was Susannah Perry. He was the Chief Financial Officer for a very large shipping company. He managed all the accounts, its investments, its pension fund. He was the most respectable man in any room he walked into. He was charming. The kind of man who remembered your mother’s name and asked after her bad knee. People trusted him. So did I.”
She took a deep breath and plowed into the rest of it. The hard part.
“He stole from the company for a decade. Tens of millions of dollars, a little at a time, hidden so cleanly that three separate auditors signed off on books that were a lie from the first line. I lived in his house and slept in his bed and spent his money. And I never had any idea what he was doing. I knew we seemed to have a lot more money than he earned, but he told me he’d made good investments.
Really good ones. And some of them I could see.
Art that went up sharply in value. Real estate that appreciated rapidly. I believed him.”
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 fooled everyone. 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 pleasant monster.”
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 na?ve 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. ”