Chapter 19 #3
I don’t know yet. Sunny heard her own voice come out of a stranger’s mouth, the answer she’d given Hank in his kitchen with three million dollars on the table between them when he’d asked what she was going to do next.
For the first time she heard how it sounded from the outside. Like a woman standing in a doorway with her bags packed, making everyone who loved her watch her go . . . and leaving them behind without a backward look.
The grief hit her without warning in the minivan, halfway back to town. As complicated as her feelings had been after Winston died, she’d still experienced enough grief to know it came whenever it decided to, stayed as long as it liked, and only left when it was good and ready.
She had to pull over on the side of the road, and she sat there with the engine running and her hands on the steering wheel and cried. Really cried, the kind she hadn’t permitted since Winston killed himself in a parking lot in California three years ago.
She cried for eight women who’d walked up a hill to face the unforgivable and tell its other victims they weren’t to blame.
For seven strangers with a dead monster’s chin and cheekbones and eyes.
For a town that came up a hill and spoke kindly to seven of its own they hadn’t seen or heard from in a very long time.
She even cried for Winston a little, for the man he’d pretended to be, whom she’d genuinely loved. And she cried for herself. For the woman who had spent years fiercely guarding her heart out of fear but calling it safety.
Grace, it turned out, was not a thing anybody earned. It was a gift someone chose to extend to others. The widows hadn’t judged the Shoemacher children. Hadn’t demanded restitution or apologies, hadn’t expected shame or guilt from Lucas’s children.
The widows had simply picked up a pen and written paid across a page that should read ruined. They’d written it in ink in front of the whole town. And the moment they did it, Cobbler Cove had finally fully returned to a place of balance and belonging for everyone.
Hank had tried to give her grace at his kitchen table in his plain understated way. There’s a difference between locking the door and being the reason a man is in the cage in the first place.
He’d been trying to tell her she wasn’t responsible for Winston’s sins. That his shame wasn’t hers to carry. She had filed it away unbelieved, the way she’d filed every kindness he’d shown her.
She took his words out now, there on the side of the road, and looked at them again in light of what Rose had said on the hill.
Sunny she still couldn’t quite write paid across her own page in her own hand.
But for the first time in three years, she believed the Winston Perry page of her life could be closed out and finished.
That was new. That was bedrock shifting.
The kids were at Tessa’s farm until supper. The rental was hot and silent. She didn’t run the air conditioning when nobody was going to be home. Even though she could afford the electric bill now without a second thought, old habits died hard.
Sunny sat down at the kitchen table, took two envelopes out of her purse, and opened the bank’s. She read the paperwork one last time and signed it.
In ink. All four flagged lines. In her own name, by her own hand.
Susannah Carter, free woman, choosing in the clear to accept her husband’s money with nothing leaning on the decision.
Exactly the way a generous man had wished for her in his office with his shoulder blades plastered against the bookcase.
She scanned the pages with her cell phone and emailed them to Reno before the part of her that lived in pencil could lodge an objection. He replied with a quick text that he’d be by tomorrow to pick up the paper copies and send them back to the bank.
Then she pulled over the yellow legal pad to the page that said What I want at the top in ink above all that blank space, and she wrote the first line.
To stay.
She looked at it for a long time, and it looked back, true as a plumb line. The page didn’t catch fire and the roof didn’t come down.
There was a second thing she wanted. She knew exactly what it was. But the second thing wasn’t something she could write down.
She was going to have to go say it out loud to a quiet man standing guard behind a door he’d opened for her so she could leave on her own terms.
This time she intended to walk through it, not to leave, but to sit down in his kitchen, and refuse to leave until he understood that she was not Lorraine, he was not Winston, and the only entry left missing in either of their books was the one they’d each been too scarred, and too scared, to write.
Tomorrow. After church, after the potluck lunch, after her children were collected and herded back home. Tomorrow, Hank Steele was going to find out what a forensic accountant did with a man whose books were honest all the way down.
She put her kettle on, for herself, for practice. And its gurgling on the stove as it built up steam to whistle sounded like a beginning.