Chapter 19 #3
Relief flooded him. It had been enough to keep a roof over her head and food in her children’s mouths. He’d worried about that a lot. Was he sending enough? Had he kept the sharks in her life at bay?
She continued, “I came because a stranger has been telling me every single month for three years, that what happened to us mattered to him or her. And I wanted to look at that person and say thank you.”
She wiped her face with both hands, impatient with the tears, and a wet laugh broke out of her. “And it turns out that stranger is the one man on earth who knew exactly who Winston was. Of course it’s you. Of course it is.”
“Sunny.” He had to stop and breathe through it. “I’ve spent three years certain I drove your husband to what he did.”
“No.” She said it so hard that the cat startled off the back of the couch.
“No. You listen to me because I’m the only person in the world with standing to tell you this, and I drove a thousand miles to do it.”
She set the coffee cup down on the table.
“Winston stole from decent, hard-working people for years. The night after the verdict came down, before the sentencing hearing, he told me that if he got jail time, he would leave me and his babies without a single backward glance and go hide on another continent.”
She took a deep breath as if she’d never spoken aloud what she was going to say next.
“After the sentencing hearing, I got home before he did. I knew he’d asked for the 24 hour reprieve on going to jail so he could pack his bags and leave the country.
Can you imagine the publicity that would’ve happened if he fled?
The press would’ve badgered us non-stop.
They would’ve approached my children and demanded to know where their daddy went.
And the police would have pursued me and the kids the same way.
They would’ve camped on our doorstep for years, hoping for a lead as to where he went, expecting him to contact us.
I couldn’t let my children grow up hounded and followed and harassed like that. So, I . . .”
Another deep breath. “. . . I got out his fake passport and the one-way airplane ticket I found tucked inside it, and I destroyed them. I left them on the kitchen counter, cut up into a hundred little pieces. Then I took the kids and went to my parents’ house where he couldn’t hurt us.”
Reno stared, shocked, but even more impressed by her courage.
“Nicely done,” Grace breathed.
Grace and Sunny exchanged glances between two mothers who’d done an impossible thing for the sake of their children.
Sunny looked back at him. “Mr. Steele.”
“Reno, please,” he interrupted.
She nodded. “Reno. He decided that night that being dead was easier than paying for his crimes. He was terrified of going to jail, and he said from day one of the trial that he would never go to jail. And so he did the only thing that would keep him out of jail. That was his decision. He made it the same way he made every decision, by thinking only about himself.”
Her jaw worked. “He was a coward and chose the cowardly way out. You didn’t make him into that.
He was also arrogant. He thought he could charm the jury and the judge into not sending him to jail.
And when that didn’t work, he tried to bully them into doing what he wanted.
You didn’t make him like that, either. It was who he was.
His cowardice and arrogance made him kill himself. Not you. Do you hear me? Not. You.”
“I hear you,” Reno said hoarsely. He felt wetness on his face, and he didn’t care. He didn’t try to do anything about it.
“You did your job,” Sunny said, softer. “You did it better than anyone had ever done anything for me in my life, and you didn’t even know you’d done it for me. You spent three years thinking you’d ruined my life, but you’re the reason I finally got to start over.”
She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. “Here’s what I came to say to you, Mr. Steele. I’m all right. My kids are all right. The oldest two are in school and the baby isn’t a baby anymore. She’s three and she’s a tyrant. And a great deal of why we’re all right is you.”
The first hint of light broke through the darkness that had clouded his soul for all this time.
She said kindly, “I didn’t know you needed to hear this too, but I think you do. Even though you didn’t make Winston kill himself, I forgive you for it. Even if what you did in the trial or said to Winston at the end did play a part in his decision to take his life, I forgive you for that, too.”
A ray of sunlight burst forth in his chest. The woman of his nightmares was okay. Better than okay. She and her kids were fine.
Sunny continued, gazing honestly at him, “Thank you for your closing argument. You said to him everything I should’ve said but didn’t have the courage or the words to say.
Your closing argument healed me in a way I didn’t even know I needed.
It was your words that gave me the strength to cut up his passport and protect my kids from the life he would’ve have condemned us to. Thank you for all of it, Reno Steele.”
He pictured the woman in the navy dress who’d gone still at sentencing and never looked at him.
She was looking at him now.
The thing he’d never let himself look at: his certainty that he didn’t get to keep the cottage and the lake and the little girl and the bread-smelling woman on the other end of the couch, he felt it lift. Sunny had lifted it off his shoulders.
“Thank you,” he managed.
“You’re welcome,” Sunny replied with a kind smile. She squeezed his hand once and let it go.
She didn’t stay long after that. There wasn’t more to say, and she had a three-year-old overly active child to collect from a babysitter in Apple Pie Creek.
Grace walked her out. Reno watched through the window as the two of them stood by the gray sedan, two widows in the wind, talking the way women talk when men aren’t part of it.
Grace took both of Sunny’s hands. Sunny laughed at something, and then wiped her eyes one more time.
Grace pointed at the lake and said something.
Sunny looked at it for a long moment and then said something that made Grace wipe her face.
Then Sunny got in her car and backed out and was gone. And suddenly, the afternoon was just another ordinary Saturday with the light coming long across the water.
Grace came and stood between his knees where he sat on the couch and put both of her hands in his hair and held his head against her, and he wrapped his arms around her and held on, and they stayed like that for a while with the cat watching them from the windowsill and judging them, as ever.
“Are you all right?” she asked into the top of his head.
“No,” he said honestly. “But I’m going to be.” He turned his face against her shirt, which smelled like flour and the lake and her. “She drove a thousand miles to set me free, and I almost had a man in Apple Pie Creek burn the letter.”
“You didn’t, though.”
“You didn’t let me.”
“That’s what I’m for,” she said.
He leaned back so he could see her face.
She was looking down at him with that soft, unguarded look she didn’t bother to cover up anymore.
“I love you, Grace. I’ve known it since the night I told you everything and you didn’t run.
I’ve haven’t said it before now because I didn’t think I you deserved to have me love you. ”
Her hands, resting on his shoulders, tightened their hold.
He continued, “A woman just drove a thousand miles to tell me I’m not the terrible person I thought I was and that I’m allowed to be happy. I love you. There’s no version of that sentence that has a ‘but’ in it. That’s the whole thing.”
For once in her life Grace didn’t have a quick answer ready. Her eyes filled, and he rose to his feet. She put her hand flat on his chest, over the place her hand always went, and he covered it with his.
“It took you long enough,” she finally said, in a voice that wobbled clear off its rails. And then, before he could say anything back, she said, “I love you too. I have for a while. I was keeping it myself because I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.”
“You were right. I wouldn’t have believed you because I didn’t think I was worthy of being loved.”
“Steele men can be so stubborn, sometimes,” she said in a long-suffering voice.
He laughed, and she laughed, and somewhere in the laughing he pulled her close and kissed her, slow and certain.
The cat got up in deep offense and stalked off to find a household with more dignity in it, and neither of them noticed her go.