Chapter 15 #2
Thank you for the six years. Even those. I know what that costs me to be allowed to say and I am saying it anyway.
G.
P.S. — I have not read it and I will not.
Bev Kaplan's office rang mine on the second of October, entirely off her own bat and with no instruction from anyone, to offer a courtesy proof.
I had Rennick decline it in writing within the hour and I have kept the letter, in case you ever want to see that I did. March, in a shop, like everybody.
Erin read it once.
Then she put it down on the table and went and stood at the sink and turned the water on and turned it off again.
Then she came back and read it four more times.
Here is what she understood, and it took her until about two in the morning to get all the way to the bottom of it.
He had done the one thing she had been absolutely certain he was incapable of.
Not the trust — the trust was money and money was the easiest thing he owned.
Not Vanessa, not the deal, not the letter to Blair.
Those had been enormous and they had been, in the end, subtraction: cutting out the rot, which is hard, but which is a thing a man does for himself as much as for anybody.
This was different. This was Graham Lockwood taking the single thing he wanted most in the world and closing the door on it himself, from the inside, at his own hand, with nobody making him and nobody watching.
Six years of a man who could not write stop to a woman he did not love.
And he had just written it to the one he did.
She sat at the table in the dark with a page of handwriting in front of her and understood, with a completeness that frightened her, that the case was closed.
All of it. Every entry in four blue ledgers, every date, every ninety seconds.
There was nothing left in the file. He had answered the whole of it, not with a gesture and not with a speech, but by finally becoming the kind of man who could finish something — and the proof was that the thing he had finished was her.
It's not what he signs, Colleen had said, a year ago in a conference room with a view of a parking structure. It's what he burns.
He had burned the last of it. He had burned the only thing he had left, which was the possibility of asking.
Erin put her face in her hands.
She did not sleep. At about four she got up and made coffee she did not drink and stood at the window over the black street.
And she was angry, and it took her a long time to find the shape of it, and when she did it was so unfair that she said it out loud to an empty kitchen just to hear how it sounded.
"You don't get to be the one who ends it."
That was it. That was the whole of the thing.
For six years she had been the only person in that entire arrangement who finished anything.
It was hers. It was the one thing she had that nobody could take — not the money, the money was just money — the fact that when it was over she would be the one who had done it, on purpose, with a plan, at 5:52 in the morning with a child on her hip.
And he had gone and taken it. Kindly. Correctly. In the only way that could possibly have proved he had changed. He had done exactly the right thing and in doing it he had walked off with the last thing she owned.
She laughed, once, badly, alone at a window at four in the morning.
Because of course. Of course that was the ending. She had written it herself in twelve days in September and had not once recognized it, and Bev had said where did you get that ending down a phone line at six in the morning, and Erin had said is it right, and had not known.
A woman spends five years building a perfect unanswerable case. She gets to the day she could use it.
And it turns out the case was the last wall she had.
At six she called Shannon, who answered on the fourth ring with the phone upside down.
"Somebody better be dead."
"He signed it eight days early so I wouldn't have to watch him do it. And then he wrote me a letter saying he's never going to ask me again, ever, in his life, and told me not to write back."
There was a silence on the line.
"Right," Shannon said. She was fully awake now. "Right. Okay. And what do you want?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do."
"Shannon—"
"No, listen to me." A bed creaked three miles away. "I have been on your side of this since a parking lot six years ago and I have never once told you what to do, and I'm not going to start now. But I want you to notice something, and then I'm going to hang up and let you have it."
"What."
"You've spent thirteen months telling me what he owes you," Shannon said. "Every single conversation. What he hasn't done, what he hasn't burned, what would have to happen. It was a list and it was fair and I agreed with every line of it.
"And I have just listened to you describe a man doing the last thing on the list," she said, "and you didn't say finally and you didn't say good. You said he doesn't get to."
Erin stood in her kitchen.
"That's not a woman who hasn't been paid," Shannon said. "That's a woman who's run out of reasons."
She hung up.
Erin stood at the window until the sky went the color it goes.
Then she went and got the four blue ledgers out of the drawer under the manuscript pages, and put them on the kitchen table in a stack, and sat down in front of them with her hands flat on the top one.
She did not open them. She knew what was in them. She had known what was in them for five years.
At about half past seven the delivery came to the shop below — the four a.m. one had been moved to five, and then at some point over the winter to seven, and nobody had ever mentioned it to her — and she heard the back door go and Owen say something and a man laugh.
Erin sat with her hands on four notebooks that had cost four ninety-nine each at a hardware store in Camden.
He is not going to ask again, she thought. He said so and he meant it and he is the one man I have ever met who does not say things he does not mean.
Which means that if this happens, I have to do it.
I have to drive down there and stand in front of him and say it out loud with nothing in my hands, and he will not help me, and he will not meet me halfway, because he has taken halfway off the table on purpose so that it can only ever be mine.
She looked at the top ledger for a long moment.
Then Erin Brooks — who had never in her life left a thing unfinished, and who had at last understood what that was going to cost her — got up, and went to get her coat.