11. Dana
DANA
Genevieve’s firm died in my living room over the course of about nine minutes, and I watched all nine.
Four of the five clients there gave Russ their numbers before they left and asked him to send the documentation.
The signed statements would come later, over the following weeks, once each of them had pulled their own files and seen it for themselves.
The fifth I found crying in my powder room.
I brought her a glass of water and let her cry, because she’d trusted a beautiful woman with her house the same way I had.
Genevieve tried to work it. She put on the firm voice, the client voice, and started toward the cluster of them with her hands already spread in the gesture that smooths everything, and they closed ranks against her like a door swinging shut.
“Russ,” she said, pivoting, because I was a wall and the clients were a wall and he was the only surface left. “Russ, tell them. We can fix the books. We can still fix this.”
“There’s no we,” Russ said.
He said it quietly, but the room had gone quiet enough to carry it.
“I’m dissolving the partnership,” he said.
“Tonight. My lawyer has the filing ready. I sign it in the morning. Every client in this room is getting a letter and a forensic accounting and an apology with my name on it, second on the door, where it always was. The firm is done, Genevieve. You did that. I just stopped covering for it.”
“You need me,” Genevieve said, and I watched her reach for the oldest tool she had, the one that had worked on him for six years. “You’ve always needed me. You can’t run a firm. You hate clients. You’ll fold in a year on your own.”
And here is what I will love Russ for, separate from everything else.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t defend himself.
He just looked at her the way you look at an invoice that no longer adds up to anything, and said, “Maybe. I’d rather fold honestly than steal to keep the lights on,” and turned his back on her.
Genevieve stood in the middle of the room she’d decorated, in the cream silk. Her lover was arguing with my mother by the coats about whose fault he was.
She left without her coat. I had it sent to her later, because I am petty in specific and useless ways, and I wanted her to know I’d been thinking about her comfort.
By ten, the house was empty except for the people who mattered.
My mother, who hugged me too hard and said she’d never liked the gray suit.
Russ, drying the wine glasses at the sink of the kitchen I’d chosen, because of course he was, because a man who dries a stranger’s wine glasses on the night his own firm burned down to the studs is the same as a woman who set a stranger’s coffee maker before he was awake. It turns out there are two of us.
The house ticked and settled around us, and this time I knew the sound meant what I’d always said it did. The house was alive. I’d just been wrong about who was living in it.