12. Russ
RUSS
The private collapse came in over the following week, and it came in writing.
I read all of it. I’d earned it.
The client group chat formed itself within forty-eight hours; one of the nineteen started it and it grew to twenty-eight by the weekend, and they added me to it on day three, which I did not expect.
They wanted the forensic accounting. They got it.
I sent every duplicated line, every lot number, every job, organized the way Dana would have organized it, because I’d learned the format from the best.
Mine was the marble countertop. Billed twice. I paid for half of someone’s love nest. Cool cool cool.
The man with the lake house called me himself. I’d never had his number; he got it from the group. He didn’t say hello, which I was learning was a thing the freshly robbed have in common.
“Is it true she did it to all of us?” he asked.
“Not all. Nineteen I can prove. Probably more I can’t.”
“I sent her to my sister.” A long breath on the line.He thanked me and hung up.
One of the old clients tried to use the wreckage.
A man whose kitchen we’d finished in the spring emailed me, sympathetic for one paragraph and then not, to say that given everything, he assumed I’d be eating the cost of the backsplash he’d decided he hated.
No charge, of course, considering. He copied his wife, so I’d feel the audience.
A month ago I would have eaten the cost of the tile, thanked him for his patience, apologized for a decision that was his. I sat with the email a while and noticed I didn’t want to, and that the not-wanting was new.
I wrote back that the backsplash was installed to the approved drawing, that I stood behind the work, and that a change now was a change order at the change-order rate.
I attached the rate. I read the draft twice for the apologies I’d have folded in by reflex, found two, took them out, and sent it without them.
He paid the fee. I didn’t tell Dana until after. When I did, she didn’t say good job, which I was grateful for. She said, “Rate plus materials?” and I said, “Rate plus materials,” and that was the whole celebration, and it was enough.
Then the emails I actually needed, the formal ones.
Clients giving written notice they were terminating, each one a small legal brick.
Each one another exhibit for the criminal referral my lawyer was assembling, and for the restitution the court would order against Genevieve no longer had.
She’d already spent it. The skim had gone long ago into the life she thought it was buying her, and the man she’d run it beside had stopped answering her calls.
I forwarded the whole file to Dana the way she’d once forwarded a file to me, with one line.
I sent her the line she’d taught me to dread. It is worse than the wet bar, and I meant it worse than she had. Thank you for teaching me how to total it.
She wrote back in a minute.
Now stop reading them. You don’t have to hold this one up. It holds itself up now.
I read them anyway, one more pass, not to manage them but to let myself feel, finally, what I’d spent a year refusing, the specific grief of having admired someone who was robbing me the whole time.
Genevieve taught me how to talk to clients.
She taught me what good light does to a room.
She also billed a widow twice for the same staircase and laughed about it on a synced drive.
I had to let both be true and not let the first one launder the second.
Then I did stop. She was right. The downfall didn’t need me anymore; it had its own momentum, the way a thing does once it’s finally true and written down where it can be read.
I hadn’t needed to put a single page away all week. There was nothing left to hide from myself. For the first time in two years the whole of it sat open on the table.