Chapter 12 #2
The board meeting took less than an hour.
It wasn’t a fight. It was just ugly. Two members wanted to wait.
One said family matter. Ryan said it was a company matter, and a federal matter, and a matter of whether anyone at this table wanted to explain to a jury why they’d kept the man who changed a witness statement. The vote was six to one.
Glen Pratt called at five-thirty.
“I’m hearing things,” Glen said. “Luke’s out. The FBI is sniffing around. You’re on every channel admitting to an affair.” A heavy breath. “I’ve got partners, Ryan. I’ve got my own board. I need to know my money is safe.”
Ryan was sitting at his desk. He looked at the phone.
“Glen,” he said. “Your money isn’t the most important thing that happened on that boat.”
“That’s not—”
“You can pull it. I understand. I won’t fight you. Talk to your partners.” He paused. “But I’m not going to spend one more minute this week trying to make you comfortable. My wife went into the water. That’s what I’m working on.”
He hung up. Glen pulled out the next morning. So did one of the funds from New York. Walsh Development’s stock dropped eight percent in a day. Ryan read the number off his screen, and felt it, and let himself feel it, and didn’t call anyone to make it go away.
* * *
He drove to his mother’s condo on Wednesday.
Kathy Walsh lived on the twentieth floor of a building on the beach, with white carpet and a view of the ocean and a lot of framed photos of her boys. She opened the door already crying. Luke had gotten there first.
“How could you,” she said. “How could you. He’s your brother. He has done everything for you. Everything. His whole life.”
“I know, Mom.”
“He was protecting you.”
Ryan sat down on her white couch. He looked at the photos on the wall. Ryan at twelve with a fish. Luke at six in a sailor suit. Their father at the head of a long table.
“Mom,” he said. “He told the FBI Scarlett was crazy. While I was out on the water looking for her body, he was on the phone with the woman who pushed her in, deciding what word to call her in the newspaper.”
His mother stopped crying.
“And he could only do that,” Ryan said, “because I taught him to. Because since he was eight years old, I let him fix everything I broke, and I never once asked what it cost him or anyone else. That’s on me.
I’m going to spend a long time with that.
” He stood up. “But he can’t work for me.
And he can’t be in my wife’s life. Not ever. ”
“Your wife,” his mother said. “Your wife left you.”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “She did.”
* * *
He found the therapist through Jess, of all people.
He had called Jess on Tuesday and asked, carefully, if she knew anyone. Jess had been silent on the phone. Then she’d said, I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for her, and texted him a name.
Dr. Deborah Moss had an office above a bakery in a strip mall, with a couch that was too soft and a box of tissues on every surface. She was about sixty and wore running shoes. She did not seem to know or care who he was.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
Ryan had prepared an answer. He had prepared it in the car. It had words like accountability and patterns and growth.
He opened his mouth and heard himself say, “I want to know why I needed a stranger to tell me I was a good man.”
Dr. Moss wrote something down.
“All right,” she said. “That’s a good place to start. Who used to tell you that? When you were a boy?”
Ryan thought about it for a long time.
“Nobody,” he said. “My brother just made it so nobody had to.”
She nodded like that meant something. It was the first of what turned out to be a lot of Tuesdays. Some of them were terrible. Most of them were boring. He went to every one.
* * *
That night, he went into the upstairs bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet.
The orange bottle was on the second shelf. The sleeping pills. The prescription label said Dr. Alexis Burke. He had been taking one every night since March. Every night, even in the Bahamas, even after, because she’d told him that grief was exhausting and he needed his rest.
He looked at it.
Then he opened it, and poured every pill down the sink, and ran the water until they were gone, and put the empty bottle in a plastic bag to give to Kerr.
He didn’t sleep at all.
He lay on the couch in the study with his eyes open and his heart racing, and every time he closed his eyes he saw a green dress coming up out of the water.
At midnight he gave up. He got dressed and drove to the tower, because there were a hundred things to fix after the board meeting, and because the empty house was worse than being awake.
* * *
At one in the morning, he was alone on the fortieth floor.
The cleaning crew had gone. The whole building was dark except for his office, and the red lights on top of the other towers across the bay, blinking slowly. He had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up. Papers everywhere. A cold cup of coffee.
He looked up at the clock on the wall.
1:04 a.m.
He knew that time. His body knew that time better than his brain did.
For two months, this had been the hour. The house quiet.
His wife asleep upstairs. Him lying awake on the study couch, his chest tight, the whole weight of the day sitting on it, and his thumb finding the number, and the warm low voice picking up on the first ring. Always, for you.
His phone was on the desk. Right there. Face up.
He looked at it.
There was nobody to call. Alexis was in a federal detention center.
Luke was not speaking to him. His mother had hung up on him twice.
His wife was asleep on a laundry-covered couch in an apartment near the hospital, finding out what she wanted, and the kindest thing he had done for her in nine years was to stay out of her way while she did it.
He wanted to call someone so badly that his hand moved on the desk.
He watched it move. He stopped it.
He sat there in the dark office with the red lights blinking across the water. He let the weight sit on his chest. He didn’t hand it to anyone. He didn’t ask anyone to tell him he was a good man. He just sat there, alone, with every single thing he’d done, and he let it be heavy.
At two, he put the phone in his desk drawer and closed it, and put his head down on his arms, and finally slept.
Nobody saw. Nobody would ever know.
That was the point.