Chapter 8
She worked it out at four in the morning, sitting on the kitchen floor.
She hadn’t meant to be on the floor. She had gotten up for water and then sat down with her back against the cabinet, the way she used to sit on break at the end of a long shift, and she had stayed there.
The fig tree moved outside the little window.
The refrigerator hummed. The Harlan letter was still taped to its door in the dark.
Deja.
She went through it slowly, the way she went through a budget. One line at a time.
Who knew the name?
Deja knew it. Deja’s mother. Deja’s teachers in Columbus. The admissions office at Georgia Tech. None of those people had ever met Lucas.
Amelia knew it. She had never said it at home.
She was sure. She had been sure for three years.
It was her one rule, and she had kept it even on nights when she was so excited about a kid she could hardly sit still.
She had told him a girl from Columbus who wants to build bridges.
She had watched his face when she said it.
He had smiled and said, Good. Build her a bridge. She had not said Deja.
Patrice knew it. But Patrice had never said a student’s name outside that building in her life. She would sooner quit.
Who else?
She thought back. All the way back, to the pilot year. Three years ago this fall.
She had spent that whole summer on the proposal.
Her first one. It wasn’t forty pages like the Harlan.
It was nine, and it was clumsy, and she had rewritten it twenty times.
A scholarship program for kids from the places she came from.
Small towns, poor counties, kids who worked nights and took care of their brothers.
Twelve students to start. Real money, and a real person to call when things went wrong freshman year.
She had taken it to the Foundation’s board in September. Maureen chaired the meeting.
They had been polite. They had listened.
Maureen had thanked her for her passion.
Then Carl Benning had asked a question about measurable outcomes that had no answer, and a woman from the museum board had said something about the Foundation’s traditional focus on the arts, and Maureen had said, gently, that perhaps this wasn’t quite the Foundation’s kind of project.
That perhaps Amelia might look at volunteering with an existing program instead. They voted. It wasn’t close.
She had driven home and made dinner and told Lucas it was fine. That she’d try again next year. That it didn’t matter.
She remembered his face across the table. He’d asked two questions and then gone quiet. He had been quiet all evening.
Then, twelve days later, Patrice had called her into her office with a strange look on her face.
An anonymous donor. Someone who had heard about the proposal. Someone who wanted to fund the whole thing, the full amount Amelia had asked for, to the dollar, through the Foundation, as long as the program stayed exactly as she’d designed it and she ran it.
And one condition.
Amelia sat still on the kitchen floor.
The donor would like to read about the students.
That was it. That was the only condition.
Every year, before the money came, the donor wanted to read every chosen student’s file.
Not to approve them. Just to read them. Patrice had sent the files out in a sealed box, and they had come back two weeks later, and then the money came. Every year. Three years.
Amelia had thought it was lovely. She had thought it was some old woman in Druid Hills who used to be a teacher.
She used to picture her, reading the files with her glasses on, at a kitchen table.
She had sent that old woman a thank-you letter every year through Patrice.
Handwritten. Three pages, with a story about every kid.
With their names.
She put her glass down on the floor carefully so she wouldn’t drop it.
* * *
He came to the Foundation at nine to pick up the file boxes.
She was waiting in the big conference room. She had been there since seven. She hadn’t slept. She had showered and put on her work clothes and put her hair up tight, and she was sitting at the long table where they had read three hundred files together, with her hands folded in front of her.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Close the door.”
He closed it. He didn’t sit down. He stood just inside it and looked at her, and she watched him start to understand that something had happened, without knowing what.
“How do you know Deja’s name?” she said.
For a second he didn’t understand the question. His face was blank, just polite confusion, a man trying to remember a name.
Then he remembered.
The color left his face all at once, like water going down a drain. His hand came up and stopped halfway to nothing and went back to his side.
“I never told you her name,” she said. “I never told you any of their names. You used to tease me about it. And last night you said she writes like Deja, like you’d read her.
Like you’d read her essay yourself.” Her voice didn’t shake.
She was proud of that, later. “So I’m asking. How do you know her name?”
He didn’t answer right away.
She waited. She had learned what his pauses meant in the kitchen in August. He stood there in the doorway looking for a way to say it that wasn’t what it was. He failed to find one.
Then something in his shoulders gave. He stopped looking for a way.
“It was me,” he said.
She had known. She had known since four in the morning. It still hit her like the floor coming up.
“The donor,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The whole pilot.”
“Yes.”
“The whole amount. To the dollar.”
“You asked for what it cost,” he said quietly. “I gave what it cost.”
“And the next year. And this year.”
“Every year.”
“And the files.” Her voice cracked on it, and she hated that, and went on. “The old woman in Druid Hills who wanted to read about the kids. That was you.”
He closed his eyes. “I read every one,” he said. “Every year. I wanted to know who you were fighting for.” He opened them again. “I read your letters too. The thank-you letters. I have all of them.”
She put her hand flat on the table. She pressed down, hard, the way she had in August, because it was that or throw something.
* * *
“Why?” she said.
He came a step into the room. He didn’t sit. He stood with his hands at his sides.
“Because they said no to you,” he said. “My mother’s board said no to you.
You came home and made dinner and said it didn’t matter, and it mattered more than anything I’d ever seen you want.
And you pretended it didn’t. You sat across from me and smiled and pretended, so I wouldn’t feel bad about my own family. I couldn’t stand it.”
“So you fixed it.”
“So I paid for it. Yes.”
“Without telling me.”
“If I’d told you, you’d have said no.” He said it simply, like a fact.
“You’d never have let me. You’d have said you didn’t want it if it came from me.
You’d have said it wasn’t yours.” He swallowed.
“I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to have one thing in that world that you’d done yourself, that nobody could ever say I’d given you.
That was the whole point. It was never supposed to be found. ”
She laughed. It was a terrible sound, short and dry.
“One thing I’d done myself,” she said. “That nobody could say you’d given me.”
He heard it. His own words came back to him.
“You stood up in front of four hundred people a month ago,” she said.
“At the Waverly. And you said, She built it herself. You said it into a microphone. And the whole time, you’d paid for every dollar of it.
Every kid. Every book. Every bus ticket home at Thanksgiving.
” Her eyes were stinging. She didn’t let them go.
“Do you know what that makes the Harlan? The Harlan’s the first money in three years that you didn’t give me.
I wrote forty pages to get it. I was so proud, Lucas.
I sat on my office floor and laughed until I cried.
And it was money for a program that only exists because you decided it should. ”
“You built it,” he said. “Amelia. You did. I only paid. Everything else was—”
“Don’t.”
He stopped.
“Don’t tell me what I built.” She stood up. She couldn’t sit anymore. “You don’t get to tell me that. Not you. Not ever again.”
* * *
She went to the window. The parking deck across the street was full now, cars in every space, people walking to work with their coffee.
She could hear him behind her, not moving.
The thing was, she understood it. That was the worst of it.
She could see why he’d done it: that night three years ago, across the dinner table, watching her pretend it didn’t matter, going quiet.
She could even see, if she let herself, that it was a kind of love.
A big, blind, stupid kind of love that wanted her to have the thing and never feel she owed him for it.
It was the opposite of the bet. She saw that too. The bet had been done for a laugh, for Zane, for his mother, for a dollar on a wall. This had been done for nothing. No credit. No audience. Nobody was ever supposed to know.
And that was what made it unbearable.
Because it meant it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t one drunk night six years ago.
It was who he was. The bet and the money were the same thing wearing different clothes.
One cruel and one kind. But both of them were Lucas Fletcher deciding what would happen to her life, and doing it, and not telling her.
She stood at the window and tried to name one thing.
One thing in her life that was hers. That he hadn’t reached into first.
The marriage? He’d decided that in a bar before he knew her name.
The house, the clothes, the dinners, the people? His.
The program? His money. His decision. His name on the fund now, forever, in front of everyone.
The Harlan? Money for his program.
Her job? The Foundation his grandfather started, that his mother chaired.