Chapter 3: "I Can't. Not Yet."
Those four words hung in the air between us.
I looked at my husband — a man I had been married to for fourteen years — and I realized I had no idea what expression was on his face.
It wasn't guilt exactly.
It wasn't fear.
It was something closer to calculation.
"Brian.
There is a hole in our living room wall.
Our daughter watched you hide a metal box inside it and then you told her to lie to me.
You are going to tell me what is in that box right now."
"I said I can't."
"Can't or won't?"
He picked the broom back up.
Actually turned his back on me and started sweeping again.
My hand came down flat on the workbench beside him.
The sound made him flinch.
"Put the broom down."
He put it down.
"Is it money?"
Silence.
"Brian.
Is there money hidden in that wall?"
He turned around.
His jaw was tight.
"It's not what you think."
"Then tell me what it is, because what I think is that my husband has been hiding cash in the walls of our house and using our twelve-year-old daughter to keep it quiet."
"It's not cash."
"Then what?"
He looked at the ceiling.
Exhaled through his nose.
The way he does when he's buying time, when he's deciding how much to say.
"It's documents."
I waited.
"Legal documents.
And some other paperwork.
I needed somewhere safe to keep them."
"Safe from what?"
"Safe from—" He stopped.
Started again.
"There are some things happening at work.
With the company.
I can't talk about it yet because I don't know how it's going to land, and I didn't want you to worry."
I stared at him.
"You destroyed our living room wall because of work paperwork."
"I didn't want it on a computer.
I didn't want it in a filing cabinet.
I needed it somewhere nobody would look."
"Nobody meaning me."
He didn't answer.
I walked past him to the open wall.
The insulation had been pulled back and restuffed unevenly.
You could see where the box had been placed — a rectangular gap in the foam, clean-edged, deliberate.
"Get it out."
"I told you, I can't—"
"Get.
It.
Out."
He stood there for a long moment.
Then he reached into the wall.
The box was grey steel, about the size of a shoebox, with a small combination lock on the front.
He set it on the workbench.
His hands didn't move toward the lock.
"Open it."
"I need you to trust me on this one."
Something shifted in my chest.
Not anger.
Something colder.
"You hid something in the walls of our home.
You told our daughter to lie to me.
And now you're asking me to trust you."
He looked at the box.
"There are things in here that could put us in a difficult position if the wrong person saw them."
"What kind of difficult position?"
He finally looked at me directly.
"The kind where we lose everything."
The furnace kicked on somewhere beneath us.
Neither of us moved.
"Brian, what have you done?"
May you like
He didn't answer.
But his hand moved — just slightly — and covered the lock.
