Chapter 6: The Man Who Made Himself Untouchable
I stood up.
Claire stood with me.
"Ethan—"
"I need a minute."
I walked to the window.
The car park below was nearly empty.
Two lights on tall poles cast yellow circles on the tarmac.
I stared at them and tried to find the edges of what I was feeling, but there were too many edges and none of them were clean.
My mother was forty meters away.
She had been sitting in a waiting room while I read her letter.
And a man named Gerald Marsh had spent twenty-five years living his life in the same city as me, untouched.
I turned around.
"I want to meet her," I said.
"But first — tell me about Marsh."
Ruth shifted against her pillow.
"What do you want to know?"
"Is he still connected?
Still protected?"
"He retired from St.
Agatha's twelve years ago.
But he sits on the board of two private medical foundations.
He has money, and he has spent a long time making sure the right people know his name." She paused.
"He also has a lawyer who has made two calls to my former colleagues in the past year.
Asking questions about me.
About what I might be saying to people."
Claire looked up sharply.
"He knows you've been talking?"
"He suspects," Ruth said.
"Gerald has always been better at suspecting than most people are at knowing."
I set the folder on the bed beside her.
"This is enough to go to someone with.
A journalist.
A lawyer.
Someone."
"It may be," Ruth said.
"But Ethan — that decision is not mine to make.
It is your mother's.
And yours, if you choose it." She looked at me steadily.
"I only promised Diane I would get the truth to you.
What happens next belongs to both of you."
I picked up the folder again.
"Has Marsh ever been confronted directly?
Has anyone ever put this in front of him?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Ruth's expression didn't change.
"Because every woman he did this to was alone.
And alone, none of them had enough." She nodded at the folder in my hands.
"Together, they might."
I thought about the four pages of my mother's letter.
The eleven times she had started it and stopped.
Twenty-five years of a wall she couldn't get past.
"I want to see her," I said.
Ruth pressed the call button beside her bed.
A moment later the night nurse appeared in the doorway.
"Can you bring the woman from the waiting room?" Ruth said.
"Tell her he's ready."
The nurse nodded and disappeared.
The next two minutes were the longest I had ever sat through.
Claire stayed near the wall, quiet, giving me the space.
I stood in the middle of the room with the folder under my arm and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
The door opened.
The woman who stepped through it was in her late forties, dark-haired, with my jaw and my eyes and a way of holding herself that I recognized without being able to say why.
She stopped just inside the door.
Her hand was still on the handle.
She looked at me the way Ruth had — like something she had been imagining for a very long time.
But where Ruth's look had been careful, this one was completely unguarded.
"Ethan," she said.
Just my name.
Nothing else.
I didn't have a speech prepared.
I hadn't known two hours ago that I would need one.
"Diane," I said.
Her face broke open.
She crossed the room and I didn't step back, and then her arms were around me and she was saying something into my shoulder that I couldn't fully hear, and I stood there in a hospice room at eleven o'clock at night holding a folder full of evidence and being held by a woman I had never met who had loved me every single day.
I didn't cry.
Not yet.
But I held on.
After a long moment, she pulled back and looked at my face with both hands framing it, the way you check something precious for damage.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I'm so sorry it took this long."
"It wasn't your fault."
"I know." She shook her head slightly.
"I know that now.
But I'm still sorry."
Behind her, Ruth made a small sound — not words, just a breath.
I looked over Diane's shoulder at the old woman in the bed, and something in Ruth's face had loosened.
Like a knot that had been there for twenty-five years had finally given way.
I looked back at my mother.
May you like
"Tell me about Gerald Marsh," I said.
"Tell me everything."
