Chapter 7: What Diane Said After He Left
We sat in the kitchen for a while without speaking.
Diane got up and poured two glasses of wine without asking.
She set one in front of me.
She sat back down.
"Are you all right?" she said.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly.
She nodded.
That seemed to be the right answer.
Joel had gone upstairs again after the car left.
I'd heard him on the stairs — not running, just walking, the slow tread of someone who has been holding something tense for a long time and is finally putting it down.
"He'll go to his brother's," Diane said.
"In Coventry.
He always does when things get difficult.
He'll stay there a week, maybe two.
He'll tell his brother I overreacted."
"And his brother will believe him?"
"His brother always believes him." She turned her glass.
"But it won't matter this time.
Karen is very thorough."
I thought about the cracked phone.
The eleven names.
The transfers recorded in his own files with the particular arrogance of a man who never expected to be caught because he never had been.
"How much did he take?" I asked.
"Altogether."
Diane was quiet for a moment.
"Karen's best estimate, across the women she's been able to identify, is just over nineteen thousand pounds.
Spread over four years.
Small enough amounts that none of them reported it individually." She paused.
"Small enough that each woman probably thought she was the only one, and felt too embarrassed to tell anyone."
I thought about that.
About the particular shame of it.
How he had chosen the amounts carefully.
Chosen women who were newly alone, newly vulnerable, newly in need of someone who seemed to understand the specific silence of an empty house.
"He knew exactly what he was doing," I said.
"Yes."
"He wasn't lost.
He wasn't lonely.
He was working."
"Yes," Diane said again.
"I think I knew that by the second time.
I just wasn't ready to say it out loud."
I understood that too.
The gap between knowing and saying.
How long a person can live in that gap when the alternative is too large to look at directly.
"What will you do?" I asked.
"Sell the house.
Move closer to my sister in Edinburgh.
Start again." She said it simply, without drama.
The plan of a woman who has been thinking about this for a long time and has made her peace with it.
"Joel wants to come with me.
He has one more year of school.
We'll manage."
"I'm glad you had a plan," I said.
"I'm glad you knocked on the door." She looked at me.
"I mean that.
I had the phone.
I had Karen.
But I needed someone who was willing to sit across the table from him and say it to his face." She paused.
"The other two women — they left before he came home.
I don't blame them.
But I needed someone who would stay."
I thought about standing on that porch in the heat.
The full minute I'd stood there before I knocked.
The jacket over my arm.
"I almost didn't," I said.
"But you did."
Outside, the light was changing.
The heat of the day had finally broken and the garden was going gold and long-shadowed, the way gardens do in late afternoon in summer.
I could see the hydrangeas from where I was sitting.
Through the kitchen window, right there under the front of the house.
Full bloom, exactly as they'd appeared in every photograph.
"Are those yours?" I asked.
"The hydrangeas.
Did you plant them?"
Diane followed my gaze.
"Twenty years ago," she said.
"When we first moved in."
I looked at them for a moment.
He had photographed her garden.
Her flowers.
Her mug from her hallway.
He had sent them to me as evidence of a life he was offering, and every single piece of it had belonged to someone else.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"For what it's worth.
I'm sorry he used your garden."
Diane was quiet for a moment.
"He used everything," she said.
May you like
"The garden is the least of it."
She refilled my glass without asking.
