Chapter 7: The Unknown Number
I didn't wake Ryan.
I lay there in the dark with the phone screen dimming in my hand, reading the message four more times as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less unsettling.
*You should ask Ryan why Diane really reached out to him after he got sober.
The money isn't the whole story.*
At 6 a.m.
I got up, made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table.
Ryan found me there forty minutes later.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw my face.
"What happened?"
I turned the phone toward him.
He read it.
His expression didn't collapse — it just went very still, the way it had on our wedding night before he'd said *I'm ready to tell you the truth.*
"Sit down," I said.
He sat.
"Is there something else?" I asked.
"Something about why Diane contacted you that you haven't told me?"
He was quiet for a moment.
Not the quiet of someone stalling.
The quiet of someone deciding how to begin.
"When I was at my worst," he said, "before I got sober — I did something I'm not proud of.
Nothing violent.
Nothing that hurt anyone directly.
But I covered something up for Diane."
I set my coffee cup down.
"What did you cover up?"
"In our last year of high school," he said, "there was a girl in our class.
Petra Simmons.
She reported to the school counselor that she was being bullied — specifically targeted.
Named Diane." He looked at the table.
"The counselor called Diane's parents.
Diane's father was on the school board."
"What happened to Petra?"
"The report disappeared.
Petra transferred schools the following semester." He looked up.
"I knew.
I saw Diane intercept the counselor's call log.
I said nothing."
"And Diane knew you'd seen it."
"Yes.
She held it over me for years — not explicitly, just the knowledge that I knew and had stayed quiet.
When I got sober and started making amends, she got nervous.
She reached out before I could reach out to Petra."
I absorbed this slowly.
"She wanted to control the narrative," I said.
"She wanted to make sure that if I ever talked, she'd already positioned herself as someone who was helping me heal.
Someone I was grateful to." He exhaled.
"And then she saw the inheritance, and the plan expanded."
I thought about Petra Simmons.
A girl who had told the truth and been moved out of the way.
"Do you know where Petra is now?" I asked.
"I found her last year," Ryan said.
"When I was putting everything together.
She lives in Portland.
She's a teacher."
"Does she know you're married?"
"No."
I picked up my phone.
The unknown number was still on the screen.
"Someone sent this," I said.
"Someone who knows more than we've told anyone."
Ryan looked at the message again.
"Petra," he said quietly.
I looked at him.
"It has to be," he said.
"She's the only other person who knows the full shape of it."
I typed back one word to the unknown number.
*Talk.*
May you like
Three minutes passed.
Then the phone rang.
