Chapter 7: The Letter
David read the message twice.
He was in the driver's seat, engine off, hands on the wheel.
The afternoon light had gone flat and grey.
"What letter?" I asked.
He didn't answer immediately.
That told me something.
"David."
"It's not what you think," he said.
"Tell me what it is."
He looked out through the windscreen.
A neighbour walked past on the pavement with a small dog.
Neither of us moved.
"When Dad left," David said slowly, "he didn't just leave.
You know that.
You always said he emptied the account and walked out.
And that's true.
But there was more to it."
I waited.
"He wrote me a letter.
I was three when he left, so I didn't read it until I was older.
He sent it to Gran's address — your mother's — and she kept it until I was eighteen.
She gave it to me when I went to university." He paused.
"I never told you because I didn't want to hurt you."
"What did it say?"
David was quiet for a moment.
"He said he left because you asked him to.
He said you told him the marriage was over and that you wanted him gone.
He said he tried to fight for custody but you threatened to — he used a legal term I didn't fully understand at the time.
Essentially he said you threatened to make things very difficult for him if he didn't disappear quietly."
The street outside was completely still.
"And you believed him?" I said.
"I was eighteen," David said.
"I didn't know what to believe.
I put the letter away and I didn't think about it for years.
And then Emma found it."
"When?"
"About two years into our marriage.
She was going through some boxes in the attic.
She came to me with it and she said—" He stopped.
"What did she say?"
"She said I deserved to know the truth about you.
That you'd been controlling my whole life and I couldn't see it because I was too close." He turned to look at me.
His eyes were pained.
"I told her she was wrong.
We argued about it.
I thought we'd put it to rest."
"But she kept the letter."
"She kept the letter," he said.
I looked at my hands in my lap.
"Your father left because he wanted to leave," I said.
"He had been seeing another woman for two years before that.
I did ask him to go — yes.
Because I found out.
Because I had a three-year-old son and a husband who had been lying to my face for two years, and I wanted him out of my house." I paused.
"I didn't threaten him.
I didn't need to.
He was relieved to go.
The letter was his way of making himself the victim after the fact."
David said nothing.
"I should have told you all of this years ago," I said.
"I kept it from you because you were a child and then because I didn't want to colour how you felt about a father you barely knew.
That was a mistake.
I see that now."
"She's going to use it," David said.
"In the proceedings.
She's going to say you're controlling.
That you drove Dad out and now you're trying to drive her out."
"I know."
"Patricia needs to know about it before Emma introduces it."
"Yes," I said.
"Call her."
David took out his phone.
Then he stopped.
"Mum." He looked at me directly.
"Is there anything else?
Anything at all that I don't know yet?
Because I need to walk into this with the full picture.
No more surprises."
I thought carefully.
"There is one more thing," I said.
"But it doesn't hurt you.
It helps you."
"Tell me."
"Gerald found something else in the account records.
The transfers to Marcus Hale's company didn't start eighteen months ago.
They started four years ago — smaller amounts, irregular, easy to miss.
The total isn't twenty-two thousand." I met his eyes.
"It's closer to sixty."
David went very still.
Sixty thousand dollars.
Moved out of their household account, over four years, to a man his wife had introduced as a colleague.
He turned back to the windscreen.
"Call Gerald," I said gently.
"And then call Patricia."
He nodded once.
His hand was steady as he dialled.
But as the phone rang, a car pulled up across the street and parked.
The driver didn't get out.
May you like
I recognised the red coat immediately.
Emma had followed us.
