Chapter 7: What the Ledger Showed
Harold came over two days later, which was unusual.
In the year since the divorce, he'd been to my house exactly twice — once to pick up a box he'd forgotten, once to drop off the kids.
Both times he'd stayed on the porch.
This time I let him in.
He sat at the kitchen table — the same table where we'd had a hundred difficult conversations when we were married — and he put his phone face-up between us.
"I need to show you something," he said.
He opened the photos of the ledger.
I'd known they existed.
I hadn't seen them until now.
The pages were handwritten in Diana's careful, looping script.
Dates in the left column.
Amounts in the middle.
In the right column, a single letter for each entry: *G* for guest, she'd written at the top of the first page.
I scrolled through slowly.
The rentals went back further than eighteen months.
They went back nearly three years.
"Harold."
"I know."
The amounts were small individually — three hundred here, four-fifty there, a week-long booking for twelve hundred.
But they added up.
I did rough math in my head and stopped when I reached a number that made me set the phone down.
"She's been doing this since before we divorced," I said.
"Yes."
"While she was living next door to us.
While she was walking into our house and taking food from our fridge."
"Yes."
I looked at him.
He looked tired in a way that went past the usual.
Not angry.
Just worn through.
"She told me she was struggling," he said.
"When she moved here.
She said she'd used most of the money from selling her old house on the new place and she was tight.
I gave her money, Renee.
I gave her money and she was running a rental business the entire time."
"The eleven thousand."
"That was just what I knew about." He picked up his phone and turned it over in his hands.
"There were smaller amounts before that.
A few hundred here and there.
I stopped counting."
I thought about all the times Diana had stood in my kitchen, opening my refrigerator, helping herself to whatever she wanted.
The trash in my bins.
The water in my pipes.
The money from Harold's account.
She hadn't been struggling.
She'd been building something — quietly, steadily, at everyone else's expense.
"What do you want to do with this?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"I want her to pay it back."
"She won't."
"I know." He set the phone on the table.
"But I want it on record that she owes it.
I want her to know that I know.
And I want her to understand that if she ever—" He stopped.
"I have a daughter, Renee.
Our daughter is going to be a teenager in two years.
I don't want her watching her grandmother treat people the way Diana treated you and thinking that's normal."
Something tightened in my chest.
I hadn't expected that.
"Okay," I said.
"I'm going to talk to a lawyer.
Not to sue her.
Just to understand my options.
And to put something in writing about the money."
"That's reasonable."
He nodded.
He reached for the phone and then stopped.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Did you ever think about just letting it go?
The water bill, the HOA — just deciding it wasn't worth the fight?"
I thought about the morning I'd looked out my window.
The hose.
Her smile when I confronted her.
*God, you're so stingy.*
"Every day," I said.
"And then I'd get another bill."
He almost smiled.
"Yeah."
He stood up to leave.
At the door, he turned back.
"The HOA decision comes tomorrow," he said.
"I know."
"Whatever they decide — you did the right thing."
I watched him walk back to his car.
He didn't go next door to Diana's.
He drove away.
I went back to the kitchen table and sat down.
Tomorrow.
One more day.
But that evening, just before dark, I saw something through my kitchen window that made me go very still.
Diana was standing in her backyard, looking at the empty pool.
Just standing there, not moving, staring down into the drained concrete basin.
She stood there for a long time.
I didn't know what she was thinking.
May you like
I didn't need to.
I turned away from the window and started making dinner.
