Chapter 7: The Morning After
Michael arrived at eight-fifteen.
He rang the doorbell instead of using his key, which told me everything about where he was standing before I even opened the door.
He looked like he hadn't slept.
His jacket was the same one from the reception, and there was a tension around his eyes that I recognized — it was the same tension Richard used to carry when he was trying to hold two contradictory things in his mind at once and couldn't put either of them down.
I stepped back to let him in.
He followed me to the kitchen without speaking.
I poured two cups of coffee and set one in front of him at the table where he had eaten breakfast every morning for the first eighteen years of his life.
He wrapped both hands around the cup and stared into it.
"She was gone when I woke up," he said.
I sat down across from him.
"She took her bags," he said.
"Not all of them.
The small ones.
The ones she could carry herself." He looked up.
"She left a note on the pillow.
It said she needed space to think and that she hoped I would come to my senses."
"Come to your senses," I repeated.
"Her exact words."
I drank my coffee.
"Mom." He set the cup down.
"I need to ask you something and I need you to answer me honestly."
"All right."
"Did you go looking for this?
The Forsythe woman, the envelope, the recording — did you set out to find something on Sabrina, or did it find you?"
I looked at my son.
"Diane Forsythe contacted me," I said.
"Eight weeks ago.
She found me through the business.
She said she had information I needed and that she was telling me because she had stayed silent about Gerald and she wasn't willing to stay silent again." I paused.
"I didn't go looking, Michael.
But when it came to me, I didn't turn away from it either."
"And the recording?"
"I installed the recorder in the kitchen six weeks ago.
After Diane's visit.
After I understood what kind of person Sabrina was." I held his gaze.
"I will not apologize for that."
His jaw worked.
"That's — Mom, that's—"
"Illegal in some circumstances and legal in others," I said.
"Avery has reviewed it.
In Massachusetts, one-party consent applies.
The recording is clean."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"What were you going to say?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I was going to say that I should have been the one protecting you.
And I wasn't.
And I don't know how to — I don't know what to do with that."
The kitchen was very quiet.
I reached across the table and put my hand over his.
He turned his hand over and held on.
We sat like that for a while — two people in a kitchen that had held thirty years of mornings, learning how to be in the same room again without the money or the fear or the careful performance of a family that was mostly held together by what neither of us said.
"She's going to come back," I said eventually.
"I know."
"She's going to have a new version of everything."
"I know that too."
"What are you going to do?"
He looked at our hands on the table.
"I called a lawyer this morning," he said.
"Before I came here.
Not Avery — my own.
I wanted someone who was mine." He looked up.
"I want to know what my options are.
With the marriage.
With the Gerald Marsh situation.
With all of it."
Something in my chest loosened — not all the way, not yet, but enough.
"That's the right decision," I said.
"It doesn't feel right," he said.
"It feels like the worst day of my life."
"I know," I said.
"Those are sometimes the same thing."
His phone buzzed on the table between us.
We both looked at it.
Sabrina's name on the screen.
He turned it face-down without answering.
It buzzed again.
Then again.
Then it stopped.
May you like
Michael picked up his coffee cup.
"Tell me what you need me to do," he said.
