Chapter 10: Thursday
Sonia was already there when I arrived.
The café was small and warm, near the edge of town, the kind of place with mismatched chairs and handwritten menus and no reason for anyone to notice you.
Diane had chosen it well.
Sonia was younger than I expected.
Early thirties, dark hair, a coat that looked like she had bought it to be invisible.
She was sitting with both hands around a cup and she stood when I came in, the way people do when they are nervous and trying not to show it.
We looked at each other for a moment.
"I'm sorry it took this long," she said.
"You're here now," I said.
We sat down.
For the first hour we didn't talk about Daniel at all.
She asked about the pregnancy.
I asked about where she lived now, what she did.
She was a librarian in a town two hours away.
She had a cat.
She had a small flat with a garden she was slowly learning to grow things in.
"Tomatoes mostly," she said.
"They don't always work but I keep trying."
"That sounds like a good thing to keep trying," I said.
She smiled.
It was a careful smile, the kind that had learned to check the room first.
I recognized it.
Then she said, "I need to tell you something that isn't in the journal."
I waited.
"The night before I left," she said, "Daniel told me that if I ever spoke to anyone about what happened in that house, he would make sure no one believed me.
He said he had people.
That Gerald had contacts.
That I would look like a troubled woman with a history of instability and no one would look twice at anything I said."
"He said the same thing to me," I said.
"Not in those words.
But the same thing."
"I believed him for four years." She looked at her cup.
"I want you to know that I believed him completely.
I thought the journal was pointless.
I almost threw it away twice." She looked up.
"I kept it because I needed one place where the truth existed.
Even if no one ever read it."
"Someone read it," I said.
"Yes." Her voice was quiet.
"Someone read it."
I reached across the table and covered her hand with mine.
The same way Carol had done for me.
Sonia looked down at my hand.
Then she turned hers over and held on.
We sat like that for a moment.
"He's going to say we coordinated this," she said.
"Gerald will argue we're working together to fabricate a case."
"Let him argue it," I said.
"Two women with the same bolt on the same bathroom door, the same conduct clause in the same agreement drafted by the same man." I paused.
"Let him stand up in a courtroom and explain that."
Sonia looked at me.
Something in her face shifted.
The careful smile became something else.
Something steadier.
"I'm not afraid of him anymore," she said.
It sounded like she was testing the words.
"Neither am I," I said.
And I meant it.
We ordered more coffee.
We talked for another hour.
She told me about the detective who had called her, the same one assigned to my case.
She told me the detective was a woman who had listened to the whole journal entry by entry without once suggesting Sonia was remembering wrong.
"She said, 'I believe you,'" Sonia told me.
"Just like that.
Three words.
I cried for twenty minutes after the call."
"I know that feeling," I said.
When we finally stood to leave, Sonia picked up her bag and then stopped.
"What's her name?" she asked.
"The baby."
"I don't know yet," I said.
"I keep changing my mind."
Sonia nodded.
"Whatever you choose," she said, "she's going to have a good mother."
I walked back to Carol's car in the cold afternoon with that sentence sitting in my chest like something warm.
Carol looked at me when I got in.
"How was she?"
"Brave," I said.
"She was very brave."
Carol started the engine.
"So are you," she said simply.
She pulled out into the street and I watched the town go by and thought about a bolt painted over on a bathroom door and a woman in a flat two hours away growing tomatoes that didn't always work but kept trying anyway.
May you like
And I thought: we are going to be all right.
Both of us.
