Chapter 8: The Last Conversation
I called Eric that evening.
He answered on the third ring, and his voice had the careful quality of someone who had been waiting for bad news and was trying to sound like he hadn't.
"I heard from Carol," he said immediately.
"I know."
"Whatever Ruth told you—"
"Eric." I kept my voice even.
"I'm not calling to renegotiate.
The agreement stands."
A silence.
"Then why are you calling?"
I looked out the kitchen window at the yard.
The evening was settling in, the light going soft and amber at the edges of the fence.
"I want to ask you something," I said.
"And I want you to answer honestly.
Not for any legal reason.
Just because I think I deserve an honest answer after six years."
He didn't say yes.
He didn't say no.
But he didn't hang up.
"Did you ever love me?" I asked.
"Or was this always about the house and the account?"
A long pause.
"It wasn't always about that," he said finally.
"When did it change?"
Another pause.
Longer.
"When I realized I'd made the same mistake again," he said.
"With Ruth's husband.
And I thought — if I could just get stable.
Get ahead of it.
I told myself I'd pay it back before you ever noticed.
That it wasn't really taking, it was borrowing."
"But you never paid it back."
"No."
"And when you realized I'd noticed—"
"I panicked," he said.
"Mom had the idea about moving in.
She said if we could establish presence in the house, make it feel like a shared home, it would complicate things legally.
I knew it was wrong.
I knew it the night you walked in."
"But you let her do it anyway."
"Yes."
I let the silence hold for a moment.
"I want you to get help, Eric," I said.
"Not for my sake.
For yours.
What you've been doing — the taking, the hiding, the building of exits — it's going to keep happening until you understand why you do it."
He didn't respond right away.
"I know," he said.
It was the quietest thing he'd said in the entire conversation.
The most real.
"The agreement is fair," I said.
"Stick to the schedule and this ends cleanly."
"And if I don't?"
"Then Ruth Albright's statement goes to a lawyer who is not Carol, and everything becomes very public and very expensive."
A pause.
"That's fair."
"It is."
"For what it's worth," he said, "the house — I always knew it was yours.
Even before the trust.
I knew you'd bought it, paid for it, built it into what it was.
I told myself it was ours because it was easier than admitting what I was doing."
I didn't say anything to that.
"I'm sorry," he said.
The words were real.
I could hear that they were real.
They were also six years too late, delivered from a short-term rental, after a forensic accountant and a signed agreement and a phone call from a woman he'd wronged a decade ago.
"I know you are," I said.
I ended the call.
I set the phone on the counter.
The house was quiet around me — not the tense, occupied quiet of the night Diane had pointed at the door, but something older and more settled.
The quiet of a place that had been through something and come out the other side.
I went to the living room and sat on the cream sofa.
The cushions were clean.
I'd had them professionally cleaned on Tuesday, the same day Kyle's van had pulled out of the driveway.
I sat there for a while without turning on any lights.
Then I got up, opened a bottle of wine I'd been saving for no particular reason, poured one glass, and took it to the back porch.
The evening was warm.
Crickets somewhere in the hedge.
The neighbor's dog had gone inside.
I sat down in the chair where Diane had sat when her arms finally uncrossed.
I drank my wine.
I didn't think about Eric, or Diane, or the account, or the agreement.
I thought about the conference in Chicago I'd come home from.
The presentation I'd given on the second morning, the one that had gone well, the one where a woman in the front row had asked a sharp question and I'd answered it cleanly and felt, for a moment, completely like myself.
That feeling was still there.
It had been there the whole time.
I just hadn't been able to hear it over everything else.
---
*Sometimes the people who try to take everything from you end up showing you exactly how much you already had.*
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