Chapter 6: What Richard Had to Say for Himself
He answered on the second ring.
"Carol." His voice was the same.
Older, but the same — that particular flatness he used when he was bracing for something.
"I wondered when you'd call."
"Did you." It wasn't a question.
"Lauren told you."
"Lauren told me everything." I was standing in the kitchen.
I had sent Lauren and Rosie to the park down the street.
I had needed the house empty for this.
"You knew about Rosie."
A pause.
"Ethan told me in confidence."
"He's gone, Richard.
There is no confidence left to keep."
"Carol—"
"He told you he had a daughter.
He told you he was going to give her a kidney.
And you told him not to."
"I told him to think carefully about what he was risking—"
"You told him she wasn't his responsibility." My voice was steady.
I had spent the night deciding it would be.
"You told him Lauren had lied to him and he owed her nothing.
You tried to talk him out of saving his own child's life."
Silence.
"And then you came to his funeral," I said.
"You stood at the back in your dark suit and you shook hands and you called me three days later and told me he was a good man.
While you were sitting on the fact that I had a granddaughter."
"I didn't think it was my place to—"
"Your place." I set my hand flat on the counter.
"Richard.
Your grandchild was standing in that church."
The silence this time was different.
Longer.
"I didn't know how to tell you," he said.
His voice had changed.
Something had gone out of it.
"I didn't know how to walk up to you at our son's funeral and say — Carol, there's something else.
I didn't know how to do that."
"So you chose not to."
"Yes."
"You chose to let me go home alone and grieve alone and not know."
"Yes." Quieter now.
"I know that was wrong."
"I want to ask you something," I said.
"And I need you to answer me honestly.
Not the way you answered Ethan.
Honestly."
"All right."
"If you had known — before the surgery, when Ethan first told you — if you had known he wouldn't survive it.
Would you still have told him not to do it?"
The pause was the longest yet.
"No," he said.
"I wouldn't have."
"Why not?"
"Because—" His voice broke.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
"Because he would have spent whatever time he had left knowing he had a daughter who was still alive.
And that would have mattered to him more than anything I could have said."
I closed my eyes.
"He knew," I said.
"He knew exactly what he was doing and he did it anyway.
And you almost stopped him."
"I know."
"I need you to come here," I said.
"Not today.
But soon.
There is a little girl who has her father's eyes and she is going to need people around her who loved him.
And whatever you and I are to each other, we are both that."
Another silence.
Then: "When?"
"I'll call you."
I hung up.
May you like
I stood in the kitchen for a moment.
Then I picked up the second envelope from the table and carried it to the chair by the window — the chair Ethan used to sit in when he came for Sunday dinners, the one that still held the shape of him somehow — and I opened it.
