Chapter 6: What He Deserves
Brandon picked up the paper.
He unfolded it slowly.
Read it.
His hands were very steady, which told me more about him than any expression would have.
He had trained himself not to show things in his hands.
I had watched those hands for a year and never understood what they were hiding.
He set the paper down on his knee.
"What do you want?" he said.
"I want you to understand your situation completely," my father said.
"Before we discuss anything else."
"I understand it."
"Tell me."
Brandon looked at him.
"The recording.
The witnesses.
The financial trail.
Melissa's testimony." A pause.
"Gerald."
"And?"
A longer pause.
"Patricia."
"Patricia," my father repeated.
"Who will need to be told.
About you.
About the apartment.
About where the money came from." He let that sit for a moment.
"She has a four-year-old son, Brandon.
That boy is going to grow up knowing what his father did."
Something moved across Brandon's face then.
The first thing that looked real all evening.
It was there for only a second before he put it away again, but I saw it.
He hadn't thought about the boy.
"What are the terms?" he said.
"There are no terms yet.
First, Emily's attorney will review the full financial damage to her companies.
Every dollar that was moved, every filing that was altered, every account that was touched.
Full restitution.
Not a settlement — full restitution, with interest."
"That could take months to calculate."
"Then it takes months."
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime, you don't leave Springfield.
You don't contact Emily.
You don't contact Melissa.
You don't contact Patricia except to tell her the truth about who you are." My father's voice didn't rise.
"And you don't speak to any journalist, any attorney not previously approved, or any associate of yours about anything that happened in this room tonight."
Brandon's eyes narrowed.
"And if I don't agree to those conditions?"
"Then everything goes to the district attorney's office tomorrow morning.
The recording, the financial documents, Melissa's testimony, Gerald's full file, and the names of Daniel Marsh and Kevin Pryce." My father looked at him steadily.
"Fraud, coercion, @ssault, and conspiracy.
You'd be looking at federal charges on the financial side alone."
"You'd expose Emily's companies in the process."
"Emily's companies are clean.
I told you — what Gerald gave you was constructed.
There is nothing in Emily's businesses that doesn't survive scrutiny." He paused.
"Can you say the same about yours?"
Brandon was quiet.
"Your construction company," my father said.
"The permits on the Riverside development.
The subcontractor payments that don't match the filed invoices." He tilted his head slightly.
"I've had eighteen months, Brandon.
You spent forty thousand dollars on a private investigator.
I spent considerably more."
The last of the calculation left Brandon's face.
What replaced it was something I had never seen there before.
Not fear exactly.
More like the look of a man standing in a room he thought he knew, reaching for a light switch, and finding only wall.
"I need to speak to my attorney," he said.
"He'll be here within the hour."
"I need to speak to him alone."
"You'll have that." My father stood.
"But before he arrives, there's one more thing."
He looked at me.
I understood what he was waiting for.
I had been sitting against the couch with Cooper in my lap for the last two hours, and my knees were still screaming, and my wrists were raw, and my hair was still on the floor, and I had not said the thing I needed to say because I hadn't been ready.
I was ready now.
I looked at Brandon.
"You drugged me," I said.
"On our anniversary.
You chained me to the floor and you hjt me with a hammer and you threatened my dog and you stood there and watched people laugh." I kept my voice level.
"You didn't do that because of the companies.
You did it because you wanted to.
Because some part of you has always wanted to and you finally had a reason."
Brandon said nothing.
"I'm not asking you to confirm that.
I don't need you to." I looked at him the way my father had looked at him — not with anger, just with clarity.
"I just needed to say it out loud.
So you know that I know."
The room was very quiet.
Brandon looked at me for a long moment.
Then he looked away.
That was the only answer I needed.
My father put his hand on my shoulder.
"Let's get your knees looked at."
"Not yet." I looked around the room.
The remaining guests — twelve, maybe fourteen now — were watching me.
Some of them had been laughing two hours ago.
Some of them had lifted their phones to film.
One woman near the fireplace had tears on her face.
I didn't know if they were for me or for herself.
"I want to know," I said to the room, "who called my father."
Silence.
Then the man I had noticed earlier — the one with his phone face-down against his leg — raised his hand slowly.
He was perhaps sixty.
Gray at his temples.
I had never seen him before tonight.
"My name is Robert Calloway," he said.
"I'm a business associate of your husband's.
Or I was." He looked at Brandon briefly.
"I have a daughter.
She's twenty-three." He stopped.
Started again.
"When I saw the chain, I called the number on the bracelet.
It was still on the floor.
The number was on the back of the clasp."
I looked at the bracelet lying across the room.
I hadn't known there was a number on the clasp.
My father had never told me that.
"Thank you," I said.
Robert Calloway nodded once and looked at his shoes.
Brandon was staring at the bracelet on the floor.
"The number on the clasp," he said slowly.
Not to anyone.
Just working it out.
"I told you," I said.
"You only needed two seconds."
His attorney arrived forty minutes later.
And the moment the attorney walked through the door and saw my father standing in the center of the room, the attorney stopped walking and said, very quietly: "Oh."
Just that.
May you like
One word.
And I understood then that my father's name meant something even in rooms where nobody was supposed to know it.
