Chapter 6: Gerald Makes a Choice
Gerald did not sleep that night.
Carol had come home an hour after Walter left with Danny.
She had walked in, set her keys on the counter, and begun making tea with the focused efficiency of a woman trying to keep her hands occupied.
Gerald had watched her from the kitchen doorway.
"Don't," he said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't make tea like nothing happened.
Don't do the thing where you manage the room until everyone forgets what the room was about."
Carol set the kettle down.
"Gerald—"
"You took money from a grieving old man and a pregnant woman." His voice was not raised.
It was something worse than raised.
It was precise.
"You took it and you used it for the business and you told yourself it was practical and you have been telling yourself that for eight years."
"Ryan was g*ne.
There was no will that named her—"
"Walter was the executor.
You knew that."
"Walter was in no state—"
"Carol." He said her name like a door closing.
"Stop."
She stopped.
Gerald sat down at the kitchen table.
He was fifty-three years old and he had built a decent life and he had trusted his wife to be the person she presented herself as, and tonight he was sitting in his own kitchen recalculating eight years of marriage against a single evening.
"I'm going to call Walter in the morning," he said.
Carol's head came up.
"Gerald—"
"I'm going to tell him everything I know about the estate accounts.
Every transaction.
Every transfer.
I kept records because I always keep records, and if there's anything in those records that helps him, he's going to have it."
"That's our money—"
"It was never our money." He looked at her directly.
"It was a sick woman's money and an old man's right and a little boy's inheritance, and I am not going to sit on it for one more day."
Carol was quiet for a long moment.
When she spoke again, her voice had changed.
The management was gone.
What was underneath it was smaller and more honest and, Gerald thought, probably the closest thing to the truth she had said all night.
"I told myself Patrice would be fine," she said.
"She was young.
She had the baby.
I told myself two thousand dollars was enough to get started."
"You told yourself what you needed to."
"Yes." A pause.
"I did."
Gerald stood up.
"I'm sleeping in the guest room tonight.
I need to think."
"Gerald—"
"I'm not leaving.
I'm not making any decisions tonight except this one." He picked up his phone from the counter.
"But Carol — if Walter's lawyer calls, you answer.
And you tell the truth.
All of it.
Because the alternative is a courtroom, and I will not lie under oath for this.
Not for this."
He walked down the hallway.
Carol stood in the kitchen alone.
The kettle had boiled and gone cold.
She didn't pour the tea.
She sat down at the table and put her face in her hands, and the sound she made was not crying exactly.
It was something older than crying.
It was the sound of a story you've told yourself for years finally running out of road.
Three weeks later, Gerald's attorney contacted Walter's attorney with a full accounting of the estate transactions.
Walter's attorney called it the most cooperative opposing disclosure he had seen in thirty years of practice.
May you like
Gerald was not charged.
Carol was.
