Chapter 5
She walked in holding my arm, in the beige coat I had bought her, and she looked at her house the way you look at something that was taken from you, with the specific expression of a person taking inventory of what remains.
"They told me it was insurance paperwork," she said, to no one in particular, because she was not speaking to anyone in particular. She was speaking to the record.
Kyle looked at her. I watched him look at her, and I want to be accurate about what I saw in his face in that moment, which was not guilt in the conventional sense. It was the specific reckoning of a person who has been treating someone as a category rather than a person and has been forced, by circumstances, to see the actual person, and is finding the visibility uncomfortable.
Vanessa said something that began with "Margaret" and did not finish.
I looked at Kyle.
"Every signature, transfer, and bank record is already preserved," I said. "The Delaware LLC, both transfer accounts, and the account receiving the remainder after fees. We have the notarization timeline. We have Robert Fisk's records from Devon Avenue. We have the motel receipts and the date the payments stopped."
Kyle looked toward the door. Two agents were near it. Not blocking it in a theatrical way. Simply there.
I took one step closer to him. Not aggressive. Just close enough for what I needed to say to be between us rather than in the room.
"You didn't steal from a helpless woman," I said. "You handed the FBI a case."
Vanessa broke then. Not dramatically. She simply began crying in the way that people cry when the performance they have been maintaining has run out of material, quietly, with her hand over her mouth, in the kitchen of a house that was never hers.
Kyle said nothing else.
The agents began the inventory.
May you like
My mother stood in the living room where she had raised two children and looked at the new furniture Kyle and Vanessa had bought with her money and did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, to me, quietly: "The garden is a mess."
"I know," I said. "We'll fix it."
