Chapter 2

By noon Camille is in my chair, and a woman I've never met is folding my clothes into a bank box.

She has my twenty-year guest register open on the desk, flipping it like a magazine. "You did all this by hand. That's almost sweet." She taps a printout tucked between the pages -- quarterly numbers, green in every column. "The Sundowner cleared a profit every quarter for five years. Steady little cash cow. Never missed a payment."

The floor tilts.

"There was a shortfall," I say. "Every month. Elliot showed me--"

"Elliot showed you a spreadsheet." Gentle, which is worse. "There was no shortfall, Esme. Every dollar you saved us went into an account with his name on it. You didn't keep this place alive. You funded his allowance."

I sold my mother's house to plug a hole that was never there.

My thumb finds the brass key on the ring. For half a second the knuckle goes white. Then I let it go, and my face doesn't move.

The lawyer clears his throat. "A caution. Those transfers are a woman moving large sums out of a business she has no stake in. Contest this, make it loud, and the word stops being saving and becomes embezzlement." A thin smile. "We'd hate for a jury to hear the ugly version."

"Say bye, Graeme," Camille calls.

Graeme looks up from the lobby chair, eyes sharp as tacks. "You made a decent nurse, girl. Shame it wasn't your family."

I counted the people in that room who were on my side. Zero.

So I stopped bracing.

I pick up the pen. Every one of them leans in a half-inch.

I set it back down.

"I'll sign. Monday, nine a.m., right here at this desk." I fold my hands. "With Elliot in the room. Whoever the board sends. And the cameras you already booked for his homecoming."

The flipping stops.

"Why," Camille says slowly, "would you want an audience for that."

"I stood behind this desk for five years. I'll hand it back standing behind it too, in front of everyone. That's the price of my quiet."

She searches my face for the trick and, for the first time since she walked in, doesn't find a smile to answer with. "...Fine. Monday."

I carry my life out to the car myself. Nobody offers to help; I don't ask.

When I come back for the last box, the room has gone quiet. Camille has the register open again -- not flipping now. Reading. Her manicured finger drags down a column of my handwriting and stops, and she checks it against her phone, and checks it again. The lawyer reads over her shoulder. Neither of them hears me in the doorway.

She closes the register. Picks it up to take it. Stops. Sets it back on my desk like it's warm.

Then she looks at it a second too long before she walks out the door.