Just me.
“I should have told you,” she said again. Her voice was very quiet. “Two years ago, when I knew, I should have told you. I’m sorry.”
I believed her again. I believed it the second time the same way I believed it the first. The sorry was real. It was the sorriest she had ever been in my presence, and it was not enough to change anything, and both things were true simultaneously, which is one of the harder facts about people you love.
“I know,” I said.
Then I said: I need you all to go now.
No one argued.
That was the thing I had not anticipated. That when it came to the actual moment, with the case number and the federal referral and the folder Barrett had built, there would be nothing left to argue with.
Patricia helped Kayla up. Derek kept his hand on her back. My father got to his feet with the deliberateness of someone whose body has become heavier in the last twenty minutes. My mother looked at me once more, briefly, and then away. They went into the hallway.
I waited until they were all through the door.
I said nothing further.
I closed it.
Then I slid down until I was sitting on the floor, back against the door, the way I had sat on my kitchen floor seven days ago after driving home from their house with steady hands and a chest that had not yet understood what had just happened.
Seven days ago I had sat on a floor and cried for twelve minutes and watched the clock because I needed something to measure.
This time I did not cry.
I sat in the quiet and breathed.
It was the same quiet it had been all week. The quiet of an apartment where the only person whose feelings I was accountable for was the person sitting on the floor.
I stayed there for a while. Then I got up.
Six months later, I can tell you how it ended. Or how it ended so far, which is the more accurate way to say it, because some things do not have endings so much as they have the point at which you stop examining them every day and they become part of the landscape rather than the weather.
Kayla pled guilty to two federal fraud charges. The original complaint had named five. A plea agreement brought it to two, which is how these things tend to work, which Barrett had explained in advance so I would not experience it as a defeat when it happened. It was not a defeat. It was the system that satisfies no one completely and that everyone can live with.
