Chapter 16
I leaned against my kitchen counter, watching the morning light filter through the window.
“You could have asked me, Kyle,” I replied smoothly. “You chose to try and steal the house instead. Enjoy the payment plan.”
I hung up. He had nothing else to say, and neither did I. The financial loss I incurred—the drained checking account, the canceled flight, the exorbitant locksmith fees—amounted to roughly $5,700. In my profession, we call that acceptable tuition. It was the price I paid to learn the exact structural integrity of my marriage, and it was a bargain. If they had succeeded, it would have cost me $180,000 and my father’s legacy. I wrote off the $5,700 as the cheapest, most efficient divorce settlement in Ohio history.
Months later, the snow began to fall, blanketing the Ohio landscape in a quiet, pristine white. Megan and I sat at my father’s kitchen table, drinking wine and eating takeout on a Friday night. The house was warm. The new locks held fast. The silence, which Margaret had threatened would destroy me, had turned out to be magnificent.
Chapter 9
I was telling Megan about my week at work. I had handled a particularly complex travel insurance case involving a woman from Chicago who had been abandoned overseas in a London hotel by her own sister after a brutal dispute over an inheritance. The woman had been terrified, panicked, and financially locked out.
Megan lowered her wine glass, looking at me with a knowing, subtle smile. “You called her back after your shift ended, didn’t you?”
I smiled back, tracing the rim of my glass. “I gave the woman a specific number to memorize. I told her how to secure an emergency passport. I told her exactly what to say to the embassy.”
I paused, looking out the window into the dark. Then I thought about the note from Kyoto. I hadn’t thrown it away. I had kept it, sliding it into the back of my personal file cabinet next to my new, permanent passport. Both handwritings were still there, preserved like specimens in amber. Ethan’s cowardly block letters: Figure it out yourself. Margaret’s vicious, slanted cursive: Let’s see who comes to save you now.
The day after I had kicked them out of the house, I had taken a black, felt-tip pen and written my own addendum underneath their threats. A single, factual sentence.
I did.