Chapter 8
I noticed that he rubbed his left knee when he thought I wasn’t looking.
“You can ask,” he said.
“About the cane?”
“People usually do.”
“I was going to ask why you came.”
He gave a small laugh.
“Much more difficult question.”
I waited.
He stared into his untouched tea.
“Three weeks ago, one of our outside investigators discovered that the Baltimore storage box connected to your mother had been released.”
“To Richard.”
“To a law firm acting for him.”
“How?”
“That is one of the things I intend to find out.”
I didn’t like the phrase intend to.
It sounded as though he still considered this his mystery.
Not mine.
“You’ll tell me what you find.”
“Of course.”
“No. Not eventually. Not after your lawyers decide what I should know.”
His eyes lifted.
“Everything. Even if it’s embarrassing to you. Even if it hurts your company.”
There was a long pause.
“Yes,” he said.
I believed he meant it.
At least in that moment.
“Why were you looking for the box?”
“Because of something your mother gave me the last time I saw her.”
“What?”
“A key.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his suit.
My muscles tightened.
He removed a tiny envelope.
Not the key itself.
The envelope had been sealed inside a transparent archival sleeve.
On the front, in faded blue ink, was handwriting I recognized immediately.
Alexander.
I stopped breathing.
My mother’s handwriting.
He placed the envelope on the rolling table between us.
“I’ve kept that for eighteen years.”
“You never opened it?”
“It was already open when she gave it to me.”
“What did she say?”
His expression changed.
I could almost see him stepping backward through time.
“She came to my office late one evening. She looked exhausted. She told me she had made a mistake by trusting someone.”
“Who?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“Your father?”
Alexander looked away.
That was enough of an answer to make my stomach tighten again.
“My father was a complicated man,” he said.
“That’s a polite sentence.”
“It is.”
“Was he involved?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at him.
He did not retreat from the question.
“Your mother gave me that envelope and told me that someday a woman named Clara might need what was inside.”
My fingers went cold around the tea cup.
“I was four.”
“Yes.”
“She said my name?”
“Yes.”
“What was inside?”
Alexander opened the archival sleeve carefully.