“Burn it,” he said before he’d decided to say it. The truth came out ahead of the lawyer answer, the way it had been doing ever since this woman taught him there was no profit in arguing with the truth.
“I want him to burn it and forget the woman’s face and let her go on never knowing. She doesn’t need to look at the man who . . .” His throat closed. He worked it open. “She doesn’t need me reminding her of the worst day of her life.”
Grace dried her hands on the towel hanging off the oven door and came back to stand right front of him. She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and he was reminded yet again of how small she was in physical stature. Everything else about her was so big in his mind’s eye: her heart, her kindness, her toughness.
“Reno,” she said. “Do you remember what I told you the night you told me about her?”
He remembered every word. He’d taken them out and turned them over more nights than he’d admit. “You told me you wouldn’t be the one to forgive me.”
“I told you it wasn’t mine to give.” Her voice was gentle and it did not give an inch. “I told you Susannah Perry was the one who got to decide whether to forgive you or not.” A pause. “I also told you she couldn’t make that choice because she didn’t know who you were.”
She reached up and laid her hand flat against his chest, over the spot where a flour handprint had been once. “Now she’s trying to find out who you are, and you want to take the choice away from her.”
“I’m trying to spare her.”
“You’re trying to spare yourself.” She said it without any heat, which made it worse. “Which I understand. I would want to, as well. But you don’t get to decide for her that she’s too fragile to hear it.” She added gently, “You hate it when people decide that about me.”
The problem with being married, he thought distantly, to a woman this honest, was going to be that he would never once get away with anything.
“She might not have come to forgive me,” he said. “She might have come to spit in my face.”
“Then she gets to do that, too.” Grace’s hand was still on his chest. “Either way, it’s hers. You sent that money for three years so she could feed her kids. The least you can do now is let her have the rest of what’s hers, even if the rest of it is a hard thing she says to your face.”
He looked down at her for a long time. The accusing voice that used to live behind his ribs had been quiet for days now, and he desperately hoped it had packed up and gone for good.
But he understood, standing here, that he was wrong. The voice might be gone. But in its place was something he’d never let himself look at directly: a flat, settled certainty that he could love Grace, and cut Lily’s eggs into hearts, and seal the dock, and still not get to keep any of it.
Not really. Not for good. Because a man who’d done what he’d done didn’t get to live in a yellow cottage on a lake with a great family and be happy.
He hadn’t known it was inside him until Grace put her hand on his chest and asked him to be brave.
“Call the bank,” she said. “Tell him to give her your name. Let her come here. I’ll make coffee, and you’ll sit in your own home and hear whatever she came to say.”
His own home? Grace was offering to share her home with him? It sounded as if she’d already made that decision and it was a done deal in her mind.
The rest of what she’d said registered a moment later, and terror ripped through him. “You’ll be here?”
“I will,” Grace said. “I’m not going to hover. But I buried a good man and you helped bury a bad one. I think the two of us might be the only people in the world who can fully understand what she’s carrying in her heart.”
She went up on her toes and kissed him, brief and certain. “You’re not doing this alone. You don’t have to do anything alone anymore. But you keep forgetting that.”
“What if she rips my head off? Accuses me of destroying her family or worse?” he asked hoarsely.
“What if she does? She’s entitled to feel anger at what happened to her. If you are the physical symbol of that to her, so be it.” She stared at him for a moment. “If you could go back in time and were asked to investigate and prosecute her husband again, would you still do it?”
“Absolutely. He stole tens of millions of dollars from the employees and customers of the shipping company. He singlehandedly bankrupted the company’s pension fund and left hundreds of retired longshoremen without a cent to live on. What he did was reprehensible.”
“Then why are you wallowing in all this guilt and regret?”
“I shouldn’t have told him to his face what I thought of him. I drove him to suicide.”
“You don’t know that. Nobody will ever know what truly drove him to take his own life. That’s between him and his Maker. So why are you trying to take all the credit for it?”
He frowned at that. “We already established that you can’t forgive me. And now you’re telling me I can’t blame, or by extension, forgive myself for his death either?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, What you can do is stop insisting that what he did with his life is your responsibility. Last time I checked, every single person is ultimately responsible for how they live their own life. We all make our own choices, good and bad, for ourselves.”
He stared at her for long seconds while his legal mind finished her argument for her. He said slowly, “So you’re saying that he chose to steal all that money, knowing what the consequences of getting caught would be. When those consequences came his way, he chose to kill himself rather than face them. And my only part in that was being the person who caught him and landed the consequences on him?”
