There was no unknown lover waiting behind that name, no secret family. The ordinary explanation made the rest harder to dismiss.
An ordinary employee had written down what Harper asked him to do.
“What did you plan to tell me?” Alex asked.
“That the big house had fallen through.”
“And everyone else?”
“That plans had changed.”
“And my mother?”
Harper’s eyes flicked toward me.
“She wasn’t coming anyway.”
Alex pulled out the narrow bench beneath the coat hooks and sat down. His knees seemed to have stopped supporting him.
“You made sure of that.”
Harper opened her mouth, then closed it.
I wanted to sit too, but that would have put me beside her. I stayed against the console, one palm resting on Peter’s old brass letter opener.
“Show him the money,” I said.
Harper looked at me sharply.
“All of it.”
It took several minutes. Alex asked her to open the relevant transactions herself, and she did, holding the phone so tightly that her fingertips whitened.
The smaller rental had cost $5,200. Another $6,800 had gone toward a personal credit-card balance. The remaining $2,500 was still in her account.
Alex wrote the figures on the back of an envelope.
“That card,” he said. “The one you told me was paid off?”
“I was going to fix it.”
“With money you told me was going to my mother?”
Harper pulled her phone against her chest.
“I needed some breathing room.”
I looked at my spreadsheet. Every careful entry suddenly seemed terribly exposed.
“You had me paying for one Christmas while you bought another.”
“The first house was too much.”
“You asked for it.”
“You could afford it.”
There it was, spoken without hesitation.
Alex’s pen stopped.
I thought of September evenings at my kitchen table, comparing menus while Harper sent photographs of flower arrangements. I had mistaken the number of decisions she included me in for the place she wanted me to have.
“Being able to pay,” I said, “didn’t make it yours to take.”
Harper turned to Alex.
“We can put the money back and still go to the smaller house. The children don’t need to lose Christmas over this.”
His jaw tightened at the mention of Sophie and Ben.
For one fearful second, I thought he would agree.
He looked at me, then at the envelope.
“No one is going to that house.”
“Alex.”
