“You could have read the documents.”
“I should have.”
He turned toward me again.
“And when she hit you, I was afraid you’d call the police and they’d find the signature. That’s why I froze.”
There was the truth, uglier than cowardice alone.
He had looked at my bleeding mouth and thought of himself.
My fingers found the edge of Evelyn’s legal pad.
Lennox slid the proposed statement toward me.
“Now do you understand? Sign, and stop tearing this family apart.”
I pushed it back with one finger.
“No.”
Terrence closed his eyes.
Then he said, “Don’t sign it, Mom.”
CHAPTER 4 – The Price of Silence
Lennox turned on him so quickly her chair struck the wall.
“Everything I did was to give us a life.”
“You bought yourself a home,” he said. “You told me the money was gone. Then you brought me to hers.”
“You were happy enough to spend it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was.”
That answer took something out of her. There was no clean innocence for her to attack, no excuse she could turn into a shared defense.
His attorney called a halt to the meeting.
In the corridor, Terrence stood well away from me.
“I’m going to give them the messages,” he said. “All of them.”
“On your lawyer’s advice,” Evelyn said firmly.
He nodded.
I could not make myself look at his hands again.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
He swallowed.
“I don’t know.”
It was the first answer he gave that did not seem designed to keep me.
