I wanted to reach across the table. The wanting was almost physical, an ache in both arms.
Instead, I laid my palms flat on my knees.
“I will tell the truth. You need to decide whether you will.”
His attorney ended the meeting soon afterward.
I stayed seated while the hallway door closed behind them.
Ruth pushed a glass of water toward me. I couldn’t lift it without spilling, so she left her hand around the base while I drank.
That evening, David called.
Marcus’s attorney had contacted him. Marcus had agreed to preserve and provide records through counsel, including the tablet he and Delaney shared for household finances.
There was something else.
Delaney had asked for a meeting the next morning.
“She says she can repay you,” David said. “But she wants signatures first.”
CHAPTER 4 – The Price of Silence
Delaney arrived carrying a cream folder.
She placed it on David’s conference table with the same careful movement she had used to adjust her coat after striking me.
Marcus sat at the far end with his attorney. Ruth sat beside me. David had agreed only to hear Delaney’s proposal; he had told her in writing that I would sign nothing that day.
She slid a bank statement toward us.
Forty-three thousand dollars.
An account in her name alone.
“There,” she said. “Your money, plus something for the misunderstanding.”
I didn’t touch it.
“I thought there was no rest.”
“It was an emergency reserve.”
“And moving into my house was what?”
Her gaze flickered toward David.
“I came to resolve this.”
The folder contained a repayment agreement tied to a sweeping release of civil claims and a proposed statement saying the porch incident had been accidental.
David pushed that page back.
“She will not sign a false statement.”
Delaney’s jaw tightened.
Marcus stared at the bank balance.
“You told me we had eleven hundred dollars.”
“I kept enough to keep us alive.”
“You let me call my mother and ask for grocery money.”
“We needed it.”
David closed the folder.
“We’re done discussing these terms.”
Delaney put her palm on it before he could return it.
“Then he needs to understand what you’re doing to him.”
She turned to me.
“He forged the release. He lied to you. Are you going to put your own son in prison because I lost my temper?”
Marcus’s attorney leaned close to him.
But Marcus was looking at the cream folder.
“The boutique statements,” he said. “Were any of them real?”
Delaney’s expression hardly changed.
“This isn’t the place.”
“Stephanie says she got twelve thousand dollars.”
“Stephanie doesn’t understand the arrangement.”
David’s telephone vibrated. He glanced at the screen, then at Marcus’s attorney, who checked her own phone.
Later, I learned that the records Marcus had authorized them to share had arrived minutes earlier. His attorney had been reviewing them with an accountant since dawn.
She asked for a private break with her client.
Delaney stood.
“No. We’re not making this bigger.”
Marcus rose anyway.
For fifteen minutes, Ruth and I waited beside a window overlooking a parking lot. A delivery driver was trying to carry too many parcels. An ordinary man having an ordinary difficult morning.
I wanted to be worried about something that small.
When Marcus returned, he did not sit beside his wife.
His attorney placed several pages before David.
With Marcus’s permission, David showed me a message thread from the shared tablet.
Terrence had sent Delaney a copy of the release.
Marcus has done her signature. I’ll handle the stamp.
