Chapter 6
For two days, I carried the question everywhere.
What have I been paying for?
It followed me onto buses.
It stood behind me at the diner while I refilled coffee cups.
It sat beside me at Dr. Patel’s clinic while she explained that my blood tests were mostly reassuring, though my iron was low and my ideas about sleep remained, in her words, “creatively irresponsible.”
It waited at home beside Lily’s blue mug.
But for the first time in nearly two years, I did not send Victor Hale three thousand dollars.
The payment date came.
Then passed.
Nothing happened.
No one appeared at my apartment.
No terrible consequence arrived.
My phone rang twice.
I let it go to voicemail.
Victor’s first message was pleasant.
“Clara, I noticed your scheduled payment hasn’t arrived. I’m sure it’s an oversight. Give me a call.”
The second came the next morning.
Still polite.
“I’d like to discuss your account. There may be some paperwork we need to update.”
That was all.
I had spent years imagining what missing a payment would feel like.
I had expected panic.
Instead I felt something stranger.
Space.
A small pocket of room inside my own life.
I used forty dollars of it to buy groceries.
Actual groceries.
Not crackers from the diner or bruised bananas from the discount shelf.
Rice.
Chicken.
Spinach, mostly because Maeve would somehow find out if I didn’t.
And, after standing in the grocery aisle for several minutes debating whether it was irresponsible, I bought the expensive tea Lily used to love.
At home I made two cups by habit.
I stood staring at the second cup.
Then I carried it to the windowsill.
The snow outside had begun to melt.
“Still terrible tea,” I told my sister.
My voice shook.
“But I finally bought it.”
The attorney Declan recommended was not Finn.
Her name was Evelyn Cho.
Her office occupied the second floor above a florist near Grayhaven University, and the waiting room contained mismatched chairs, a dying fern, and a coffee machine that sounded as though it regretted every decision it had ever made.
I liked the place immediately.
Evelyn was in her early forties, wore tortoiseshell glasses, and interrupted my explanation only to clarify dates.
When I finished, she arranged the documents in three neat piles.
“The good news,” she said, “is that you kept records.”
“I keep everything.”
“I noticed.”
“Lily said I was one unpaid utility bill away from becoming an archivist.”
Evelyn smiled.
“The less good news is that we need to establish precisely what Harbor Mutual represented, what you authorized, and where the funds went.”
“I never received the money.”
“That matters.”
“It says St. Agnes was supposed to.”
“That matters too.”
“And the trust on the disbursement sheet didn’t exist.”
“That matters a great deal.”
I leaned forward.
“So I don’t owe them.”
Evelyn didn’t give me the answer I wanted.
“Maybe.”
I sat back.
“Maybe?”
“I don’t want to replace one person’s certainty with another person’s certainty before we have the records.”
The disappointment must have shown on my face.
She removed her glasses.
“Clara, people who have been kept confused for a long time often become understandably hungry for a simple answer. But a careful answer is better than a fast one.”
I thought of Declan.
He had done the same thing.
He had never promised the debt was false.
He had only helped me find the next question.
“What do you need?”
“Permission to request records from Harbor Mutual. The trust’s historic filings. St. Agnes. And the Walsh foundation.”
I hesitated at the last one.
“You think they could be involved?”
“I think facts are easier to trust when everyone opens their books.”
That made sense.
It also made me uncomfortable.
Declan’s mother had paid Lily’s bill.
Declan had sat beside my bed for hours because I had refused to release his hand.
Part of me wanted to place the Walsh family on one side of an invisible line marked safe.
Evelyn apparently had no interest in invisible lines.
May you like
Good.
“Request everything,” I said.
