The room went still.
“And now that you know,” I continued, “she has nothing left to threaten us with.”
David rubbed his face with both hands.
“You could have just kept paying her,” he said. “It would have been easier.”
“Easier for one more month,” I replied. “Then the next, and the next, until I die and she comes for one of you. I will not hand you that fear the way he handed it to me.”
“She has nothing left to threaten us with.”
Rachel reached across the table and took my hand.
I squeezed her fingers and felt something loosen inside my chest.
Margaret’s secret was worthless now.
But she didn’t know that yet.
I picked up my car keys.
But she didn’t know that yet.
***
The drive back to Margaret’s house felt different this time.
I knocked, and she opened the door wearing a smug expression.
“You came to your senses,” she said. “The rent is due. Bring it inside.”
“I’m not here to pay you.”
Her smile thinned.
“You came to your senses,”
“Then I’ll call your children. I’ll tell them exactly how their father built his little fortune. On my brother’s ruin.”
“You can call them if you like.”
“You think they’ll still worship him after they hear it?”
I stepped closer to the doorway.
“I’ll tell them exactly how their father built his little fortune.”
“Margaret, I won’t pretend Michael was innocent. He wronged Daniel. He hid the money, he lied about the collapse, and he lied to me for almost forty years.”
Her chin lifted, expecting me to break.
“But you took a real wound and turned it into a business,” I continued. “Twenty-seven years of rent. I checked the numbers. You collected far more than Michael ever kept back. This stopped being justice a long time ago.”
“Don’t lecture me about justice,” she snapped. “You lived comfortably on it.”
