We’re almost to the end of the story. I’ve told you nearly everything I know, but there’s one thing I’ve been withholding, something I’ve been afraid to say, something important that happened just after my father died, in the liminal space between the day he pulled the trigger and the day of the funeral. 

Even as I saw it coming, I knew what it was. Through the front window, I saw Aunty Regina take something out of the trunk of her car. She handled it with caution and ceremony as though it were precious and as though it might bite. I watched her come up the front path until she dropped out of sight. As a child, I didn’t understand why you couldn’t see clear out to the street from the front window. Now I was grown and understood: where you can’t see out, no one can see in. That was the trick of it. Already, though, I had seen enough to know what was coming. My breath was ragged. The doorbell rang. It was here.

Regina stood in the foyer. Her eyes were strained behind her gray transition lenses.

“This is for you.” She held a box at arm’s length. It was an armored briefcase wrapped in black-pebbled plastic. She handed it to me, and it pulled on my arm like a dead weight.

“Your father told me to give this to you if—” Her voice broke as she pressed the key into my palm, “—if anything ever happened to him.”

I put the key in my pocket just as Mom came downstairs. “Oh, Regina, I’m so sorry.” Their embrace was tight and brief. “Come in. Would you like some tea?” 

My mother led Regina into the kitchen. I went the other way, set the black box on the dining room table, circled back to the kitchen, and set the kettle to boil.

* * *

It was cool and dark in the kitchen. Regina admired the flowers: calla lilies, pink carnations, velvet orchids. Her fingers brushed the yellow roses on the kitchen table. “His favorite,” she said mournfully. Her eye fell on the letters of condolence that were arranged along the sideboard. “He touched so many lives.” I stood at the counter and arranged cookies on a platter. “He loved sweet things,” she said. “And he loved you, Sweetie.” Regina caught my cold hand as I put the plate on the table. “He loved you more than anything in this world.”

“Yes,” Mom said tearfully. “Yes.”

No one said anything about the black box on the other side of the wall.

The kettle screamed, and I busied myself with the tea.

* * *

When Regina stood up to leave, I offered to help her out to the car. “Do you want to go for a walk?” I asked at the end of the driveway. It was a magnificent spring day. We walked past the hydrangea, past the white house on the corner, and kept going. “Where are you staying? How long will you be in town?” I led her through the suburban labyrinth. I asked questions and listened. “How are you doing?” If you listen to anyone long enough, they’ll end up telling you their truth.

Eventually, she started talking—really talking. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “Brien was a good man. Generous. Giving. He helped people.” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “He wouldn’t do those things.”

We were walking side by side in the street. I stopped and turned towards her.

“He did it,” I said.

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s the truth.”

We both cried a little, and I held her hand back to the car.

* * *

When I got back, the house was quiet. The black box was in the living room. The key was in my pocket. My hands shook as I turned the key in the lock. The box yawned open. I peered into its mouth—saw what was there—stacks of $20, $50, $100 bills, packed together like teeth—and slammed it shut.

Mom was in her study, working; that’s how she survived. I stood in the doorframe. She jumped when she saw me.

“Call Faith,” I said.

“Who?” she asked. Then it registered, and her voice dropped. “Why?”

“Call her now. We need help.”

* * *

Faith Rhodes was an attorney in Philadelphia. I had researched lawyers last summer after the news first broke. I wanted to make sure my mother was protected. I picked Faith from a list of lawyers because she was a woman and because I liked her name. I was desperate and needed something to believe in.

Mom made the call, and Faith told us to meet her at a Starbucks in a Target in a strip mall on the Main Line. She instructed us to leave our phones in the car. We sat at a dirty plastic table. She had smooth, rouged skin and perfectly manicured nails. She asked questions. I told her the story. Then she spoke to my mother about the cost of the retainer.

A few days later, we traveled to a high-rise in Center City. Mom and I rode the elevator to Faith’s office, which hovered like a glass aquarium over the city. I shivered. Everything smelled like money.

Faith knew the backstory from the newspapers: the allegations, federal investigation, and pending indictments. How Dad drove to the train station that day. She asked a lot of follow-up questions, and I told her what I knew: expense reports, bank accounts, and business checks that came in the mail. I told her how he put me on the payroll and gave me a company phone. It had taken me a while, but eventually, I was so sick with guilt that I closed the account, stopped the deposits, changed my number, and got my own phone.

“Good girl,” Faith softened her voice as if she were talking to a dog or a horse.

She turned to Mom, “And what did you think was going on?”

“I didn’t think much about it,” my mother was answering Faith’s questions, but she was looking at me. “It wasn’t my business.”

“And the money?”

“Brien was highly intelligent,” Mom’s voice had sharp edges. Mom was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I had already heard it a thousand times. “He didn’t need to steal.”

“And you didn’t have any suspicions?”

Mom was quiet. She closed her eyes. “I guess I was blind to it.”

“Some might say you were willfully blind.” 

There was a long pause. Faith noted something on her legal pad and turned back to me. 

“Okay, so an aunt brought the box to your house. Did you open it in front of her—or talk to her about what was inside?”

“No,” I said. “I put it out of sight in the next room and fixed her some tea.”

“Good girl.” The lawyer put down her pen and looked at me with approval. “Do you think she opened it?”

“No.”

“And does anyone else know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And how much money are we talking about?”

“A lot.”

“How much?” she asked again.

“A LOT.” I said the words slowly and clearly and deliberately, willing her to understand.

“Did you count it?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

I looked at her.

“I know.”

Faith leaned back in her chair and looked out the window. “And what do you want me to do about it?”

There was a long pause.

“I want to give it back.”

“What do you mean—give it back?”

“It’s stolen.” I stood up. My mind was floating outside my body.

“You don’t know that for sure,” she said, playing devil’s advocate. “You don’t actually know where it came from. For all you know, he had been saving for years before he even started the school.”

“Well, I know I can’t keep it,” I said. “I want to give it back.”

“Back to whom?”

“Back to the school.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. 

I sat down, deflated. 

“Can you make an arrangement with the Feds?”

Faith looked at me with surprise—and with pity. “No one has ever asked me to do something like this before.” She was quiet for a moment. “Let me see who I know, what I can do. Maybe I can arrange a time, schedule an exchange, and meet them at the house when you aren’t there.”

“Thank you.” My hands shook with relief. “Thank you.” It was agreed: Faith would make the exchange. “Just let us get through the funeral first.”

* * *

It would be another week before my father’s body was laid to rest. First, we waited on the coroner’s report. The body was forensic evidence. Eventually, his body was released for cremation, but it took some time to schedule the services as my mother, his wife of more than twenty years, collaborated with my stepmother Darlene. They were like two abandoned songbirds—separated from each other by a generation—guarding their nests and surveying what remained of the day.

The only time I ever saw them speak was when they clasped hands at the funeral. It was a small private service. Mom sat on one side of the aisle, and Darlene sat on the other, draped in black, with the baby on her lap. I was the mistress of ceremonies. My brother Michael and I both read passages from the book; then I delivered the eulogy. I said, “My father spoke a secret language.” That was true; he spoke in code, hidden meanings, veiled threats. I also said, “Whatever he took, he has already returned in great measure.” That was a lie. What he took from me I still don’t know how to reclaim: my truth, my sovereignty, my voice. But I was his eldest, his daughter, his favorite, and I did what I was expected to do: I stood in the church and lied. Then I knelt in the pew and prayed. Tomorrow. By the will of God, by tomorrow morning, the money will be gone, and the story will be over.

But when I called Faith the next day, her voice was cold and distant. “I can’t do it,” she said.

“What do you mean—can’t?”

“I can’t make the arrangements. It would open up too many questions and put other assets—other people—your family—at risk.”

I couldn’t breathe. I had just lost my father; I couldn’t imagine losing anyone else. 

“I wish I could help. You seem like good people, but it’s too dangerous to come forward with this. You don’t know what you don’t know: who else might be implicated and what else is involved.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

She said, “My advice is to put on gloves and count your money—”

“It’s not my money,” I said.

There was a long pause. Finally, she said, “You can never have too much money.”

She was telling the truth as well as she knew it, a truth commonly accepted as fact—that money buys freedom, but I didn’t believe her because that wasn’t my truth. Anyone who believes you can never have too much money doesn’t know about bribery, blood money, hush money—how money can be a cage, a leash, a collar, a handgun, the cold threat of the grave.

Faith’s voice was smooth and hypnotic. “Count the money—and then put it away somewhere safe,” she instructed.

“Like where?”

“You’re a smart girl,” she said. “You’ll figure it out.”

* * *

I couldn’t bring myself to touch that money, but before I left for the summer, I did hide the black-armored box—that box looked just like the black box I almost remembered my father may have kept a gun in when I was a child. Was it the same gun Dad put in his mouth that day at the train station? What else was he trying to hide? I took the black box full of mysteries, wrapped it in linens, stuffed it in a pillowcase, and put it on a shelf in the spare closet. I took a step back and examined it: innocuous, a pillow in a stack of pillows. Then I hid the key in a teacup in the china cabinet downstairs.

At the end of that summer, I got in my car and drove two thousand miles out West, where I lived undercover in a small, dim graduate student apartment—where I spent my days reading, writing, researching, studying character and motive, taking careful notes in a series of little black books, investigating my memories, searching for clues, trying to decipher exactly what happened,  following the chain of consequence, weighing the options, carrying the weight of impossible choice—preparing for the day I would have the strength and the skill to write this story.