Chapter 4: The Apartment on Delmore Street
I wrote the name down on a piece of paper Harold slid across the desk.
Marcus Hale.
I said it quietly, once, the way you say something out loud to test whether it sounds real.
It didn't.
"Do you know him?" Harold asked.
"No."
"Your mother didn't either.
But she recognized the timing." Harold tapped the final entry on the bank statement.
"The nine-thousand-dollar transfer happened four days before the lease was signed."
I set the paper down.
"She funded the deposit," I said.
"That's what it looks like."
I sat with that for a moment.
My eighty-two-year-old mother's savings.
Used to secure an apartment for a man whose name I had never heard.
"Harold, what are my options?"
"That depends on what you want." He leaned back.
"If the transfers were made without full informed consent — and given your mother's age and the pattern of escalating amounts, there's a reasonable case to be made — we could pursue recovery.
Civil action.
Possibly more, depending on what a full review of the circumstances shows."
"And the trust?"
"Your mother asked me to revise it.
I've already drafted the changes.
She just needs to review and sign." He paused.
"I'd recommend doing that soon."
I nodded.
I picked up my phone and looked at the address on the rental agreement.
Delmore Street.
Apartment 4B.
"I need to go there," I said.
"David—"
"I'm not going to do anything.
I just need to see it."
Harold looked at me for a long moment.
"Take someone with you."
Mr.
Bellamy was still in the waiting room, sitting in a chair near the window with a paper cup of coffee, reading a magazine he had probably already read twice.
He looked up when I came out.
"How bad?" he said.
"Bad enough."
He stood up and dropped the magazine on the chair.
"Where are we going?"
Delmore Street was twenty minutes across town.
A quiet block.
Mid-rise building.
The kind of place that looked like nothing from the outside — plain brick, a buzzer panel by the door, a row of mailboxes in the lobby.
We sat in Mr.
Bellamy's car across the street.
"You don't have to go in," he said.
"I know."
"But you're going to."
"I just want to see if the car is there."
I scanned the street.
No dark blue sedan.
Then my phone buzzed.
Vanessa.
I let it go to voicemail.
Thirty seconds later, it buzzed again.
A text this time.
*David, please.
I'm at home.
Come home.
I can explain everything.
Please.*
I put the phone face-down on my knee.
"She's been calling since this morning," I said.
Mr.
Bellamy didn't say anything.
He just watched the building.
Then the front door of the building opened.
A man came out.
Mid-forties.
Well-dressed.
He had a phone to his ear and he was moving quickly, like someone who had somewhere to be and was already late.
He reached the curb and looked up and down the street.
Then his eyes landed on Mr.
Bellamy's car.
He didn't react.
Why would he?
He didn't know me.
But I looked at him.
And I looked at the way he was dressed.
And I looked at the phone in his hand.
And then my own phone lit up on my knee.
Vanessa.
Calling again.
I watched the man on the curb lift his phone away from his ear.
Look at the screen.
Then put it back.
My phone stopped ringing.
The man on the curb put his phone in his pocket, turned left, and walked away down the street.
I sat very still.
"David," Mr.
Bellamy said quietly.
"I saw."
We didn't say anything else for a moment.
Then Mr.
Bellamy started the engine.
"Where to?" he said.
I thought about going home.
About walking through the front door and sitting across from Vanessa and listening to whatever explanation she had prepared.
About the way her voice had sounded on the phone that morning.
Scared.
Rehearsed.
Careful.
"Take me to my mother's," I said.
Mom lived twelve minutes away in the house where I had grown up.
A small white house with a garden she still tended herself, slowly, in the mornings when her joints allowed it.
She opened the door before I knocked.
She had been watching for me.
"Come in," she said.
"I'll put the kettle on."
We sat at her kitchen table.
The same table where she had helped me with homework thirty-five years ago.
The same chairs.
The same window looking out at the garden.
She set two cups of tea down and sat across from me.
"Harold called," she said.
"I know."
"He told me you saw the rental agreement."
"Yes."
Mom wrapped both hands around her cup.
Her knuckles were swollen the way they always were in cold weather.
"I didn't want to be right," she said.
"I know, Mom."
"I kept telling myself there was an explanation.
That I had misread the statements.
That maybe she was saving it for something.
A surprise for you." She looked down at her cup.
"I'm good at telling myself things."
"You should have told me sooner."
She looked up.
Her eyes were steady.
"You loved her," she said simply.
"I didn't want to be the reason."
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers.
We sat like that for a while.
The kettle had gone quiet.
The garden outside was still.
Then Mom said, "There's something else I didn't show you."
She got up slowly and went to the small desk in the corner of the kitchen.
She opened the top drawer and came back with an envelope.
She set it on the table between us.
My name was written on the front.
In Vanessa's handwriting.
"It came here," Mom said.
"To my address.
Three weeks ago.
I don't know why she sent it here and not to the house."
I looked at the envelope.
It was sealed.
"She doesn't know I have it," Mom said quietly.
"I think she sent it to the wrong address by mistake.
Our street names are similar." She paused.
"I almost sent it back."
I picked it up.
Whatever was inside, Vanessa had written it three weeks ago.
Before the thirty-nine phone calls.
Before the bank statement on the waiting room chair.
Before this morning and the hospital bag and the foil-wrapped slice of banana bread sitting untouched on the counter.
Three weeks ago, Vanessa had written something and put it in an envelope with my name on it.
And sent it to my mother's house by mistake.
I turned it over in my hands.
May you like
Mom sat across from me and said nothing.
I opened it.
