Chapter 9: The Moment David Had to Choose
Arthur was served on Tuesday afternoon.
I wasn't home when it happened.
I was at work, in a meeting I couldn't leave, when David called three times in a row.
I stepped into the hallway on the third call.
"What did you do?" His voice was tight.
Controlled.
The way he got when he was trying not to raise it.
"I filed for a protective order."
"Against my father."
"Yes."
A long silence.
"Rebecca, you need to come home right now and explain this to me."
"I'll be home by six," I said.
"David — before you say anything else to your father, I need you to listen to something first.
Will you do that?"
He didn't answer immediately.
"Will you do that?" I asked again.
"Fine," he said.
"Six o'clock."
I got home at five fifty.
Arthur's car was not in the driveway.
David was sitting at the kitchen table with his jacket still on, his hands flat on the surface, not doing anything.
Just sitting.
I sat down across from him and put my phone on the table between us.
"Play it," he said.
I played the recording.
All of it.
Arthur at my door.
The command.
Chloe's voice downstairs.
Arthur in the hallway after.
The phone call to Evelyn.
Her voice.
*She wasn't in the room.
I don't know where she went.
Did she drink any of it?*
When it ended, David didn't move.
I waited.
"That's my mother's voice," he said.
"Yes."
"She was supposed to be in Richmond."
"She wasn't."
He stood up and walked to the window.
Stood there with his back to me.
"David," I said.
"I need to tell you something else."
I told him about Gerald Marsh.
About Sandra.
About Diane.
I told him about Nora and the lab sample.
I told him about Patricia Holt and the protective order.
I laid it out in the same order I had lived it, from the closet to the conference room, and I did not soften any of it.
When I finished, he was still at the window.
"How long have you been carrying this?" he said.
"Since Friday night."
He turned around.
His face was difficult to read — not angry, not disbelieving.
Something worse.
Something that looked like a man recognizing a thing he had refused to see for a long time.
"When you told me about him before," he said slowly.
"The comments.
The hallway.
I told you he was old-fashioned."
"You did."
"I didn't believe you."
"No," I said.
"You didn't."
He crossed back to the table and sat down.
He looked at the phone between us.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Rebecca.
I'm sorry."
I had waited two years to hear those words.
Sitting across from him now, I felt them land — not with relief, not yet, but with a kind of ache that meant they were real.
"What do you need from me?" he said.
"I need you to tell Patricia Holt what you know.
What I told you before.
What you dismissed.
I need you to say it on the record."
He nodded slowly.
"And I need you to not call your mother tonight."
His jaw tightened.
But he nodded again.
"All right," he said.
His phone buzzed on the table.
He glanced at it.
Evelyn's name on the screen.
He turned it face-down.
We sat in the kitchen together in the quiet, and neither of us spoke for a while.
Outside, a car passed.
The refrigerator hummed.
Then David reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
He didn't say anything.
May you like
Neither did I.
But when Evelyn called a second time, and then a third, his hand didn't move.
