The price of her forgiveness

THE AUDIT

Chapter 4: The Audit

Lachlan

The key was in the winter coat, where it had always been. For about thirty seconds I stood in the hall with that small cold thing in my palm and couldn’t make myself go back to studying.

I told myself it was nothing. The cleaner had dusted. A delivery man had bumped the shelf. I’m a rational person. I run a company with eleven thousand employees, and I don’t believe in ghosts.

But I’d learned something at Cormac’s table. What a person doesn’t do tells you more than what they do. And I’d been not doing something for three years.

It was past eleven when I went back in. I locked the study door behind me, which was ridiculous, since there was nobody in the house to lock it against. I knelt in the green circle of the lamp, pulled the box out, and set it on the carpet in front of me like a patient.

The key turned easily. Too easily. Locks that haven’t been opened in years should grumble.

I lifted the lid.

My father’s will sat on top, in its blue legal folder, exactly where I’d left it. The deeds under that. The little velvet pouch with my mother’s pearl earrings. And at the bottom, in a plain white envelope gone soft at the corners, the note.

I don’t know why I took that out first. I suppose because it was the one thing in the box I knew by heart, and some stubborn part of me needed to check that it was still true.

Four sentences, in her small slanting hand, in blue ink that had pressed through the paper.

Please don’t look for me. I can’t do this anymore. You’ll understand one day, or you won’t. I’m sorry.

I put my thumb over the last two words. Then I put the note down on my knee, face down, because I couldn’t look at it and do the next thing at the same time.

The next thing was the folder.

It was under the note, where it had no business being. When I locked this box three years ago I put the folder in first, flat on the bottom, and everything else on top of it. I remembered that. I’d wanted it buried. Now it lay at the top of the stack with its corner turned up, like a hand raised in class.

Someone had taken it out and read it. Recently. And they hadn’t bothered to put it back in order, or they’d wanted me to know.

Manila. A medical practice’s name printed on the tab. Dr. A. Pryce. Private Consultation. Below it, in black marker, K. Vance.

I sat back on my heels.

It arrived the morning after she left. A courier, seven-ten. I was still in last night’s shirt, sitting on the stairs, because I hadn’t been able to make myself go up and sleep in that bed. The man handed me a clipboard and I signed for it without reading what I was signing. The envelope was addressed to me, in a typed label, no sender’s name outside. I opened it standing in the doorway.

I read two lines. That’s all. Two lines in the middle of the first page, and I had to put it down and hold on to the door frame.

The patient presents as clinically unstable. The patient is, in this practitioner’s opinion, barren.

Barren. The word hit me like a slap from someone I trusted. Kaelia and I had been through two years of tests and bad news and a silence that spread through the house like damp. I knew what the doctors had said. I’d never, ever heard it put in a word like that, with that flat clerical cruelty, as though she were a field.

And unstable. I’d sat on those stairs and gone through the last months in my head. The nights she didn’t come to bed. The way she stopped going to the studio. The look on her face when I told her I’d be late again. I’d taken it for grief, and I’d been too much of a coward to sit down in it with her. And now a doctor was telling me what I’d missed.

She’d been ill. She’d been ill and I hadn’t seen, and she’d walked out in the dark because she couldn’t bear for me to watch.

That’s the story I wrote that morning. The note said please don’t look for me. The report said give her space. I put them side by side like two halves of a map, and they fit.

So I obeyed. God help me, I called it love. I called it respect. I thought, she’s a proud woman, she wants to heal in private, and if I go hammering on doors she’ll only run further. I locked the folder away because I couldn’t stand the sight of it, and I told myself I was giving her room.

Three years. Three years of room.

I opened the folder.

I’m a man who reads contracts for a living. I’ve caught a misplaced comma in a four-hundred-page merger agreement. And in all that time I had never read past two lines of the only document that explained the worst night of my life. I’d been afraid of what else was in it. I think I’d been afraid of being wrong.

I read it slowly now, with a pen in my hand like a man auditing someone else’s accounts.

The letterhead. A clinic on Marlowe Street. A reference number. Evaluation of Mrs. Kaelia Vance, aged thirty-one. A paragraph of clinical language about stress and loss and an inability to cope. The word barren again, by itself, in its own sentence. The words at risk to herself in the next. It is recommended that the family refrain from attempting contact, as pursuit may precipitate further decline.

I read that line five times.

Someone had written, in a medical report on my wife, an instruction to me. Don’t follow her. And I, who prided myself on questioning everything, had followed the instruction like a good dog.

My hands were shaking. I put the pages on the carpet and flattened them with my palms.

Then I noticed what was missing.

The report described an examination. In consultation, the patient was tearful and disoriented, and wept for most of the hour. An hour. In a room. With a doctor. I turned the page for the date, the place, the time.

Consultation conducted at the Marlowe Street premises.

Marlowe Street was across the city. Kaelia hated driving at night. I tried to remember if she’d taken the car and then I remembered I didn’t need to remember, because I knew.

I got up on stiff knees and went to the desk and woke the laptop. There’s a security system at the gate, a camera and a log. I’d never looked at it. Why would I? There was nothing to look for. The system keeps eighteen months of footage, but the log is permanent. I opened it, scrolled back, and counted three years of dates until I found Tuesday.

9:36 p.m. Pedestrian exit, side gate. Single female. No vehicle.

I sat very still.

She’d walked out. On foot. In the dark. Through the side gate, the little one by the roses, with her bag on her shoulder. I’d never known how she left. I’d never asked. In my head she’d taken a taxi or driven off in a flash of headlights like something in a film. But she’d gone out on foot, the way a person goes when she doesn’t want any noise.

I could almost see her at the gate. The small, straight back. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was frightened.

My chest hurts. I breathed through it.

So at nine thirty-six she was on the pavement outside my house with no car. And the report said she’d spent an hour in a consultation room on the other side of town, weeping, disoriented, clinically unstable. When? She’d have had to get across the city. She’d have had to be seen. How, in the time between the gate and midnight? Where was the doctor’s room? Where was the hour?

I went back to the folder and I turned to the last page, because the answer, if there was one, would be at the bottom, where doctors put their names.

There it was. A neat blue signature, A. Pryce, MD, and under it a small printed line I’d read past a dozen times without seeing. The kind of line that computers add so that no one has to remember.

Electronically signed: 11:41 p.m.

I looked at the clock on the desk. I looked at the log on the screen. I did the sum on my fingers, like a child, as though the numbers might change if I counted them differently.

She walked out at nine thirty-six. The doctor signed the report at eleven forty-one.

Two hours and five minutes.

Somewhere in that gap, someone had sat down and written that my wife was unstable and barren and a danger to herself, and told her husband not to come after her. And they’d done it before I’d even got home from my meeting. Before I’d found the cold bed. Before the note.

Before I even knew she was gone.

The lamp hummed. Somewhere in the house a pipe ticked as it cooled. I thought about who had the keys. The housekeeper, off since Friday. Marcus, who had never once set foot in this room. Briony, who had a spare on her ring and who had stood at the rail on Cormac’s porch this afternoon, hand tucked under hand, watching the road.

I didn’t want to think about it. I thought about it anyway, in a small cold voice that didn’t sound like mine.

And under that, louder, and far worse, came the thought I couldn’t push away.

Kaelia hadn’t left because she was ill. Somebody had decided what story I’d be told about why, and had written it before the ink was dry on her goodbye.

I picked up the folder and held it against my chest, as if it could be hurt, and I said out loud, to a room that had never once answered me, “What did they do to you?”

For the first time in three years, it felt like a question I might be able to get an answer to.