The price of her forgiveness

THE BUYER

Chapter 2: The Buyer

Kaelia

Wren sleeps like she’s been told a secret and is guarding it. Fists up by her ears, mouth a little open, one foot kicked free of the blanket. She’s two years and nine months old and she takes up the whole bed, and every night I tell myself I’ll move her to her own, and every night I don’t.

I stood in the doorway for a long time. Past eleven. The window was open an inch and I could hear the sea, which is why I chose this house. Salt and noise. Nothing that sounds like a city.

She rolled over and the hall light caught her face. The dimple on the left cheek only. Her father’s. I stopped pretending I didn’t see it a long time ago.

I tucked the loose foot back under the blanket and she muttered something that was either “Mama” or “more,” and my chest did what it always does. That slow tight pull, like a thread I’ve been tied to since the day she arrived.

For years the doctors told me it wouldn’t happen. They said it gently, in that careful voice people use for certain words. Lachlan and I tried, and failed, and tried again, and somewhere in the failing we stopped talking about it, and then we stopped talking. I believed what they told me. Then I stood in a rented bathroom with a test in my hand and laughed until I had to sit on the floor. Mostly because I was terrified. A little because the universe has a cruel sense of humour.

I should have told him. I know that. I’ve said it to the ceiling for thirty-three months. But I had my reasons for leaving, and I still believe they were good ones, and he never came after me. Not once. I checked, God help me. I checked the doorstep every morning for the first year.

I pulled Wren’s door almost shut and went down to the kitchen.

The laptop was where I’d left it, a pale square in the dark. I didn’t turn on the overhead light. I made tea I wasn’t going to drink and sat with the screen glowing against my hands.

Larkspur Holdings. Three years of work, and the name came from the weed that grew through the cracks in the pavement outside the first office we could afford. Jett picked it. He said if we were going to be a nuisance, we should at least be a pretty one.

The dashboard was green. Fourteen point three percent of Vance Enterprise’s debt, bought in eleven days through three entities that would take a good lawyer six months to untangle. Enough to be felt. Not enough to be fought.

I’d done the arithmetic so many times it had stopped being arithmetic. It had become a kind of prayer.

The back door clicked. I didn’t jump. Only one person has a key.

Jett came in with the sea wind still on his coat. He’s six foot four and built like a wardrobe, and he carries a tin of ginger biscuits in his pocket at all times, like a man who expects the world to end with an unmet craving for something sweet. He put the tin on the table without a word and sat opposite me.

“It’s midnight,” I said.

“Your light’s on.”

“My light’s off.”

“Your laptop’s on. Same thing, with you.” He looked at the screen, then at me. “You bought the note this evening.”

“I bought the note this evening.”

“Kay.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m going to.” He took a biscuit, broke it in half, and slid the bigger half toward me, which is what he does when he’s about to say something I won’t like. “I helped you build this. I’ll help you finish it. But you’ve been telling me for a year it’s a business decision. It’s not a business decision. You’re buying a man’s life in small pieces, and you’re doing it without telling him who you are.”

“He’d stop me.”

“He might not.”

“He would, Jett. If he knew it was me, he’d pay anything to make me go away.”

“Or he’d pay anything to make you stay.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a good sound. “You didn’t see that house. You didn’t see how quiet it was. He never once picked up the phone.”

“You told him not to look for you.”

“I wrote four sentences. That’s not a lock on the door.”

He was quiet. The sea filled the space between us, a long breath in, a long breath out.

“What’s the end?” he said finally. “Say it. If you own enough of the debt, what do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

I did. That was the trouble. I’d turned it over so many nights that I knew its shape in the dark. I wanted to walk into that glass tower with the paper in my hand. I wanted to watch his face change when he understood who’d been standing behind his name all this time. I wanted him to feel, for one minute, what it is to wake up and find the floor gone.

And under that, lower, something I didn’t let myself look at directly. I wanted him to see me. That was all. After everything, I wanted to be seen.

“I want him to know,” I said. “That’s all.”

“That’s not a plan. That’s a wound.”

“It’s a plan with a wound in it.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. He looked tired, and older than he was, and I felt a flash of guilt for dragging him along on this. Jett had a quiet life once. Then I turned up in his office with a baby on my hip and a suitcase of rage.

“You’re walking into a fire,” he said.

“I walked out of one.”

“Then why are you going back in?”

I didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t sound like a lie, or worse, like the truth. So I pushed the tin back toward him and said, “Eat your biscuit.”

He ate the biscuit. He’s a good man. He knows when to stop.

At the door he turned. “She asked about you today, you know. Wren. She wanted to know if you were a dragon.”

“A dragon.”

“I said you were more like a lighthouse. Mostly quiet, sometimes bright, and people keep crashing into you anyway.” He gave me a crooked smile. “Get some sleep.”

The door closed. The sea went on.

I should have slept. Instead I opened the second window, the one I’d been avoiding all week.

Due diligence, I’d told Jett. You don’t buy a company’s debt without reading its charitable filings, its subsidiaries, its quiet little corners where money goes to be forgotten. That was true. It was also a lie, the way most of my excuses are, a true thing standing in front of a truer one.

I scrolled through the foundation records. Page after page of grants. A hospital wing. A scholarship named for his father. Clean, careful, forgettable.

Then a line near the bottom of the third page, and I stopped breathing.

Open Door Arts Fund. Founded by K. Vance. Annual allocation: full.

I read it again. I clicked into the history and the whole thing opened like a drawer I’d forgotten I owned. Every quarter for three years, a payment. Same amount. Same recipient list. Studio rents for painters who couldn’t afford them, materials for kids from the east side, the little summer programme in the converted warehouse that I’d started with nine hundred pounds and a borrowed van.

It was still running. All of it. He hadn’t cut it, or folded it into something with his name on the door. He’d kept it alive, exactly as I left it, and my name was still on the letterhead.

I put my hand over my mouth.

I had spent three years building a picture of the man in that house. Cold. Efficient. A man who’d read a few lines on a pillow and gone back to work because work was easier than me. I needed that picture. I had built a whole life on top of it.

A man like that doesn’t pay for my kids’ paint every quarter for three years.

Upstairs, Wren turned over in her sleep and said something in her small, fierce voice. I held very still, and the screen glowed on, and the cursor blinked beside my name.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to burn him down or call him. The terrible part was that I couldn’t tell which one scared me more.