Chapter 3 - What Comes Through a Closed Door
I raised a finger to my lips. Rosa understood right away and pressed herself back against the bookshelf.
"Yeah," I called. "Just finishing a chapter."
A beat of silence. Then the handle turned.
Vivian came in wearing her silk robe, hair down around her shoulders. She looked exactly the way she always did at that hour — calm, unhurried, lovely.
Her eyes swept the room and stopped on Rosa. Something flickered across her face and was gone before I could hold onto it.
"Rosa." Pleasant. Light. "It's awfully late. Everything okay?"
"She left her bag," I said before Rosa could open her mouth. "I told her to come back and get it."
Vivian looked at me. Then at Rosa. Then at the desk.
The folded paper was in my hand, flat against my thigh, hidden below the desk edge.
"Of course," Vivian said. She gave Rosa a small smile. "Don't make a habit of it. You need your sleep too."
"Yes, ma'am. Sorry."
"Goodnight, then."
Rosa took her coat off the chair by the door — there really was a coat there, thank God — and left without once looking back at me.
Vivian watched her go. Then she turned around.
"Come to bed, Walter. You've been shut in here for hours."
"Soon," I said.
She crossed the room, kissed the top of my head, rested her hand on my shoulder for a second, and left.
I sat dead still until I heard the bedroom door click at the end of the hall.
Then I opened the paper again.
Four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The receiving account had no name on it — just a routing number I'd never seen. The transfer date was two days out.
I turned it over. On the back, in faint pencil: a phone number and two words.
Final confirmation.
I sat with that a long time.
Then I dug the business card of my attorney, Harold Benton, out of the desk drawer. He'd handled my estate, my will, my property transfers for years. He was seventy-one himself — cautious, old-school. He'd never liked Vivian. He'd never said it in words, but I'd seen his face the one time they were in a room together.
I didn't call him that night. It was past eleven, and I wanted a clear head before I said any of this out loud to anyone.
Instead I photographed the document, front and back. Then I folded it exactly the way Rosa had handed it to me and buried it at the back of the drawer under a stack of old letters.
I switched off the lamp and sat in the dark, listening to the house. The refrigerator hummed. A branch scraped the window. Down the hall, behind that closed door, my wife was either asleep or lying awake waiting to hear me come to bed.
I thought about the charity dinner. The way she'd laughed at my old stories. The way she'd looked at me like I was still worth looking at.
I'd believed every second of it.
When I finally stood and reached the doorway, I noticed something I'd missed when Vivian came in.
A thin line of light under the door of the small sitting room across the hall — the room she used when she wanted to take a call in private.
May you like
That light hadn't been on when Rosa knocked.
It was on now.
