Chapter 19 - The Final Dinner
I returned home as the sun was setting,
the sky a bruised purple that matched my soul.
My mother was in the kitchen,
cooking dinner as if nothing had changed.
The smell of roasted chicken filled the house,
a domestic lie that made me want to scream.
I walked in and placed the files from the vault on the counter.
The sound was heavy,
the sound of a gavel falling on a thirty-year-old crime.
She didn't turn around.
She just kept stirring the gravy.
“I assumed you’d find it eventually,”
she said,
her voice devoid of emotion.
“Vance was always the weak link.”
“He couldn't stand the idea of me winning.”
“You killed him,”
I said,
the words feeling like stones in my mouth.
“You killed my father.”
She turned then,
and for the first time,
I saw the true Judith.
Her eyes were as cold as the Cayman accounts,
her face a mask of iron-willed pragmatism.
“I saved us,
Mallory,”
she said.
“Your father was going to take us down with him.”
“He wanted to be a hero,
but heroes leave their families penniless and broken.”
“I made a choice so you could have a life of privilege.”
“I married you to Derek to close the loop.”
“I gave you the folder to cut the dead weight.”
I looked at her,
this stranger who had birthed me,
and I felt nothing but a vast,
empty space where love used to be.
“You’re going to jail,
Mom,”
I said,
reaching for my phone.
She laughed,
a soft,
pitying sound.
“And who will take care of Hazel?”
she asked.
“If I go down,
I’ll make sure the investigation looks at your involvement in the boutique again.”
“I’ll show them how you ‘willingly’ signed those papers.”
“We’re tied together,
Mal.”
“In blood and in crime.”
I smiled then,
and it was the smile I had learned from her.
“I already thought of that,”
I said.
“I sent the files to the state prosecutor an hour ago.”
“With a full,
notarized statement from Julian Vance.”
“He’s been waiting for this for a long time,
Mom.”
“He was the one who loved my father.”
“He wasn't your partner.”
“He was your witness.”
The sirens began to wail in the distance,
climbing the hill toward our sanctuary.
My mother’s face finally crumbled,
the mask of the protective matriarch falling away to reveal the frightened girl she had been thirty years ago.
She reached for me,
but I stepped back,
the same way I had stepped back from Derek on the tarmac.
“Just keep the peace,
Mom,”
I said,
the irony a bitter,
May you like
perfect circle.
“The peace of a prison cell.”
