Jordan set the drafting scale on the side table, lining it up parallel with the lamp base. He looked at me, his eyes dark and steady in the lamplight.
“Do you remember the toast your father gave at our wedding?” he asked.
“Jordan, that was twelve years ago,” I said, my thumb instinctively twisting my silver wedding band. “What does that have to do with my parents losing their home?”
“He stood up in front of eighty people,” Jordan said, speaking slowly, each word distinct. “He said you were marrying a boy who didn’t know his own library card number because his parents couldn’t afford to keep him in one place long enough to get one.”
“He was drunk,” I said, though the memory still made my face hot, the humiliation of that reception hall rushing back. “He apologized the next day.”
“He didn’t apologize,” Jordan said. “He laughed. And then he told me that a man without a pedigree should be grateful to sit at a table he didn’t pay for.”
“Why are you bringing this up now?” I asked.
“Because your father has spent twelve years pretending I don’t exist while he built a house of cards,” Jordan said. “Some debts cannot be paid with money, Claire.”
He stood up, walked past me into the dark hallway, and headed toward his private study.
I stood in the center of the living room, the silence of the house settling around me like dust. On the entryway table, Jordan’s leather briefcase sat unbuckled, its brass latch gleaming in the spill of the kitchen light.
I stepped closer, my fingers hovering over the leather, staring at the folded certified letter tucked inside Jordan’s leather briefcase.
My hand hovered over the brass clasp of Jordan’s leather briefcase, but I pulled back before my fingers could touch the metal. I left the study, the unanswered question of that certified letter resting heavy in my chest.
By eleven the next morning, I stood in my mother’s dining room at the harbor condo. The air smelled of beeswax and expensive lavender soap, a clean, dry scent that followed my parents from their five-bedroom colonial to this smaller, sunlit space overlooking the docks. Through the glass doors, the lake was a flat sheet of slate under the autumn sky.
