Chapter 2 - The Price of a Roof
The second notebook detailed the first six months of our marriage. I turned the pages, my stomach tightening into a knot of pure nausea as Evelyn’s words tore away every illusion I had built about my own cleverness.
*March 3. Leo spent three hours tonight calculating how many years I have left based on my blood pressure medication refills. He thinks I don't hear him whispering into his phone in the hallway, talking to that girl from the bar about 'waiting out the lease.' It hurts, of course. A widow never quite forgets the sting of being unwanted. But a widow also learns that people in cages will say anything to justify chewing through their own chains. I bought him new work boots today. His soles were worn down to the cardboard. If he is going to steal my house, he should at least have dry feet while he does it.*
I slammed the notebook shut, my chest heaving. The silence in the lawyer's office was deafening.
"Why didn't she throw me out?" I muttered, staring at the grain of the polished wood table. "If she knew I was just a gold-digging fraud waiting for her to die... why feed me? Why wash my clothes? Why let me sleep in her bed?"
Vance leaned back in his leather chair, interlocking his fingers over his stomach. "Because Evelyn believed that redemption isn't something you find; it's something you endure. She wanted to see if living a decent life for a few years could cure a boy of his hunger. She gave you a home, Leo. In exchange, she asked for your company. But you never gave it. You gave her your absence while your body was sitting in the living room."
I stood up abruptly, the chair scraping loudly against the floorboards. "I needed out! You don't know what it’s like to sleep in a freezing truck with collection agencies calling your phone twenty times a day! I didn't ask to be born broke!"
"No," Vance replied, his voice chillingly calm. "You didn't ask to be born broke. But you chose to be hollow. Read the final entry in that red journal, Leo. That was written three hours before she collapsed in the kitchen."
My hands shook as I flipped the red journal open to the very last page.
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*May 19. My heart is giving out. The doctor gave me weeks, maybe days. Leo will inherit the house legally if I don't change the deed tonight. I won't do it. A house given to a thief only teaches him how to pick the next lock. I am leaving the house to my niece, and the money to the clinic that saved my husband forty years ago. But I am leaving Leo the box. Because if anything of him is salvageable, these pages will break him. And in breaking, he might finally learn how to build something real.*
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