Chapter 106: Blue Cardigan
Bree came to the office on the fourteenth of August at four in the afternoon.
She had not called either. It runs in that family, arriving without warning and expecting the door to be answered.
I saw her cross the lot. She parked on the street and not in the lot, which meant she had thought about it beforehand.
She was not driving my car. She was driving a grey hatchback with a dealer plate frame and a child seat in the back.
I want to record that I did not know where my car was at that point, and that I had stopped asking eleven months earlier.
She was twenty-nine. She looked older than that and she looked like she had not slept properly in a season.
Blue cardigan, buttoned wrong at the bottom. Flat shoes. No bag.
Marisol looked at me. I shook my head. She took her coffee into the back and shut the door most of the way.
Bree stood on the mat, the same square of mat Dean had stood on in April.
I stayed behind the counter. I put both hands on the counter. That is what I do now.
“I'm not here to fight,” she said.
“Then don't.”
“Can I sit.”
“No.”
She did not sit. She stood there and her hands would not stay still and she kept working them into the cardigan sleeves.
Her left wrist was bare. There was a paler band on it, about a centimetre wide, where the sun had not reached in years.
I noticed that before I noticed anything else in the room, and I have thought about why since.
“They're going to charge me,” she said.
“Probably. Before Christmas, if the grand jury sits in November.”
“Dean told them everything.”
“He told them some of it. He told them the part that costs him the least.”
She started crying. I want to be exact. She cried the way people cry when they are frightened for themselves.
I have seen a great deal of crying. Six years of visiting rooms teaches you the difference.
I did not go around the counter. I did not hand her anything. I stood where I was.
“I was twenty-one,” she said.
“I was twenty-four.”
“That's not the same.”
“No. I was three years older and I was not driving.”
She stopped crying quite quickly after that, which told me something as well.
“Can you stop it,” she said. “The petition. Can you withdraw it.”
“No.”
“You've made your point. Everybody knows now. Everybody at the church knows.”
“That is not the point I was making.”
“They'll put me in for years, Cass. Years.”
“Yes. They might.”
“You know what it's like in there.”
“I know exactly what it's like in there. I know what the soap smells like. I know how long the phone queue is on a Sunday.”
She had nothing for that. She looked at the chairs and did not sit in one.
Then she said the thing she had actually come to say, and she said it as if it were her defence.
“You offered.”
“What.”
“Mum said you offered. That you came to the house and you said you'd do it. That it was your idea.”
The clock did the thing it does at the half hour.
“When did she tell you that?”
“Then. Straight after. She said you offered because you had no record and Dean did, and that it made sense to everybody at the time.”
“And you believed her.” She said she was twenty-one, again, as though the number did any work at all.
I did not shout at her. I have thought about this a great deal and I am satisfied that I did not.
I came around the counter and I opened the front door and I held it, and I stood back from it, a full pace back.
“Go on,” I said.
She went. At the door she turned round.
“I never wanted the bangle,” she said. “She gave it to me. She said it was hers to give.”
Then she got into the grey hatchback and sat in it for a while before she started it.
I went back inside and stood behind the counter, and Marisol came out with two coffees and put one down.
She did not ask a single question. She has never asked me a single question.
I got through one hundred and forty pages before six, and then I went home and could not eat anything, and did not try very hard.
At eleven that night I wrote three lines in the notebook, because a thing you do not write down is a thing you will misremember.
Bree Halloway, 14 August, 4:00 p.m. Said R. H. told her I offered.
Said the bangle was given, not taken. Wrist bare. Pale band, approx one centimetre.
Then I put the notebook in the drawer and lay on the bed with my shoes on for about an hour.