The recordings of my calls with your mother, the originals, all of it — I kept it for six years to protect my own neck.
Check your email in twenty minutes.
And — for whatever it is worth to you now, which I know is nothing — I am sorry.
It was the worst thing I ever did.
She is the reason I never practiced again.”
I believed the sorry, oddly, though it changed nothing and I told him so.
There had been something in the old man’s voice from the first word — not fear, or not only fear, but a kind of exhausted readiness, the sound of a person who has been waiting years for the knock and is almost glad, when it finally comes, to stop waiting.
Emeric Vasser had walked into a hospital room six years ago and frightened a pregnant woman into vanishing, on my mother’s instructions and my mother’s money, and he had spent every day since knowing exactly what he was.
He had kept the recordings, he said, to protect himself.
But a man who only wanted to protect himself destroys the evidence; he does not preserve, for six years, the originals that damn the person paying him.
Some part of Vasser had kept those recordings so that this call could happen — so that someday, when the truth came for my mother, he would be able to hand over the proof and be, at the very end of a ruined career, on the right side of one thing.
It was not enough.
Nothing would have been enough.
But I understood, hanging up, that my mother had not only broken five lives that day in the hospital.