Harriet looked at her.
“What?”
“We gave him forty thousand dollars.” Blythe’s voice was shaking now.
“Harlan sold a parcel of land in Massachusetts.
Weston told us he needed it to finish the down payment on your home.”
Harlan set the deed down with a terrible calm.
“And I made him sign a receipt.”
For Blythe, this was the moment the ground truly went out, and it went out in a way that was different from her husband’s cold engineering fury.
Harlan was learning what his son had done.
Blythe was learning what her son was.
All night she had been absorbing the fact of the abandonment, the lie about the renovation, the children behind a curtain — and she had been holding, underneath it, the mother’s desperate reservation, the surely there is an explanation, surely my boy is not simply this. And now the forty thousand dollars had detonated the last of it.
Because this was not a man overwhelmed by a hard situation, not a marriage that had failed the way marriages fail.
This was her son taking money from his own parents — money his father had raised by selling land, land that had been in the family, sold on the strength of a lie about needing it for a home he was even then planning to steal — and putting it toward a fraud.
He had defrauded his wife, his children, and, it turned out, his own mother and father, all in the same scheme, and he had called them every Sunday for eight months and lied warmly to their faces the whole time.