Page 61 of Atonement

She glared between the two of us. “You know, I’ve been keeping quiet about what’s been going on over at the house.” She lowered he voice and leaned in closer. “I’m sure I could cut a pretty sweet deal if I told the Feds just how Meyer and Maddie came to get together.”

I’d expected this; honestly, it was surprising she hadn’t threatened me with it earlier. I shifted forward in my seat, getting as close to her as I could without getting screamed at by a guard. “Tell me, Anita, did Maddie ever tell you she was at my house against her will?”

She didn’t say anything, but the tightness in her jaw told me what I needed to know. Madeline hadn’t even bothered to plead with Anita when she visited.

I leaned back again. “Ten million, and that’s it. Or I’ll pull your lawyer.”

She gasped. “You wouldn’t!”

“I would. How much money did you save, Anita? Enough to pay for even an hour of his time? You’ll be stuck with a public defender by this time tomorrow. And then youreallywon’t have to worry about how much money I give you, because you will never see the outside of a prison cell again.”

David shifted next to me, clearly uncomfortable with this strong-arm tactic, but Anita was already caving. This was why I didn’t want her lawyer here. He’d have negotiated and threatened far more effectively than she could.

“So why don’t you sign this—” I held out my hand, and David handed me a one page contract that I slid across the table to her — “and you can have some money and I’ll keep paying for your lawyer.”

She sneered at the paper as she read. “This says I’ll take all the blame for the sale on the company’s behalf. And that I won’t try to pin any of it on Shawn.”

“That’s right. And unless you want to be defending yourself in court, you’ll sign it and let us get out of your hair. I’ll transfer you ten million dollars to your offshore account tomorrow, and we will never speak again.”

She sneered, and seemed almost ready to refuse, but then grabbed the pen offered to her by David and scrawled her signature across the bottom of the page. She threw the pen back across the table and sat back, arms crossed over her chest. “I always hated you.”

“I know, and I never understood why. We had a common enemy.” I thought about what Eva said, that she’d suffered as much as I had in a different way. And wasn’t it true? She was stuck here and would be for several more years. My head was fucked, but at least I was free. I had people who loved me, a new family to help me build a new life. Anita had nothing and no one.

“The money will be in your account tomorrow. I’ll keep paying for your lawyer until the trial is over.” I stood and buttoned my jacket, Joshua and David following suit. “I’m not paying for any fucking appeals. When you get your sentence, you accept it like an adult. And Anita?”

She looked up at me. She was on the verge of tears, but to her credit, she held them back with the same stubbornness that had gotten her in to this mess to begin with.

“Don’t contact me when you get out. You leave the state and make your new life scamming rich old men somewhere else. I never want to see or hear from you ever again. Is that understood?”

“Crystal fucking clear,” she snapped, and saluted me with her middle finger.

*

David rushed away as soon as we walked out of the prison, no doubt eager to get some breathing space from my insane family. Joshua and I walked back to the car side by side, but with a healthy distance between us. I wanted to get home and talk to Maddie as soon as I could—being away from her for this long was making me nervous—but Joshua paused outside the car instead of getting in right away.

“I know your life sucked. I shouldn’t have implied that you had it easy.” He fished around in the pocket of his coat, retrieving a packet of cigarettes, and placed one in his mouth. I’d never seen him smoke before. “He didn’t even take me to a fire station, Meyer. I was found in a literal fucking dumpster. They guessed some teenager got overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. But it was a grown ass man who left me to die.”

He lit the cigarette, and a sweet smell unmistakable as marijuana, not tobacco, filled my nostrils. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke for some time before letting it out.

“Figuring out that Conrad was my father was a lot of guesswork. When I dove deeper into his personal life, found out how many criminal prosecutions he’s avoided by paying the right people large amounts of money, I figured he had to be keeping girls at his house. I assumed whoever my mother was, she was long dead.”

After one more puff, he offered me the joint. I considered it, then shook my head. He shrugged and stuck it back in the corner of his mouth.

“Lots of babies get adopted by nice families, but I wasn’t one of them. My parents divorced when I was five, and then my dad drank himself to death by the time I graduated high school. Mom had a crisis after the divorce and married some asshole five years younger than her who didn’t want kids. No one gave a shit about me. So when I graduated and got my dad’s life insurance money, I used it to hire an investigator. It took the better part of a year, but he eventually led me to Conrad.”

He took one more puff of the joint, then put it out on the bottom of his shoe before placing it back in the packet. I shoved my hands deeper in my pockets, wishing we were out of the cold but not wanting him to stop talking.

“I never really hated you. But I hated him, for keeping you, just because you looked like him. So I used the last of my savings to move out here and learn to do personal security. I figured if I could get in close, I could take him down from the inside.” He snorted, as if embarrassed by himself, and looked at his feet. “I had this grand plan, the way it was going to go down. The look on his face when he realized I was the one who fucked him over, and what I’d say to him in response.”

“That’s why you didn’t want him to be dead. Because it meant you weren’t the one to take him down.”

He nodded. “If anything, what he got was too easy. Relatively painless. And Anita—God knows she deserves the jail time, but he deserved it more.”

I sighed. “Yeah. He did.”

We stood in silence for a few minutes, looking anywhere but at each other. A couple of birds sitting on the fence took off and strained against the wind.

“Fuck it’s cold.”

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