Then I picked up the folder marked Project Margaret.
But before I could open it, the door opened, and Thomas came in.
He’d come back for my reading glasses. I’d left them in his car.
He stopped in the doorway and looked at us. At Daniel crying on the bed. At the box on the chair. At the hotel receipts spread across the blanket, and the letters, and the checkbook register from a bank he’d never heard of.
“What’s going on?” he said. “What is all this?”
So we told him.
It took a long time. Thomas is an accountant. He wanted to see every piece of paper. He read the checkbook register line by line. He took out his phone and added it all up while I lay there.
“Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars,” he said finally. “Over fourteen years. Dad gave two hundred and twelve thousand dollars to a lab in Massachusetts.”
