Chapter 6 - CAROL’S VERSION STARTED CRACKING
Carol came to Hannah’s house Tuesday with groceries.
Too many groceries.
Three bags of fruit, cereal, juice boxes, pasta, canned soup.
Guilt had apparently turned her into a one-woman supermarket.
I let her inside because Leo ran to her before I could decide whether I wanted her there.
She knelt and held him for almost a minute.
Then I asked the question I had been avoiding.
“What else did you know?”
Carol stiffened.
She admitted she had covered for Michael’s trips.
When I called her asking why he missed birthdays, dinners, or weekends, Michael sometimes contacted her first and told her what explanation to give me.
“I thought I was protecting your marriage.”
“You were protecting Michael from his marriage.”
She didn’t argue.
Then she told me something worse.
Four months earlier, Michael had asked to borrow her tablet because his laptop was supposedly being repaired.
Carol’s tablet still had copies of old family documents stored in cloud folders.
Tax returns.
Closing statements.
Scans of my driver’s license from when Carol helped us apply for a family travel program years earlier.
Michael had access to all of it.
Carol started crying.
I didn’t comfort her.
“Did you give him my passwords?”
“No.”
“Did you give him documents he could use to pretend to be me?”
She couldn’t answer.
Leo appeared in the hallway carrying a toy fire truck.
Carol wiped her face before he saw.
That small movement told me she understood something important.
May you like
Whatever Michael had done, she could no longer describe herself as someone who simply hadn’t known.
She had ignored too many questions because the answers might have forced her to choose between her son and the truth.
