Chapter 9 - The Family Name Started Costing Something
The consequences spread.
Whitmore Residential’s board retained outside counsel to review whether company resources had been used after the fire to suppress safety information.
An insurer requested archived records relating to the estate reconstruction.
A nonprofit hospital board asked Dad to temporarily step aside from its fundraising committee while questions about his public statements were reviewed.
No one arrested him.
No company collapsed.
Reality was slower than scandal.
Dad blamed me anyway.
“You’re enjoying this,” he said during the only meeting Rebecca allowed without lawyers in the room.
“No.”
“Then stop.”
“Tell the truth.”
“I already told you your mother was in the nursery.”
Mom stood from the sofa.
“Stop using me.”
Dad turned toward her.
Their marriage had survived thirty years partly because she had never said that sentence loudly enough.
Now she did.
Sienna sat beside me.
Dad looked at her.
“And you? After everything I gave you?”
Sienna’s face tightened.
“A two-million-dollar birthday party isn’t a personality.”
I almost smiled.
Dad did not.
Mom then handed Rebecca a small leather appointment book she had kept from the year of the fire.
On the afternoon before the blaze, she had written:
Richard furious — Tom says nursery circuit unsafe. R says event cannot move.
Dad went completely still.
Rebecca looked at him.
“Who is Tom?”
Nobody needed the answer anymore.
Dad stood.
“This meeting is over.”
As he walked out, Mom opened the appointment book again.
There was another entry from three days after the fire.
R says if I contradict candle story, girls lose everything.
Sienna whispered, “Mom…”
But Rebecca was staring at a different page.
A name appeared repeatedly during the months after the fire.
Dr. Elaine Mercer.
My childhood psychiatrist.
May you like
The doctor whose notes said Dad stopped Mom from telling me what happened.
And according to Mom’s appointment book, Dr. Mercer had eventually told Dad she would no longer participate.
