He looked at her over the ledger. You're complimenting me. I'm stating an observation. She said you can take it as you like. He was quiet for a moment.
My son tells me you taught yourself all of this. Your son talks too much. He does. Walter said with a particular dry tone of a man who had been saying exactly that for 35 years he always has. He turned a page his mother was the same way.
Couldn't let a thought go unspoken. It was the first time he had mentioned Nathaniel's mother. Amelia kept her eyes on the ledger and let the space stay open if he wanted to fill it. He did. She died when he was 12.
Walter said fever fast. He said it the way he said most things, not without feeling, but with the feeling pressed flat by years of practical necessity. He was talking through his grief before she was in the ground. Couldn't stop. I didn't know what to do with that then.
And now he looked at her. Now I think he learned it from her, the talking. And I think it's probably kept him sane in ways my kind of quiet wouldn't have. She looked at the old man across the desk. At the compressed, dense, complicated person he was, and at the particular love for his son that lived inside his disapproval of her, and she thought with a quiet, private ache that she understood him better than he would probably want her to.
Mr. Carter, she said, I know you don't approve of me. I never said that. You haven't had to, she said, but I want you to know that I'm not asking for your approval. I'm asking when the time comes for your honesty.
The same honesty you've given me over these books. That's all. Walter looked at her for a long moment. You're not what I expected, he said. It was the second time he had said it, but this time it landed differently.
Like an admission. You said that before, she said. It bears repeating, he said, and went back to the ledger. She finished the accounts on a Tuesday in late September. She laid out the final reconciled figures on Walter's desk in a clean summary.