"I don't know," Clare said carefully. I can't prove that. But the timing, the timing, Thomas said tightly, is that I have just gotten someone to help me keep this house running. My children are doing better than they have in 2 years. And suddenly, a woman who came to my wife's funeral and has not written since is interested in my children's welfare.
He pushed back from the table and stood. My children are not going anywhere, he said quietly. With the absolute flatness of a man stating a thing that is not negotiable. "No," Clare said. "They're not."
He looked at her. "What do you know about family law?" He said, "Custody. What it takes to to come after someone's children?" "Not enough," she said.
"But I know you need that lawyer in Milbrook, and you need him now, not next week." He was already picking up his hat. It's 9:00 in the evening, Clare said. I'm going tomorrow at first light. He put the hat down again, controlled.
He sat back down. He put his hands flat on the table. Tell me what you know. Everything. Even what you're not sure about.
She told him everything she'd heard through Ruth Hadley. Everything she'd assembled from what the children had let slip in. Unguarded moments. Everything Jacob had told her about the numbers and the rumors at school. The pieces of a picture that were each individually ambiguous and together were beginning to look like a design.
Thomas listened to all of it without moving. When she finished, he was quiet for a long time. "You've been paying attention to all of this," he said. "Yes," she said. "Since before you told me about the ledger?"
"Yes, while you were running the house and managing the children and reorganizing the pantry and getting Jacob back in school." He said this without irony, almost with wonder. You were watching all of this at the same time. Clare looked at him steadily. Someone needed to.
Thomas looked at her. He looked at her for a long time in the way he had looked at her before that particular quality of attention that she was learning to recognize as Thomas Walker. Actually seeing someone rather than simply looking at them. What did you come here expecting? He said finally.
When you walked up that road. A month's work, she said. A chance to save enough money to get myself somewhere better. And instead, and instead I appeared to be engaged in something considerably more complicated, Clare said. It came out slightly drier than she intended.