Rhett had the emails showing Dash knew. Dad wouldn't give me a figure while the lawyers worked out what could be recovered. I didn't need one to understand why my brother had been scared. Dad suspended Dash from management and stopped giving Rhett new work. The company lawyer contacted Rhett's lawyer about the disputed charges.
Rhett had counted on Dash being more afraid of the emails than he was. Now he had to explain why his company had billed for work it hadn't finished. The lawyers argued over what was actually done and what had only been promised. Meanwhile, Dad still had customers and employees to look after. Dash sent me a longer email a few days later.
Dash said he'd thought losing Rhett's crews would cost them two contracts. So he'd signed off on early payments and told himself he'd straighten out the invoices later. He never did. Rhett kept the emails. When he found Rhett and Maren at the lake house, he'd threatened to tell me.
Rhett reminded him of the invoices and said if Dash wanted to make trouble, Dad could see every email. Rhett would have had to answer for those bills, too, but he knew Dash was terrified of losing Dad's trust and his place in the company. He didn't have to send the emails. He only had to make Dash believe he might. Dash said he panicked.
He'd let them use the house one more time, then another. After a while, he said, "It felt like I couldn't tell you without also admitting everything else." He wrote, "I kept thinking I'd find a way to stop it without blowing up your life." Maren and I started sorting out the house. Neither of us wanted to stay there, and neither could comfortably carry the mortgage alone.
Our attorneys worked through the financial details. We agreed to sell. The day the realtor came to take pictures, Maren stood in the doorway of the empty third bedroom and asked if I was absolutely sure. I told her I'd already signed the listing papers. She looked at the bare walls for a while, then asked whether I wanted to keep the dining table.
That was the last time she asked me to reconsider. We divided the furniture on paper. It was easier that way. I took my grandmother's heavy kitchen table. Maren kept the sofa and bedroom furniture.
Neither of us wanted the half-finished puzzle on the shelf. The house went on the market in the fall. I drove past it one evening after the listing went up. There was a sign in the yard and fresh mulch around the front shrubs. I remembered standing in that same yard the day we bought it, arguing with Maren about whether we'd ever need three bedrooms.
We thought we'd have kids. After the tests and appointments, we'd stopped talking about it much. Standing outside the house, I remembered how sure we'd been that we'd need those bedrooms. The divorce took months, mostly paperwork and the house proceeds. Maren didn't contest it.
Sometimes she'd text about a bill and add that she missed me. I answered the question about the bill. The sale closed after the holidays. I moved into a small rental closer to the plant. It had a narrow kitchen and a neighbor who worked on his motorcycle at odd hours.
I bought a second-hand couch and put my grandmother's table by the window. Mom came over one Saturday with a box of kitchen things she said she'd found in her basement. There were dish towels and mismatched glasses. I told her I could buy glasses. She said she knew and put them in the cabinet anyway.
We sat at the table and had coffee. She told me Dad was doing okay, just tired. Dash had moved out of his office at the company. He was working with his attorney and trying to find a job that didn't involve Dad's business. She said she worried about him, but she wasn't going to ask me to call.
By spring, the company had reached a settlement in principle with Rhett's business over some of the disputed billing. The terms weren't final, but Rhett was losing a customer that had supplied a steady share of his contracts for years. He'd have to answer for the disputed invoices through his attorney, and Dad wouldn't give him another job. I heard none of it from Rhett himself. That suited me.
Dash wasn't returning to management. Dad had hired someone from outside the family to run day-to-day operations. It cost more than he'd wanted to spend, but he said he slept better knowing someone was checking the invoices. The last email Dash sent me came around the anniversary of when I'd found the jacket. He barely mentioned the company.
He said he'd been thinking about the lake house, about how he'd taken something that belonged to all of us and turned it into a place where I was made a fool of. He said he'd been afraid of losing his job and Dad's respect. He'd been afraid Rhett would tell everyone about the invoices. He'd convinced himself that if he could keep things quiet for another week, then another month, something would change. He admitted he'd changed the lake house locks after I started asking about Rhett and the cleaning bills.
He'd hoped that taking over the maintenance would keep me from going back and noticing anything else. He wrote, "I kept telling myself I was protecting you from finding out. I was protecting me. I know that now." I sat with that for a long time.
It was the closest he'd come to saying it without an excuse attached. I believed he meant it. I also knew that if I answered, even with one sentence, he'd take it as the start of a conversation I wasn't ready to have. That summer Mom asked whether I wanted to join her and Dad at the lake house for a weekend. She said they were thinking of selling it eventually because it was becoming too much to maintain.
She didn't push. She just said she'd like to spend a day there with me before they made any decisions. I told her I loved her, but I didn't want to go back yet. Maybe I never would. She said okay.
Then she asked if I could help Dad move a bookshelf the following Saturday. I said sure. Later that summer, Tobin and I rented a small cabin at a different lake for a weekend in August. It was nothing special. The dock leaned a little and the grill took forever to light.
We spent Saturday fishing badly and trying to cook steaks without burning them. At one point Tobin dropped the pliers into the water and had to wade in after them. I laughed so hard I had to sit down. We didn't talk about Maren or Rhett or Dash that afternoon. We talked about a machine at work that kept tripping a breaker and whether Tobin should finally get rid of his truck.
When the sun went down, we sat outside with the bugs and the sound of somebody's boat across the water. I thought about my brother calling to promise me a new key. He'd asked how Maren and I were doing. He knew exactly where she'd been spending her afternoons. He knew who she'd been with and he'd still asked.
When Tobin asked if I wanted to come back the next month, I said yes. We picked a weekend and put it on the calendar. It was the first plan I'd made in a long time that didn't require me to wonder who else already knew something I didn't.