The statement hung there.
I leaned toward the laptop.
My parents’ lease had a purchase option. I had asked David to include it. The price was tied to an independent appraisal, with credit for a portion of their rent. They could exercise it if they ever rebuilt their finances.
In four years, they had never asked how it worked.
Perhaps now they had.
Richard looked at David. “Is there a purchase option?”
“Yes,” David said.
“And this man knew about it?”
“You provided him the lease,” David replied.
Terrence spread his hands. “I was trying to put together financing.”
“In your name?” Natalie asked.
“No.”
“Then why did you need to move in?”
He did not answer.
Natalie gripped the tape measure so tightly its metal edge pressed into her palm.
I remembered her satisfaction at dinner. She had looked pleased when Patricia said they needed my old bedroom. It had felt like the familiar contest between us, one more thing she could take while I stayed quiet.
Now she looked at her husband as though she had never seen him clearly.
“I thought we were staying for a month,” she said.
“That was the plan.”
“You told me Mom and Dad had asked us to help them get organized. You said we could use the room because Nicole never stays overnight anymore.”
“That is what they said.”
“You also said we might be able to buy a place next year.”
“We still might.”
“With what money?”
Terrence glanced toward Richard. “This isn’t appropriate in front of everyone.”
Natalie laughed once. There was no humor in it.
“You’ve been talking about my parents’ house in front of people they don’t know. You can answer me in their hallway.”
David closed the ownership papers. “The lender inquiry came to me because their representative requested confirmation that the proposed borrowers could convey or encumber the property. They cannot.”
Richard sat down heavily on the bench near the door.
I watched him reread his own signature on the lease. He had signed without considering what the words protected. He had trusted Terrence with those same pages because Terrence wore a good suit and used the right terms.
“I told him I could get a better deal than the option price,” Terrence said finally.
Natalie stared. “How?”
“I thought the owner was an investment firm. Firms negotiate.”
“Using my parents as what?”
“Tenants willing to buy.”
“And us living here?”
“It would show a plan for the property.”
She waited. Terrence looked down.
“You wanted them to sign whatever you arranged,” she said.
“I wanted everybody to benefit.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
I did not know whether Terrence had planned to cheat them. David did not claim he had. A lender inquiry and an ambitious proposal were not proof of a scheme.
But he had kept the proposal from Natalie while encouraging her to move into my old room. He had presented possibility as certainty, and my family had been ready to clear a child from the table for it.
The house had nearly been lost once through desperate choices. Tonight, they were preparing to trust another promise they had not examined.
Patricia moved closer to her husband. “You knew about the option?”
Richard kept his eyes on the lease. “I forgot.”
“How do you forget something like that?”
“At the time, all I cared about was that we could stay.”
Her expression changed. Whatever they had said to the country club, the fear beneath it belonged to both of them.
The deputy asked Richard for a brief account of the evening. My father answered in clipped sentences, omitting my mother’s words.
Patricia interrupted him.
“I said the boy was a mistake.”
He turned to her. “Patricia.”
“I said it.”
For the first time since David arrived, she looked straight at the camera.
The lens was too high for her to see me through it. Still, I felt exposed.
“I wanted Nicole to hear it,” she told the deputy. “I was angry, and I wanted to hurt her.”
Natalie whispered, “Mom.”
Patricia shook her head. “Let me finish.”
She pressed her fingers together, searching for words she had avoided for years.
“When Richard lost the house, he told me he would fix it. Then this company appeared. I was ashamed of needing a stranger’s help. Every time Nicole came over, she looked as if she could manage everything I couldn’t.”
I thought of all the afternoons I had spent fixing their bills and answering their calls.
“You could have asked me,” I whispered to the screen.
Patricia could not hear me.
“So I made her feel small,” she said. “I knew what her work was doing for her. I just didn’t want to admit she was doing better than we were.”
Her face tightened.
“None of that excuses what I called Leo.”
No one spoke.
It was an admission, not an apology. I needed more than an admission.
In the hotel room, Leo stirred.
