Chapter 5 - WHAT GEORGE FINALLY ADMITTED
George found Sarah in the garage that afternoon loading tote bags into the trunk of her Honda.
The twins were upstairs with headphones on, under strict instructions not to unpack anything.
George closed the garage door behind him. It dimmed the light enough that she had to look directly at him to read his face.
“I didn’t know about the money at first,” he said.
Sarah kept folding clothes.
“At first.”
“Eleanor moved some things around.”
“Money is not ‘things.’”
He flinched. “Mark’s attorney retainer came up fast. Dana filed for primary physical custody, and Mark panicked. Your mother said we’d replace what you put in once he got back on his feet.”
Sarah straightened slowly.
“When were you planning to tell me?”
George didn’t answer that one.
Instead he said, “I told your mother not to move the kids downstairs.”
“But you let her.”
He looked toward the house.
“I should have stopped it.”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of the answer seemed to knock something loose in him.
“She thinks if Mark loses time with Owen, it proves she failed him,” George said quietly. “She’s always been that way with him.”
Sarah almost laughed.
“So my kids were supposed to make her feel better?”
“No.”
“But they did the sacrificing.”
George nodded once, shame-faced.
Sarah went back to packing.
He stayed where he was.
After a minute he said, “It isn’t just about rooms.”
Sarah paused.
“What does that mean?”
George hesitated. “There’s some kind of visit tomorrow.”
She turned to face him fully.
“A visit from who?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s a lie.”
His shoulders sank. “A family-services person. Or a court person. Mark didn’t explain it all to me.”
“You expect me to believe you didn’t ask?”
George’s voice sharpened, then broke under its own weight. “I asked. Your mother said if I wanted peace in my own house, I needed to stop interrogating her.”
There it was—the truest thing he had said yet.
Not innocence.
Cowardice.
Sarah leaned against the car door.
“So they moved the twins downstairs for a visitor.”
George rubbed the side of his neck. “I heard your mother tell Mark the upstairs had to look settled.”
Settled.
The taped doors. The missing photos. The bleach smell.
Sarah saw it all again, in a different order.
“Did they tell the twins to keep quiet?”
George looked miserable. “Chloe asked me this morning if she should call the basement a game room if someone asked.”
Sarah’s hand tightened around the car key.
She did not shout. She didn’t trust herself to.
Instead she said, “If anyone asks my children to lie for adults again, they will never be alone with them.”
George nodded as if he had expected nothing less.
As he opened the garage door to leave, he stopped once more.
“Sarah.”
She waited.
“I know this won’t help now, but I never thought you and the kids were temporary to me.”
Sarah looked at him, then at the doorway back into the house where he would still go stand beside Eleanor if pressed hard enough.
May you like
“It would help more if you acted like that.”
He had no answer for her.
