Richard Calls Sarah
Chapter 11 - Richard Calls Sarah
Richard made the phone call he'd been rehearsing for ten years on a quiet Wednesday evening, sitting alone in his office above the store, staring at his own phone like it might bite him if he pressed the number too quickly.
Sarah answered on the third ring, voice careful, guarded, though something in it told Richard she'd been expecting this call for considerably longer than she intended to admit.
"I owe you an apology that's ten years overdue," he said, before she could speak first. "I don't want to make excuses. I want to tell you exactly what I know now, and what I should have known then, and let you decide what, if anything, you want to do with it."
He told her everything Priya's investigation had uncovered, the payments to Greg, the fabricated evidence, Constance's deliberate, sustained campaign to destroy their marriage from the inside.
Sarah listened in silence, the same way she'd listened to Mark a week earlier, letting the full scope of the truth settle before responding.
"I knew, in some part of me, that the evidence never quite made sense," she said finally. "Transfers from accounts I'd never opened. Conversations with people I'd never met. Some part of me always knew it was too perfectly constructed to be genuine. I just couldn't prove it at the time, and I was too hurt, too exhausted, to keep fighting against something I couldn't disprove."
"I should have believed you over her," Richard said. "That's the simplest version of what went wrong, and it's entirely my fault. I chose my mother's story over my wife's, because her story was easier to hear than the alternative, which would have required me to accept that my own mother was capable of something this calculated."
"I understand why you chose the easier story," Sarah said. "I don't think that makes it forgivable, exactly. I think it makes it human, though, which is something I've had ten years to slowly distinguish from each other."
"I don't expect forgiveness quickly," Richard said. "I don't think I've earned it yet. I just wanted you to hear the truth directly from me, finally, instead of through our son or through lawyers."
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They talked for another hour that evening, carefully, the specific, tentative conversation of two people exploring whether a bridge burned a decade ago might still hold enough structure underneath to cautiously rebuild.
Neither of them made any promises. Both of them understood, hanging up that night, that whatever came next would require considerably more patience than either of them had shown the first time around.
