“Begin what?” I said. “Victor, where is everyone?”
He pointed toward the kitchen. “The real instructions are in there. That one was just the draft.”
I found the second note taped to the granite countertop, in Brady’s handwriting, with the particular care of someone who has rehearsed what they wanted to say.
Gone on a Caribbean cruise with Hannah. Mom decided to come too since she needed a break. You’ll stay home and take care of Victor. He needs you back Monday.
Hannah was a colleague from Brady’s marketing department. She was the woman he had described to me for two years as loud, annoying, and professionally mediocre, the woman he sighed about when she was invited to departmental events he could not avoid, the woman he insisted, on the two occasions I had raised the question, was nothing more than a work acquaintance he barely tolerated. I stood in the freezing kitchen and held the note with both hands and processed the specific cruelty of being lied to about the particular shape of the lie.
My phone pinged in my pocket with the cheerful notification sound I had always associated with small good things, messages from friends, confirmations of plans. I put it back without looking.
“He’s not coming back until Monday, is he.”
Victor was standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning on a cane but standing, the supposedly bedridden man Brady had described to me as basically a vegetable and completely dependent, upright on his own two feet.
“No,” I said. “No one is.”
He nodded with the grim confirmation of someone for whom this is not news. “Classic Brady move. Cowardice dressed up as delegation.” He shuffled to a kitchen chair and lowered himself into it. “Check your bank account, Jade.”
