The Ledger

Chapter 7: Same Hand

Chapter 7: Same Hand

18

Tommy left for work with the same three words he'd been leaving me with all week. "Don't go outside."

There wasn't anywhere to be, so it wasn't hard.

The phone rang at six in the morning and again at noon and again at eleven at night, numbers with no name on them. If I picked up, whoever it was either said nothing at all or said whatever they'd called about, and it was never anything I hadn't read already. By Tuesday I'd stopped answering. After that it was just a sound in the apartment, like the refrigerator.

Every night I started at the beginning and went through the whole thing looking for the place where I did something wrong. I didn't find it that week either.

Sunday night I texted Vivian. *I need one sentence from you.*

Then I called, because the call I'd made the day before hadn't gone anywhere, and got one ring and voicemail. Monday morning I called and got one ring and voicemail, and I told myself a story about her phone being wrecked by all of it. I could hold that for about an hour at a time.

Monday afternoon her name was on a screen and it wasn't under a video.

Hale Properties Group had put out an announcement. Vivian Hale and Julian Vance. There was a photograph with it. She was in dark green with her chin at the angle she gets when there's a camera on her and she's already decided she's leaving. The man beside her had one hand flat on her back. He was smiling with his chin down, the way you smile when you know what the picture looks like.

I'd seen that smile once. It was in the hallway outside 355, half a second before his hand went flat on my back and pushed me through the door.

The fourth picture, the one from the end of the couch, had a sleeve in the corner of it. Black leather, five studs, a hand at the end of it with a phone in it. In the announcement photograph the same man had that hand flat on her back, in a dinner jacket.

Same hand.

Julian Vance. Vance Capital. There was a father in the second paragraph and a foundation in the third, and the word business didn't appear anywhere in it. That was careful of them.

The comments built all afternoon.

ok THAT's the guy

this makes a lot more sense

imagine being the other one reading this today

she was never going to end up with somebody like that, be serious

somebody had the whole wedding priced out before five o'clock. nobody asked where the numbers came from.

Nobody brought up the video.

I read to the bottom, the way I'd read to the bottom of the video.

19

Tommy came in from work and didn't take his coat off, and held his phone up in front of me with the picture already open on it, which is how I knew he'd been standing outside looking at it first.

"That's the sleeve," he said.

"It's a press release."

"That's the sleeve, Ethan. That's the guy who put you through that door, and he's the guy holding the phone in the other picture, and now he's marrying her, and you're going to sit here."

"I'm going to sit here."

"There's thirty thousand dollars of your money gone and you're not going to say one word."

"It's a joint account. Her name's on it too."

"Somebody paid for a bottle of wine with it and you've got the statement."

"I've got a statement."

"Say something."

"Don't."

"Don't what."

"Just don't."

I couldn't have told him. What I meant was that he would be the one who got hit for it.

He went to bed at nine again. At two on Wednesday morning he was at the table with the laptop open and his hand flat on the table beside it, and by the time it was light what he'd made was up.

He'd made a slideshow. Screenshots, and a date down the side of every slide, and photographs — the ones he'd taken himself, the lake in July, my birthday, the two of us on the fire escape in October, a wedding we went to in April where I'm in a tie I borrowed off him. The lease with both our names on it. Two payment requests for half a deposit.

None of it was dramatic. There's no version of a slideshow about splitting checks that anybody wants to look at, and he knew that, and he made it anyway, because it was the only thing he had and he wasn't going to sit there.

He put it up from an account with no name on it and no picture on it. He didn't tell me he had.

At eight-forty I made an account with my name on it and put four sentences underneath.

I'm the guy in the video. Nobody was paying my way. We split everything for three years, every check, and I gave more than I got, and every single thing she ever gave me is in a box with tape on it in the back of a closet and I never opened it. That's all.

I did it so it would land on the account with my name on it instead of on his. It landed by nine.

you made a whole account for this

he was living off her the whole time and now he's crying about it

nobody asked

he's been trying to be somebody since the first video

three years of receipts. sure.

this is what he wanted

Half the accounts were eleven days old. I looked.

20

Thursday Tommy left at seven with the hood of his coat up. He never does that. He came back at ten past five with blood in his hair and down the collar of the coat, and one hand up by the side of his head like he was holding a phone that wasn't there.

Somebody on the platform had recognized him. There's a picture of him in that slideshow, at the lake, in the background with his head turned and his mouth open laughing at something, and by Thursday morning somebody had gone through the whole thing a frame at a time, the way they do.

He said the guy said he was the same as me. He said it like a fact he'd learned.

Four staples. He wouldn't let me come to the clinic, and he sat down on the couch afterward with his coat still on.

I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets for a while. My hands wouldn't hold still. That's the part I remember.

As far as they were concerned, whatever they were going to do to me was earned. Nobody had ever asked him what he'd done.

At seven that night I picked his phone up off the table and called her. All week my calls had rung once and gone to voicemail. His was a number she didn't have.

She answered on the fourth ring.

"Vivian."

Nothing.

"It's Ethan."

"I know who it is."

"We need to talk."

Nothing, long enough that I took the phone away from my face to check whether it had dropped.

"We were together three years. I'm not sorry about the three years. Is one conversation too much to ask?"

"Where."

"You pick."

"Larkspur. Eight." Then, in the voice she uses for anything she's already decided: "Come by yourself. If I see anybody else in that room I'm walking out of it."

"I wasn't going to bring anybody."

She said fine. I said fine. Hers was the fine you say to get somebody off the phone, and I think she was afraid of what I might do. I thought so then. I still think so.

Larkspur was where the banquet had been. It was where 355 was.

Tommy was on the couch with his head against the back of it and a dish towel full of ice he wasn't using.

"I'm coming with you."

"It's a club with a door and a list. There's a man at the door."

He looked at me for a while and didn't say anything, which is what he does when he's already decided.

I told him I'd be home by ten.

Author’s Note

The thing I keep going back to in this chapter is Ethan making a second account. He never wanted to speak — all week he wouldn't. He does it only so the reaction falls on his name instead of Tommy's, and it falls by nine o'clock anyway. Four sentences, ending on 'That's all.' Then Tommy's four staples, and the line about nobody ever asking what he'd done. Those two are carrying this for each other and neither of them will say it out loud.

If you'd like to read ahead, the chapters past this one are already up on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang