The Spring Tide Rushed In Too Late for Us

Chapter 4 The Attorney General

The problem with threatening the attorney general's office is that it only works once, and only if you're serious.

I was serious. But I was also thirty-one years old with a checking account balance of four thousand one hundred dollars, a master's degree, and a fiancé who was no longer a fiancé, and I had just told a room full of people with more money than I would ever see that I was willing to go to war. I spent Thursday night in the motel making a list of what I had and what I didn't.

What I had: the wire confirmations, the Delaware registration, the December statement, the email copies, the timeline, and my own knowledge of the foundation's books.

What I didn't have: the foundation's bank statements for the years before I was hired, the original board minutes from the years when the scheme started, and any documentation that Northbrook Trust was connected to the family land deal.

What I also didn't have: my job, probably, by Friday at five.

I called the attorney general's charitable trust division at 8:30 on Friday morning. The person who answered was named Danielle Okafor and she listened to me for nine minutes without interrupting. When I finished, she asked me four questions: Did I have documentation? Was I willing to be identified? Had I signed filings I now believed to be false? And had I been threatened or offered anything in exchange for my silence?

I answered all four. The truth to the fourth question was that I had been offered nothing and threatened with nothing specific, which I understood even as I said it was a problem, because it meant there was no smoking g*n of retaliation, just the slow gravity of a family that expected me to fold.

"Send me what you have," Okafor said. "I'll review it. It's not a quick process. If it moves forward, it's months. And I want you to understand something: once you file, you can't unfile. Your name is on it. Your professional record is on it. These people will know it was you."

"I understand."

"Do you?" A pause. "Because most of the people who call me don't."

"I understand," I said. "Send me an email address."

I sent the files on Friday afternoon at 3:40. Then I sat in the motel room and waited, and at 4:55 my phone rang. It was Ellis.

"I need to talk to you in person," he said.

"Then come to the motel."

He was quiet. "Mara."

"You can find the address. It's the only one in town."

He came at 6:30. He stood in the doorway of the motel room for a moment looking at the two chairs and the little table and the bag on the bed, and his face did something complicated, and then he came in and sat down in the chair I didn't sit in.

"I'm going to close Pine Hollow," he said.

"Okay."

"And Harbor Point. All of it returned to the foundation. I told Corinne this afternoon."

"Okay."

"And I'm going to amend the filings. Last three years." He looked at me. "Is that enough?"

I looked at him. He was wearing the gray coat I had bought him two Christmases ago. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had spent Wednesday and Thursday and Friday sitting in rooms with lawyers, and who had decided, at the end, that this was the cheapest version of what he had to do.

"Why now?" I said.

"Because you were right."

"That's not why."

He was quiet.

"Ellis," I said. "You said to me on Tuesday that you'd been dealing with Grant family money since you were twenty-two, and you'd never had to explain yourself to anyone who wasn't a Grant." He looked at the carpet. "You didn't come after me when I left. You said if I walked out the door I wasn't coming back, and I walked out, and you didn't come after me. You were fine with losing me to keep the money quiet, and you're not closing Pine Hollow because I was right. You're closing it because I called the attorney general."

He didn't deny it. I have to give him that. He didn't deny it, and he didn't try to pretend, and I think that was the last honest thing he ever gave me.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Mara, I'm sorry. You have to know I never meant—"

"I know what you meant." I stood up. "You meant to get married. You meant to keep the house and the foundation and the family and me, all in the same pocket, and you meant for me to keep signing things and not ask questions. I don't think you ever sat down and decided to lie to me. I think you just didn't think I was a person who counted."

He stood up too. "That's not true."

"It is true. It's been true for three years. The only thing that changed is I found out."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said something that I hadn't expected, and that I have thought about many times since, because it was true and it was awful.

"What do you want me to do?" he said. "What's the version of this where you don't hate me?"

"I don't hate you," I said. "I don't feel anything about you anymore. That's what you did. That's the whole thing."

He left after that. He stood in the parking lot for a while, I could see him through the curtain, and then he drove away, and I sat down on the bed and I didn't cry, because I had already used up my crying, and I finished my list.

The list said this: I needed the Northbrook documentation. I needed the years before I was hired. And I needed to decide, before the attorney general's office decided for me, what I was going to be.