Chapter 2
I did not know he had been working on it. I knew only that I had reached the end of a patience I had been building for twelve years, and that the end had arrived on a Tuesday evening in November when I made the mistake of telling my mother, in front of Arthur, that I had spoken with a lawyer in Richmond about the scholarship money that had been declined on my behalf without my signature on any document authorizing the declination.
Arthur Sterling was a judge. He understood, better than anyone, what an unsigned authorization meant.
He waited until my mother left the room.
The hallway of the Sterling estate was white marble and crystal chandelier, the kind of space that announces money before it announces anything else, and I was standing at the base of the staircase when Arthur came out of his study with his jacket off and his watch still on his wrist and a leather belt in his right hand that he held with the specific looseness of a man who wants you to see what he is holding without being certain of its exact purpose, because uncertainty is its own form of control.
"Call anyone you want," he said.
He said it the way he said things in his courtroom, with the patient authority of someone who knows the outcome before the proceeding begins. He crossed the hallway and stood over me, the belt hanging from his hand, and I sat down on the floor because my legs made that decision before I did, and I looked up at him and thought about twelve years of architecture and the room with no doors and the scholarship and the job in Richmond and my mother standing in the living room doorway with both hands pressed against her mouth.
Julian was in the study entrance. Julian Sterling, thirty-one years old, Arthur's son from his first marriage, the man who had grown up watching his father operate and had absorbed the lesson completely. Julian had a dish towel pressed to his nose from an altercation earlier in the evening that I will not detail here except to say that I had not thrown the first thing and I had not thrown him and I had not done anything that the surveillance system in the hallway would not confirm when someone with access to it decided to look. Julian watched his father stand over me with the specific expression of a man who believes the situation is resolved.
"No one is coming to save you," Arthur said.
He leaned closer when he said it, close enough that I could smell the whiskey that had been informing his confidence since before dinner. His voice was low and certain, the voice of a man who has made assessments like this before and found them accurate, and I looked at him for a long moment and thought about what I knew that he did not know.
My hand found my phone on the marble floor beside me. It had fallen during the earlier part of the evening and the screen was cracked in the lower corner but the call function was intact, which was the only function I needed. I kept my eyes on Arthur while I found the number by memory, because looking at the phone would have told him what I was doing.
I raised it to my ear.
It rang once.
May you like
A voice answered that I had been hearing on phone calls for two years and in person twice and that I knew, in the particular way you know the voices of people who made you before you could make yourself, with a certainty that went below language.
"Dad," I said. My voice cracked on the word and I let it crack because there was no point in performing composure I did not have. "Please save me."
