All under one roof

Chapter 33

All Under One Roof

Ethan arrived forty minutes after them.

Judith heard the car on the gravel before she saw him. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea Grace had pressed into her hands the moment she walked through the door. Dan was across from her doing the same thing. Neither of them had said much since coming inside. They were both just sitting with the quiet for the first time in hours letting it settle around them.

Grace appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Another car outside.”

Dan stood up immediately.

“It is Ethan,” Judith said without moving.

She did not know how she knew. She just did.

Dan sat back down.

The front door opened a minute later and Ethan walked into the kitchen still in his coat from last night, the folder under his arm, his face carrying the particular tiredness of a man who had not slept and was not going to stop moving long enough to feel it.

He looked at both of them at the table.

“Nobody followed me,” he said.

“Good,” Dan said.

Grace appeared behind him. “Sit down. I will get you tea.”

Ethan looked at Grace the way people look at someone who reminds them of something safe from a long time ago. He sat down without arguing.

Grace put a cup in front of him and disappeared back toward the stove.

The three of them sat around the table. The folder between them. Outside through the kitchen window the garden was visible and somewhere out there Lily was on the swing, her voice carrying back to the house every few seconds.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then Ethan put his hand in his jacket pocket and placed the USB drive on the table beside the folder.

“We need to talk about what comes next,” he said.

“We know,” Dan said.

Ethan looked at Judith. “Sarah Okafor called you.”

“Yes,” Judith said. “They are pushing a counter story. Saying I fabricated the recording.”

“I know. Elena sent me the same information twenty minutes ago.” He wrapped both hands around the tea cup. “It will not hold. The financial records are too detailed to have been fabricated and Robert’s statement this morning gives the police something solid to work with. But Whitmore is going to keep pushing it because the longer he keeps the story confused the more time he buys himself.”

“Time to do what,” Dan asked.

“Disappear,” Ethan said. “Move his money. Close the accounts. Make himself as clean as possible before the investigation gets to him directly.” He paused. “Which means we cannot give him that time.”

“What do you want to do,” Judith said.

Ethan looked at her. “There is a press conference. Today. This afternoon if we can arrange it. Not a newspaper story. Not an anonymous source. You. Me. Dan. In front of cameras with Robert Ashby beside us and everything we have laid out clearly.” He held her gaze. “Whitmore can discredit a recording. He can discredit a journalist. He cannot discredit all of us standing together saying the same thing in public.”

The kitchen was quiet.

Dan looked at the table. Then at Ethan. “You are asking us to put our faces on this completely.”

“Yes,” Ethan said.

“If it goes wrong—”

“It will not go wrong,” Ethan said. “We have the recording. We have the financial records. We have Robert’s statement and we have the camera footage of our father threatening Judith’s daughter on a public street this morning.” He looked at Dan steadily. “What exactly does he have against that.”

Dan was quiet.

“A fabricated counter story and a very expensive lawyer,” Judith said.

“Yes,” Ethan said. “And neither of those things survives a press conference.”

Grace came back to the table and refilled all three cups without being asked. She looked at each of their faces briefly then went back to the stove without a word. She had clearly been in rooms where serious things were being decided before and knew exactly how to exist in one without disturbing it.

Judith looked at the window.

Lily’s voice came through again. Laughing at something. Talking to herself the way she did when she was happy and did not need anyone else to complete the moment.

“If we do this,” Judith said quietly. “My name is going to be everywhere. My face. My family. Everything.”

“Yes,” Ethan said.

“My mother is going to see it.”

“Yes.”

Judith looked at the table. She thought about her mother in that hospital bed asking if she was eating properly. About the years her mother had spent not knowing the full truth about anything. About the contract and Lilly and Dan and all of it.

Her mother was going to find out everything today.

“Okay,” she said.

Both brothers looked at her.

“Okay,” she said again. More firmly this time. “We do the press conference. This afternoon.” She looked at Ethan. “Call Robert. Tell him we need a location and we need it within three hours.”

Ethan picked up his phone.

“And someone needs to call my mother,” Judith said. “Before she sees anything on the news. She hears it from me first.”

“I will sit with you when you call her,” Dan said.

She looked at him. “You do not have to.”

“I know,” he said. “I want to.”

Ethan was already on the phone to Robert, his voice low and quick, the folder open in front of him again. Dan had his own phone out checking something. The kitchen felt different from five minutes ago. Purposeful. Like a room where a decision had just been made and everybody in it knew there was no taking it back.

The back door opened and Lily came running in with grass on her knees and her cheeks red from the cold.

She stopped when she saw Ethan.

“You came,” she said.

“I came,” Ethan said.

Lily looked at him for a moment. Then she climbed up onto the chair beside him and leaned against his arm and looked at the folder on the table with great seriousness.

“Are those important papers,” she asked.

“Very important,” Ethan said.

Lily nodded slowly like she understood completely.

“Okay,” she said. “I will be quiet then.”

Nobody laughed. But the mood in the room lifted just slightly in the way it only could when a child said exactly the right thing without knowing it.

Grace appeared with a plate of biscuits and set them in the middle of the table.

Outside the garden was still and green and very far from London.