Luis died, so I’m grateful there are very few students around. I don’t think I could handle the stares, although I’m getting a lot better at that.
“How is Roberto?” she asks. I smile. She’s the only who calls him that and I think he secretly loves it.
I smile. “Rob’s wonderful. He’s been taking the kids fishing a lot.”
“They’ll love that,” she says.
I will never forget—and I’ve said this so much lately—the day Luis’s father, Rob, came to get me outside the court house. We had just found out so many things about Luis. That he had been forging my signature for years. That he signed for my inheritance, that he forged a power of attorney to act on my behalf so he could sell my mother’s house once enough years had passed, and he kept the money, too. He never spent it. All this time it’s been sitting in a term deposit account which he had opened, also in my name.
But there was one thing I never knew, which was that when Luis was young he set fire to a man, and killed him. No one knows the circumstances exactly, and he was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Because of his age, he went to juvenile detention for eight months. Somehow, my mother found out and tried to tell me. But everything I believed about that still stands: it may have been the truth, but the only reason she wanted me to know was to hurt me. To push me to end the relationship because she just didn’t like to see me happy. It would have made no difference if she’d told me. I would have believed with all my heart whatever Luis did back then had been involuntary.
But that day on the lawn outside the court house, Rob broke down and sobbed on my shoulder because he’d never told me about it. But we both thought he was good and kind, I said. You didn’t know either, what he was capable of. You thought he’d made a mistake, you didn’t want it to tarnish the rest of his life. I would have done the same for my kids.
But he put a hand over his eyes, and asked if I was going to forbid him from seeing his grandchildren now. “They all I have left,” he said.
“So come and live with us,” I replied. “They adore you. You’re on your own now. Apart from me, you’re the only family they have left. You’re the only family I have left.”
And he sobbed again on my shoulder, for a long time, but with relief, and some joy too, I think.
I’ve resigned from Locke Weidman, sold our house, and we’ve moved to Martha’s Vineyard, to a small but charming rented house. The money I got from the sale of our house is not enough to buy something over here and, until earlier this week, I didn’t know if I’d ever get the money in the term deposit account. I’m not sure I want it, anyway. And I certainly won’t be receiving the prize money. The Forrester Foundation has kindly allowed me more time to give them my notebooks, but I’d already decided to refuse the prize. I wanted to wait until the district attorney concluded his investigation to tell them formally, and explain that it was Alex who solved it, with a little help from me, and that the prize should be awarded to him posthumously. Maybe his parents will use it to create a scholarship in his memory, especially now that the medical examiner has officially ruled his death was suicide.
This came about because of his ex-girlfriend, a young woman called Lauren who used to go out with him when they were together at NYU. She’d broken it off but he had refused to accept it. After two years of behavior that bordered on stalking, he had emailed her to say he wanted to show her something, and after that, he promised he would no longer harass her. It was the last thing he was asking of her.
I don’t know the exact details of all this but, suffice to say, she flew over to visit him—without telling her parents, who would have forbidden it. When she arrived at the apartment, the door was not quite closed. He wasn’t there. She walked in, waited, and she left. The consensus was that he had hoped she would understand he had killed himself because of her, and he wanted her to know.