I stared at the drawing until the letters became blurred.
“Yes,” Nora said. “Only a little. But enough.”
I raised my eyes. “What does this have to do with my son not speaking for eight years?”
Nora clasped her hands together. “Because he was five. He heard adults fighting. Janice heard it too. The next day she died. A child can build a terrible story out of that.”
Nausea rolled through me.
Nora nodded once. “Did Zane ever tell you what really happened to your first house?”
Twenty-two years earlier, Zane and I had nearly lost that house during a financial crisis. I had been pregnant and terrified almost every day. Zane told me an anonymous investor had stepped in and given him time to repair the loan.
“I was the investor,” Nora said.
She passed me an old loan statement bearing our address.
Then she gave me something worse.
