Parekh looked completely thrown. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t know how long it would have worked. I didn’t try to attend classes. I didn’t want to risk getting caught. I just needed some time at the Project.”
Parekh was shaking his head. “Hannah, you’ve just . . . we’ve just told the court you’re enrol ed at Virginia Law. That’s the only reason you were al owed to question Pierce. Christ. If this was known, you’d be disbarred before you were ever admitted. You’d never be a lawyer.”
Now that it was al over Hannah felt only a sinking, drifting feeling. Whether or not she could return to school, whether or not she would ever be a lawyer, none of it seemed to matter. “I know. It seemed like it might be worth it.”
He was lost for words. He just stood there, thinking, for a long moment. “Do you plan on going back to Maine to graduate?”
“I suppose that’s up to you. You could report me.”
He started packing up his papers again and was silent for a time.
“Maybe some things are better left unsaid, for everyone’s sake. With al the fal out from this, there’l be enough headlines. Maybe no one wil think to look too closely at you.”
It surprised Hannah that Parekh was being so generous, but she thought it wasn’t likely she would get away with everything. There had been journalists in the courtroom. What had happened would be reported and she’d been front and center to al the drama. Someone was bound to ask an awkward question. She’d need more luck than she’d ever had in her life to get away with this, to be able to return quietly to Maine, without repercussions. If that was even what she wanted. “What happens next?” she asked. “With Pierce, I mean.”
“Burrel wil make some phone cal s. Engle won’t have this investigation long. This has been too public. They’l have to do it right.” Parekh had put the last of his papers into his bag. He glanced around the courtroom, as if committing it to memory, and turned to go.
“Robert.”
He turned back.
“Why do you do it? What’s in it for you?”
“Why do I do what? The Project, you mean?”
She nodded.
He sighed, like it was a question he had been asked too many times. “Because it has to be done. Because if you see something like this, and you can fix it, then it’s your mess to clean up. We’re talking about basic maintenance, Hannah. That’s what we’re doing. Our work is necessary, basic, bare minimum maintenance of the system.
If we don’t do it, the house fal s down around us. You asked what I get out of it? That’s the answer. A house I can live in. Somewhere safe to sleep at the end of the day.”
She let him go, but she thought about what he’d said for a long time.
Hannah
TWENTY-ONE
Hannah let herself quietly into the little house in Orono, Maine. Laura was waiting for her, by arrangement.
“Hannah.”
“Mom.”
Laura was standing near the fireplace, her hand on the back of the armchair. She was beautiful y dressed in tailored wool trousers and a silk blouse, her hair smooth and shiny. Hannah, in her travel-stained jeans and T-shirt, felt a familiar sense of inadequacy.
“I hope you are ready to apologize,” Laura said stiffly. “I don’t know what got into you, down there in Virginia. I don’t know how I’l ever forgive you.”
“Michael Dandridge is my father,” Hannah said quietly. She’d been anticipating this confrontation for days, had seen it, in her mind’s eye, painted in colors of high drama. But now that the moment had arrived, she felt curiously flat. Laura, on the other hand, was almost quivering with tension and pent-up energy. She must have known exactly what was coming, but she blanched as if Hannah had slapped her, and took a half-step backward. Hannah drew on reserves of strength that felt almost depleted and continued.
“You wrote that diary for me, to keep me in line. I’d started high school, I was getting older, I was beginning to see through you, wasn’t I? But I was stil sad, stil lonely. So you gave me a fairy tale.
A story I could cling to. Something that would explain you and excuse you. And my God, it worked, didn’t it? I just ate it up.”
Suddenly, Laura was fighting back tears. She held up a hand to Hannah and wheezed as she tried to take a breath. Her face tightened again in fear as she tried and failed to draw another breath.
“Hannah . . .” It was a gasp more than it was a word.
“Stop it, Mom,” Hannah said flatly.
It took a minute for Laura to realize that this time Hannah wasn’t going to run to the rescue. She dropped the outstretched hand, straightened up, and her expression changed to one of injured innocence. “How could you ever think that of me? That I could do that to you? How could you accuse me, after everything I’ve been through . . .”
Hannah saw the calculation in her mother’s eyes and wondered how she could ever have been blind to it.
“It’s not true,” Laura continued. “Not true. Whoever told you al of this is lying to you. Manipulating you.”
“You told me that my father was a murderer and a rapist. You let me go to Virginia to do everything I could to keep him in prison.
That’s sick. You’re a sick person.”
“I never lied to you. Michael Dandridge is not your father.”
“Jesus, Mom. Give it up. He’s a free man. You must know that by now. A DNA test would take a few weeks. What are you going to do when I come to you with the results?”
Laura shook her head in seeming distress. “If you did do a test it would only prove that I’ve been tel ing the truth. But . . . if by the smal est chance . . . I mean . . . I don’t think so, but the rape . . .”
Hannah felt sick. “Jesus, Mom.”
Laura looked back at her, mutinous.
“Why do you hate him so much? Because he left you? Or because he wasn’t as rich as you thought he was when you hooked up with him?”
Laura just shook her head.
“How much punishment would have been enough? You sent him to prison for eleven years. You almost got him kil ed.”
“I had nothing to do with him going to prison!” Laura flared up.
“What happened in Virginia had nothing to do with me.”
“Bul shit. I checked the files. The cops were looking for a scapegoat, sure, but they chose Michael for a reason. Those anonymous calls. Michael’s lawyers thought the cops made them up.
But I’ve checked. Those cal s came from Orono. They came from here. They came from you.”
For the longest moment Laura said nothing. Then she straightened up, and al the distress fel out of her expression. She smoothed her hair back from her face. “You can’t prove any of this,”
she said.
Al the breath went out of Hannah’s lungs. She stood stil for a moment, then forced herself to move, to walk toward her bedroom.
She pul ed a suitcase out from under her bed and started packing, throwing in clothes and books as fast as she could. Laura stood in the door and watched.