The Deposit Slip

38





Jared had rescheduled his return home. By the time he’d placed Cory on the train it was impossible to make his flight anyway, so what was the hurry? Another day or two would make no difference in the outcome of the case.

He stayed overnight at Cory’s hostel, then spent the following day roaming Athens. Not as a tourist, but just walking. He could have been wandering the streets of Minneapolis for all he noticed his surroundings.

His thoughts were unmanageable and time slid away. He felt untethered. Whatever spirits had driven him the past thirteen years—through college and law school, then churning out the billable hours and trials at Paisley—in the last twenty-four hours, they had deserted him.

Early that evening, he found himself on the Areopagus once again, not sure how he’d gotten there. The tour groups had left, and only straggling visitors sat atop the hill, waiting, Jared realized, for the sun to set. He chose a cold and solitary rock and sat down.

He’d found the critical witness to the deposit—the only living witness who would tell the truth about that evening—and he’d let her go. As a result, he’d likely lost the case. In the process, he’d squandered his financial comeback. And lost Jessie.

Quite a scorecard. If that was all he was meant to accomplish in this case, what was he doing here, half the world away from home, watching a sunset among strangers? What could he possibly rescue from this debacle?

The sun was nearly gone now, just a layer of orange clinging to the horizon. Staring at the image, Jared’s thoughts turned toward his father and Mrs. Huddleston’s still unanswered question—why Samuel chose to live amidst that rubble of the destruction he’d caused.

He still had no good answer. But, as he had at the hostel, Jared wondered if maybe the time had come to stop persecuting the man. It was obvious that the town of Ashley was doing enough of that anyway.

Part of Jared cried back that his father didn’t deserve absolution, regardless of whether he’d changed. Then again, he felt the whisper of a notion that pardoning the man was not about what his father deserved, but about what Jared needed to do.

Besides, he thought as he picked up a pebble and threw it down into the hollow alongside the rocks, after he’d come so close to placing Cory in danger to win the lawsuit, his father’s crimes no longer seemed so unimaginable—or unforgivable.