The Good Liar(16)

“So what do I do? How do I get unstuck?”

“You do the work.”

“That sounds . . . tiring.”

“I never said it was going to be easy.”



After Linda, I pull myself together and make it to my Compensation Committee meeting early. There wasn’t any traffic for once, but also, perhaps things can change. It would be nice to think so, if even for a moment.

The Compensation Committee meets as needed to reconsider the cases the retired judge we’ve hired to make the initial determination rejects. Given the importance of our decisions, these meetings are always a challenge, and I know already that today’s meeting is going to be harder than most.

“Shall we discuss the Ring case?” Franny asks when we’ve assembled around the table. She speaks in a Midwestern twang, an accent she tries to cover up, though I’ve told her time and again she doesn’t need to. She’s wearing a gray wool blazer I helped her pick out a few weeks ago from the sale rack at J.Crew. It strikes me how different the Franny of today is from the one I met so many months ago. Better hair, better clothes, twenty pounds shed, but also, she has much more confidence and assurance. She’s found her purpose and her sense of place. She’s more at home here than I am. “Okay with you, Cecily?”

“Of course.”

We’re sitting at opposite ends of a long glass table in the second conference room in the Initiative’s offices. The others on the committee, two men whose wives died in the building, a twenty-three-year-old girl who lost her father and whose mother is long dead of cancer, and Tanya Simpson, the committee’s secretary, fill up the space between us.

“I know this will be difficult for some of you,” Franny says, meaning mostly me, I suppose, and her. “But it’s an important part of the process.”

I voted against Franny’s “process” when she proposed it six months ago, when we first gathered to set out the guidelines we wanted to follow. Her idea was that for a family to get compensation, they’d generally need a DNA match to something—nobody liked to use the words “flesh,” “blood,” “bone”—found in the wreckage that’s still being sifted through, even now. I understood why she proposed it, but I couldn’t bring myself to support a measure that would leave some people without the help I’d received. Especially because I’d gotten my check before the process was in place.

In the beginning, when the money was rolling in from the celebrity fund-raisers and they wanted a photo op to keep it coming, they’d turned to me, my family, put us on a dais, and handed us a big check with more zeros on it than I could believe. Donate today, and every family can have this future . . . But when the donations slowed down and the complaints started, the judge had been brought in and the committee was created above him to hear appeals and special cases. I owed it to all the people who didn’t get the opportunity I did to do my best to make sure that if their claim was denied, it was for a valid reason.

When the Rings’ claim was turned down because they couldn’t match Franny or the girls’ DNA to anything in the wreckage, I’d been the one to console Franny when she wept about what she’d done. It was a stupid rule, stupid. So stupid, she said over and over until I was worried she’d gone into some sort of autistic trance. I had to hand it to Franny, though, when she’d pulled herself together—a shot of whiskey had done it—she hadn’t given up on the idea that the decision could be reversed. And here we are today, with that possibility.

“What’s the new evidence?” Jenny, the twenty-three-year-old, asks. Her thin limbs concern me. I didn’t know her before, so it’s possible that she’s naturally this skinny, this almost-see-through. But she doesn’t have anyone looking out for her anymore, so I feel responsible, as if I should paint her back in, make sure she’s visible.

“It’s the mug,” Franny says, her voice wavering.

A few weeks ago, the search team found a coffee mug in pristine condition. It seemed impossible that the explosion and the fire and everything else hadn’t shattered it into a million pieces, but like the pottery that survived Pompeii, there it was, covered in dust but intact.

It wasn’t only its survival that was so arresting. Other whole things had been found—a desk, phones, paintings, many bodies, including Tom’s. It was the fact that it was a mug that obviously belonged to someone, one of those mugs kids make for their mothers at school, with WE HEART MOM on one side and her picture on the other. And on the rim, the thing that made it eligible for consideration: lipstick that had been left—presumably—by its last user. The media had become obsessed with this mug, debating its provenance, wondering what we were going to do with it, and while they weren’t allowed in this meeting, it wouldn’t be long before the results of it became known, analyzed, dissected.

Franny puts a white square box on the table. It looks like a cake box, something that generally houses something delicious, something perfectly frosted rather than tragic. None of us has seen the mug in person, only photographs, though it still was a blow when I caught sight of it on the nightly news. I remember when her children gave her this mug, almost two years ago, on Valentine’s Day.

Franny opens the box, then puts on a pair of surgeon’s gloves, snapping them into place with practiced ease.

“Is that necessary?” one of the men asks. Robert’s always been hostile to Franny and only slightly less so to me. He’s not used to being anything other than in charge is my take on the matter, so he has to lash out whenever he feels someone else’s authority. “It’s already been through testing.”