The Red Hunter(89)

I was a teenager the last time I stepped on that bridge. Ten years later, I didn’t feel like I’d come very far. I was still stuck in that night in so many ways.

They’d hate me, Paul had said, for how I’ve failed you.

He hadn’t failed me. He’d taken me in, took care of me with as much love as any parent. He’d helped with homework, found help when things got beyond him. He paid for my education.

“How?” I’d asked him when I first started to understand the size of the expense. I didn’t know how much he had saved or what kind of pension he had. But I didn’t think it was much, not enough to cover tuition at NYU and still live. “How are you affording this?”

It was a Sunday; I discovered the bill from the university sitting on top of a stack of others. Prior to that, I hadn’t even thought about it. In my house, it wasn’t if I went to college, it was where. There was no talk about how it would get paid for. I would strive to get into the best possible school and, somehow, it would get managed. My parents didn’t talk about money.

“Your mother had some money saved,” he said that day. “When you graduate, whatever is left will go to you. That’s what she wanted.”

“How much?”

He went into the bedroom and came back with an envelope, a statement that had been opened and stuffed back in the envelope with my name on it. He’d scrawled a user name and password in blue ink.

“She wanted you to go to college,” he said. “She worried that if you knew there was money, you wouldn’t go to school.”

I lifted the statement out and stared at the numbers. The balance, the large withdrawals that coincided with tuition payments, money I had needed for books, room and board, more than $60,000 a year. There was a little more than $300,000 still.

“You’ll need another hundred fifty or more to finish school,” he said. “But the rest is yours. Don’t get your head turned. It’s a head start. It’s not as much money as it seems.”

There was something wrenching my stomach.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Where did she get this money?”

My parents did not have money. They didn’t talk about it, but I knew we weren’t rich. My mother clipped coupons, searched online for bargains. We got our books from the library, bought what was on sale, not the latest styles. The answer to almost everything I wanted was no or maybe later. And I knew that it hurt her to say no; she wanted me to have everything I wanted, what the other girls had.

“It was an inheritance from her grandmother,” he said. “She added to it when she could. You know how she was. Frugal. Then there was the death benefit, pension, life insurance, and the sale of your parents’ stuff.”

It didn’t ring true.

“She told you about it?” I asked.

He nodded, but his face looked gray, his expression strained. It was a look he got when he talked about my parents. Grief, anger, something else I couldn’t name.

“I was your legal guardian should anything happen to them,” he said. “That was always known. We talked about you, your future, what she—what they—wanted for you.”

“But I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought there was debt. That my dad was in trouble.”

He blinked at me. “Who told you that?”

“I heard you and Boz talking, a long time ago,” I said. “That’s why they thought—” I couldn’t finish.

That my dad was a dirty cop, that he robbed drug dealers and stole their money, that they came looking, that he let them kill my mother, torture me, kill him rather than say where it was hidden. I still couldn’t put my lips around those words in front of him, even though I had been talking to Mike. Even though I had grown strong enough, brave enough to ask questions, to look for answers.

“It’s not true,” he said. “What they thought. There’s no evidence. Your dad—he was a good man. He wasn’t good with money. But he was a good man.”

“If they were in trouble,” I said. “Why didn’t she use this money to pay the bills?”

“Because,” he said. “It was money she’d saved for you. She didn’t want to compromise your future because of their mistakes.”

“She told you that?”

He nodded, looked down at a hand he had laid down flat on the table.

“So you knew about the money, but my dad didn’t?”

He didn’t answer, didn’t look at me. Then, “Your mother confided in me sometimes. Your dad wasn’t always easy, and your mother and I were friends. But I didn’t know about the debt until after they were gone. If I had, I’d have helped them.”

I folded up the statement.

“That money is in an education trust,” he said. “So, again, it can only be used for those costs until you graduate. Then it belongs to you.”

“I’ll give it to you,” I said. “When I graduate.”

“You will not,” he said, turning those icy eyes on me. He reached for my hand, and I laced my fingers through his.

“You deserve it,” I told him. “How much have you spent on me?”

He bowed his head, and when he looked at me again, his eyes glistened.

“Every second you have been in my life is a blessing, Zoey,” he told me. Color came up his neck. “You’re the very best of both of them. Every time I look at you, I see her beauty, his goodness, her warmth, his strength. I’m the one who owes you.”