PART 8
Harriet came to see me the following month, on her own, without Roland, sitting across from me at the same kitchen table where I’d told my children everything.
“Elias’s office called me,” she said. “About the collections claim. About where it actually came from.”
I watched her face carefully, unsure exactly what I was about to see there.
“I didn’t know,” she said, and something in her voice cracked slightly on the words. “Roland never told me he’d sold off any piece of that old debt. I thought that whole situation had been closed for decades, the same as you did.”
“I believe you,” I said, and found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I actually meant it.
“I’m sorry,” Harriet said. “For what my husband’s mistakes ended up costing you, even indirectly, even all these years later. Silas paid off a debt that was never really his responsibility in the first place, quietly, for a decade, and never once told either of us he was still carrying the weight of it into his own final years.”
“He didn’t want either of you carrying that weight either,” I said. “I think that’s simply who your brother was. He’d rather absorb something painful himself than hand it to the people he loved.”
