PART 9
The collections claim, once Elias’s office formally responded with the original 1986 satisfaction of debt filing, was dropped within six weeks, exactly as he’d predicted it would be. It had never had real legal standing to begin with; it had only ever needed the right documentation to fall apart entirely.
Roland, for his part, never reached out to me directly, though Harriet told me, months later, that the two of them had spent a long, difficult stretch working through exactly how much he’d kept hidden from her over the years, not just the old debt sale, but a pattern of similar decisions stretching back further than either of them had ever discussed openly before.
I still live in the house Silas and I raised our children in, on Larkin Street in Thistlewick, though I finally used a portion of the trust last spring to fix the roof he’d been quietly patching himself for the better part of a decade, too stubborn to spend money on it while there was still an old debt hanging over both of us that neither of us, until eighteen months before he died, fully understood the shape of.
I visit the cabin on Lake Aldermoor sometimes now too, at Harriet’s invitation, sitting on the same dock where Silas used to fish every summer morning before the rest of the family woke up.
