Chapter 14 - The Thing He Didn't Want to Hear
The morning after her message, Claire asked Daniel to sit beside her bed. "I need to say something," she told him. "Don't answer too fast."
"You hit Mallory," Claire said. "After I fell."
"I know."
"Emma saw."
"I know that too."
Claire looked at the bruised lines on his knuckles. "I was trying to keep her safe. I don't want her learning that we fix fear by hurting somebody back."
Daniel stared at the floor. "You think I don't hate what I did?"
"I think you want me to tell you it was all right because you loved us."
"I can't tell you that," Claire continued. "I love you. I still can't tell you that."
At his first counseling appointment, Daniel described the sound of the planter breaking and the terrible second after it, when he realized he could have killed his sister. The counselor asked what he had hoped the violence would accomplish.
"Make the scene stop," Daniel said.
"Did it?"
"No. It made another person need an ambulance."
"That's the part to remember when anger comes back. Not to shame yourself forever. To make a different choice."
Meanwhile Moreno interviewed the home health aide who had helped care for Helen during her final month. The aide remembered Mallory demanding that Helen sign a loan paper. Claire had stepped between them and told Mallory to leave.
"She wasn't yelling," the aide said. "Claire just kept saying, 'Your mother said no.' Mallory looked at her like she'd been slapped."
The aide also remembered a blue envelope Helen had placed inside her kitchen drawer.
"She sealed it herself," the aide said. "She told me the last page explained why she didn't want Mallory handling her money."
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Moreno asked whether anyone had seen the envelope afterward.
"Only Mallory," the aide answered. "She was alone in the house the night before the funeral."
