Chapter 12: Gwen Under Oath
Civil deposition took Gwen out of the coastal wind and into a room with a stenographer and a pitcher of water she did not drink.
I watched by video from Patel’s office, muted, Mark’s hand near mine without touching. Gwen looked smaller than the voice on the old tape. She admitted debts. She admitted anger. She denied hiring men. She denied a bridge. She cried when Clara’s name was spoken and I could not tell whether the tears were weather or craft. Patel placed the pier PI note on the table. Gwen’s eyes flicked. The flick was not nothing.
Outside the frame of the camera, Ruiz’s team continued the other track. The dead driver’s storage unit, long auctioned, had a buyer who had kept a box of “junk papers.” Among them: a scratched notebook page with a date near the disappearance and the words bridge job – sister pays. Handwriting analysis would fight. The page still entered the universe of things that existed.
After the deposition Mark and I sat in a diner and ordered eggs neither of us finished. “If she did it,” Mark said carefully, “what do you want?”
May you like
“I want the record to stop calling my wife careless on a wet road,” I said. “I want my children’s names spoken in a room where someone has to answer. I do not expect the ocean to give them back.”
He nodded. He was the age my son would have been, almost. The math hurt in both directions. I paid for the eggs. Outside, a bus sighed at the curb. Life insisted on its ordinary noises. I was learning to let them in without calling them betrayal.
