Candace let out a breath she'd been holding, I think, for about fifty years.
"Does he know?" she said. "What I did?"
"He knows you're afraid of him," I said. "He's always known that. He knew it the first day." I put her tea in front of her. "Dogs like him are trained to notice fear. It's what they look for. My husband used to say that a good patrol dog can tell the difference between a man who's scared and a man who's guilty, and that most of the time they're the same man."
She laughed, a short wet sound, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
She didn't ask me to drop the suit. I'd expected her to. I'd been rehearsing, for a week, what I'd say when she did. Instead she told me she'd listed her house. She said the market had finally come back, the way she'd always told herself it would, and that she'd have enough after the mortgage to pay the restitution and most of whatever a court decided she owed me, and that she was moving to her sister's in Dayton, and that she was going to see a therapist about the dogs and about some other things. She said she didn't expect me to forgive her and wasn't asking me to. She said she wanted to tell me to my face that she was sorry, without a casserole.
Then she put an envelope on the table. "That's from me, not my lawyer," she said. "You don't have to open it now. You don't have to open it ever."
She finished her tea. At the door, she pulled the hood of the rain shell up over her hair, and looked down at Rook, who had followed us to the hall, and very slowly, very carefully, she held her hand out to him, palm down, and he touched his nose to it.
Then she went down my walk in the rain.
XIV.
It's May now. The pool opened on Memorial Day weekend with fresh white plaster and a new main drain, paid for, Neville Albers informed the membership in a cheerful email, out of a fully restored reserve fund. The special election was in April. I'm the treasurer. I read every statement, every month, line by line, with a yellow highlighter, and I bring them to every meeting and pass them around, and people have stopped making fun of me for it, mostly.