She was not.
“I need help, Trevor,” she said.
“I’m doing my best.”
“No,” she replied, and there was no anger in it. That made it worse. “You’re visiting us. You come home, but you don’t arrive.”
I remember that sentence now because it was the last honest warning she gave me.
At the time, I kissed her forehead and said, “Work is just busy.”
Hannah looked at me for a long while.
Then she said, “I know.”
Those two words should have frightened me.
They did not.
A guilty man often mistakes a woman’s silence for stupidity. I mistook Hannah’s quiet for weakness. I thought she was too tired to notice the cologne on my shirt, too overwhelmed to check bank statements, too gentle to hire an attorney, too loving to leave.
I had confused grace with blindness.
