In the shower, I turned the water as hot as I could bear. I lifted my face to the nozzle, let the water beat upon me. I didn't hear the shower door open. I felt the draft, and then I felt her hands. They settled on my back like autumn leaves. I might have flinched.

"Shhh," Barbara said gently. "Be still." I started to turn. "Don't turn around," she said.

She reached around me and wet her hands in the shower. She ran the soap between them and replaced it on the soap dish. Then she put her hands on my chest, which grew slick beneath them. She must have felt my resistance, in my tense muscles, in my unyielding posture-perhaps in the rigidity of my silence. Yet she chose to ignore it, and her hands lathered a path from my chest to my stomach. She molded herself against my back and I felt the firm press of her flesh against my own. Water cascaded across my shoulders, forced its path down the joining of our bodies, and she opened herself to it, let it wet her. She slithered against me, insinuated her slender leg between my own. And her hands worked down to a place where in the past they had always been welcome.

"Barbara." My voice was an intruder. Her fingers worked harder, as if persistence alone could make me want the absolution she thought was in her power to offer.

"Just let me do this," she said.

I did not want to hurt her. I wanted nothing to do with her at all. "Barbara," I said again, more insistently this time. I reached for her fingers. She pulled me around to face her.

"I can do this, Work."

The front of her hair was wet, the back still dry, and her face was so serious that I almost laughed; yet there was desperation in her eyes, as if this was all she had left to offer and she knew it. For a moment, I did not know what to say, and in that moment she lowered herself to her knees.

"For God's sake, Barbara." I could not keep the disgust out of my voice, and I pushed roughly past her; I opened the door and grabbed my towel. Steam followed me out, along with a dread silence. The water stopped. I did not look back. When Barbara stepped out next to me, she didn't bother to cover herself. She ignored the water that ran into her eyes and pooled on the floor; and I ignored her until I knew she would not simply walk away. So I turned and faced her, my towel heavy with cooling damp, my heart just heavy.

"My life's falling apart, too," she said. But it wasn't sadness I saw in her eyes. It was anger.

CHAPTER 32.

In my closet I found a row of empty hangers, which was fine. I would never wear a suit again; I was pretty sure of that. I pulled on a pair of jeans, an old button-down shirt, and running shoes that I'd worn out years ago. On the top shelf was a battered, disreputable baseball cap, and I put that on, too.

I found Barbara in the kitchen. She was making a pot of coffee; her robe was cinched tight.

"What can I do to make it right?" she asked. "I want it to be right with us, Work. So just tell me."

A week before, I would have wavered and broken. I'd have told her that I loved her and that everything would be all right. Part of me would have believed it, but the rest of me would have screamed its thin scream.

"I don't love you, Barbara. I don't think I ever did." She opened her mouth, but I continued before she could speak. "You don't love me, either. Maybe you think you do, but you don't. Let's not pretend anymore. It's over."

"Just like that," she said. "You say so and it's over." Her anger was obvious, but it may have been ego.

"We've been on a downward spiral for years."

"I'm not giving you a divorce. We've been through too much. You owe me."

"'Owe you'?"

"That's right."

"I don't need your agreement, Barbara; I don't even need cause. All it takes is a year's separation."

"You need me. You won't make it in this town without me."

I shook my head. "You might be surprised at how little I need." But she ignored me and moved across the kitchen floor on feet that were invisible beneath the hem of her robe.

"We have our problems, Work, but we're a team. We can deal with anything."

She reached for me.

"Don't touch me," I said.

She allowed her hands to drop, but they did so slowly. She looked up at me, and already she seemed to be retreating.

"Okay, Work. If that's what you want. I won't fight you. I'll even act civilized. That's what you want, isn't it, a dry, emotionless parting? A clean break. So that you can get on with your new life and I can try to figure what mine will be. Right?"

"My new life might well be prison, Barbara. This may be the biggest favor I've ever done for you."

"You won't go to prison," she said, but I merely shrugged.

"I'll do the best I can for you, moneywise; you won't have to fight me."

Barbara laughed, and I saw some of the old bitterness steal into her eyes. "You don't make enough money now, Work. You never have, not even when Ezra was alive, and nobody made money the way he did."

Her words rang in my head, and something clicked. "What did you just say?"

"You heard me." She turned away, picked up a pack of cigarettes, and lit one. I didn't know when she had started smoking again. She was in college the last time I saw a cigarette between her lips, but this one danced in her mouth as she spoke. "You could barely make it with Ezra looking out for you. As it is, I don't know a single lawyer in town who makes less money than you do." She blew smoke at the ceiling. "So keep your empty promises. I know what they're worth."

But that wasn't what struck me.

Making money's not the same as having it. Hank's words. Hank's words.

"Would you say that Ezra liked making money?" I asked. "Or did he like having it?"

"What are you talking about, Work? What does any of that matter? He's dead. Our marriage is dead."

But I was onto something. The pieces weren't in place, but something was there and I couldn't let go of it. "Money, Barbara. The achievement of it or the possession of it? Which was more important?"

She blew out more smoke and shrugged, as if nothing mattered anymore. "Having it," she said. "He didn't care about working for it. It was a tool."

She was right. He depended on it. He could use it, and suddenly I knew. Not the exact combination to his safe, but I knew where to find it. And just like that, opening the old man's safe became the most important thing in my world. It was something I had to do, and I knew how to do it.

I've got to go," I said. I put my hand on her arm and she did not flinch away. "I'm sorry, Barbara."

She nodded and looked at the floor, more smoke writhing from her lips.

"We'll talk more later," I said, and picked up the keys. I stopped at the garage door and looked back. I expected her to appear different somehow, but she didn't. She looked as she always had. My hand was on the door when her voice stopped me a final time.

"One question," she said.

"What?"

"What about your alibi?" she asked. "Aren't you worried about losing your alibi?"

For an instant, our eyes locked. She let her shutters drop, and I saw into the depths of her. That's when I knew that she knew. She'd known all along; so I said the words, and with their passing, a weight seemed to fall away, and in that instant even Barbara was untainted.

"You were never my alibi, Barbara. We both know that."

She nodded slightly, and this time the tears came.

"There was a time I would have killed for you," she said, and looked back up. "What was one little lie?"

The tears came faster, and her shoulders trembled as if finally exhausted by some invisible load. "Are you going to be okay?" I asked.

"We do what we need to do, right? That's what survival is all about."

"It's just a question of getting to the point where it has to be done. That's why we'll both be okay. Maybe we can part as friends."

She sniffed loudly, and laughed. She wiped at her eyes. "Wouldn't that be something?"

"It would," I agreed. "Listen, I'll be at the office. I won't be long. When I get back, we'll talk some more."

"What are you going to the office for?" she asked.

"Nothing, really. I just figured something out."

She gestured at the pain-filled space around us: the room, the house, maybe the entirety of our lives together. "More important than this?" she asked.

"No," I replied, lying. "Of course not."

"Then don't leave," she said.

"It's just life, Barbara, and it gets messy. Not everything works out the way you want."

"It does if you want it badly enough."

"Only sometimes," I said. Then I left, closing the door on the life behind me. I started the car and turned around. The children were still in the park, tiny flashes of color as they ran and screamed. I turned off the radio, put the car in drive, and then I saw Barbara in the garage. She watched me in utter stillness, and for an instant she did look different. But then she waved at me to wait and ran light-footed to the window.

"Don't go," she said. "I don't want it to end like this."

"I've got to."

"Damn it, Work. What's so important?"

"Nothing," I said. "Nothing that concerns you."

She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned over as if her stomach hurt. "It's going to end badly. I know it will." Her eyes grew distant. She looked down at the park, as if the sight of the children affected her, too. "Ten years of our lives, and it'll all be wasted. Just gone."

"People move on every day, Barbara. We're no different."

"That's why it never could have worked," she said, and I heard blame in her voice. She looked down at me. "You never wanted to be special, and there was nothing I could do to make you want that. You were so ready to be satisfied. You took the scraps from Ezra's table and thought you had a banquet."

"Ezra was chained to that table. He was no happier than I was."

"Yes, he was. He took what he wanted and took pleasure in taking it. He was a man that way."

"Are you trying to hurt me?" I asked. "Because this is unpleasant enough as it is."

Barbara smacked her hand on the top of the car. "And you think it's pleasant for me? It's not."

I looked away from her then, turned my eyes down the hill to the flashes of color that stained the dark green grass. Suddenly, I wanted to be away from this place, but something remained to be said. So I said it.

"Do you know what our problem is, Barbara? You never knew me. You saw what you wanted to see. A young lawyer from a rich family, with a near-famous father, and you assumed you knew me. Who I was. What I wanted. What I cared about. You married a stranger, and you tried to turn him into someone that you recognized. For ten years, you beat me down, and I let you do it; but I could never be what you wanted. So you grew frustrated and bitter, and I grew despondent. I hid from myself, as if it would all just go away, and that makes me as bad as you. We married for the wrong reasons, a common-enough mistake, and if I'd been man enough, I would have ended it years ago."

Barbara's lips twisted. "Your self-righteousness makes me ill," she said. "You're no better than me."

"I don't pretend to be."

"Just go," she said. "You're right. It's over. So just go."

"I'm sorry, Barbara."

"Save your fucking sympathy," she said, and walked back to the house.

I let her go, and for that moment I seemed to float; but the absence of pain can pass as pleasure for only so long, and I still had things to do. I pointed her car toward the office.

A psychiatrist could probably explain my obsession with opening Ezra's safe. In tearing down his last secret, I was replacing him, assuming his power. Or struggling to understand him. To outdo him. Truthfully, it was nothing that complicated. I'd worked in that building for ten years, thirteen if you counted the summer jobs during law school. During that time, my father had made no reference to the safe. We were family. We were partners. He shouldn't have kept secrets from me. Yes, I was curious, but more than that I was disturbed; and some part of me believed that tearing down this secret would make my father known to me once and for all. Our truest self is often the person we allow no one else to see-who we are when we are alone. In the real world, we edit. We compromise and prevaricate.

I wanted to see the man behind the curtain.

For what I'd realized was this, and I should have seen it sooner: Ezra cared about having money; it was the curse of growing up dirt-poor. Money bought food. Money fixed the roof. Having it meant survival. So the million-dollar jury award that made him famous and ultimately rich was not the most important thing after all. I'd been wrong about that. Because big-dollar jury verdicts are appealed, and even if they're not, nobody cuts a check the day of the verdict. Making money versus having money. In that equation, only one date matters: the day you deposit the check.

I didn't know what date that was, but there would be records. Somewhere in the office was a deposit record showing a cash infusion of $333,333.33, exactly one-third of one million dollars. By the time he died, a few hundred grand amounted to chump change, but that was the money that had made him. I should have seen it.

I parked in back and looked up at the tall, narrow building. Already I felt like a stranger there, and Barbara's words echoed in my mind: Ten years . . . wasted. Just gone. Ten years . . . wasted. Just gone.

I got out of the car. No one was around, but in the distance I heard sirens, and I thought of Mills. She was looking at Ezra's gun, slapping her open palms against the hard muscles of her thighs. She would find the anonymous caller and I would be identified. I would be arrested, tried, and convicted. All I had was Hank, and the faded hope that Vanessa Stolen could save both body and soul.

Inside, the office was musty, as if weeks or months had passed since last I'd been there. Shadows stretched through slatted blinds, and dust hung in the alternating bars of light. The place was silent and unwelcoming, as if my thoughts had betrayed me. I did not belong. That was the message. The building knew.

I locked the door behind me, moved down the short hall and into the main reception area. Sound was muffled; I pushed through air that felt like water, and accepted that much of what I felt was formless dread. I tried to shake it off.

The cops had seized my computers, so I went down the narrow, creaking staircase to the basement, where boxes rose in jagged mounds and a single bare bulb dangled as if from a gibbet. The place was packed with old case files, tax records, and bank statements. I saw broken furniture, an exercise machine that dated to the seventies, and eight different golf bags. It was a mess, and the oldest stuff was in the very back. I waded through it, trying to figure out the system. The boxes were stacked haphazardly but were grouped together by dates. So the files from any given year would be found together, buried in a mass grave.

I located what I thought would be the right year and started tearing open boxes. There was no order to it at all, which surprised me. Ezra had always been meticulous in his affairs. Files numbered in the thousands, crushed into misshapen cardboard cartons. And inside the larger boxes I found smaller containers holding monthly calendars, receipts, message slips, dried-out pens, and paper clips. There were half-used legal pads and discarded Rolodex cards. It was as if Ezra had emptied his desk every year and then started fresh with new supplies. I opened his day planner for December, saw the small exclamation point he'd placed on December 31, and realized then why this was so different. It was a finished year, and like so much of his past, Ezra had boxed it away to be forgotten. Ezra had always cared about the future. Everything else was one step above refuse.

I found what I was looking for in the bottom of the seventh box, buried beneath a foot and a half of divorce pleadings. I recognized the well-creased spine of the thick black ledger book that Ezra had always preferred. It made a cracking sound when I opened it, and I fingered the green paper, now browned at the edges, and saw the rows of Ezra's precise figures. My first impression was of smallness. Small writing and small numbers-nothing like his stature or the billings he would soon come to achieve. I found the deposit entry on the thirty-third page. The deposit above it was for fifty-seven dollars, the one below for an even hundred. His handwriting was unvaried, so that one-third of a million dollars might well have been a daily deposit. Looking at it, I could only imagine the satisfaction that entry must have given him. Yet, it was as if he'd bottled up any symptoms of joy or pleasure. Maybe he'd been selfish with it; maybe he'd just been disciplined. But I could still remember the night he took us out to celebrate. "Nothing can stop me now," he'd said. And he'd been right, until Alex shot him in the head.

I left the basement and turned off the light. The smell of moldering cardboard followed me as I headed for Ezra's office. I paused at the foot of the stairs, remembering the sound of a heavy chair crashing down; but now there was only silence, and so I broke it, my feet heavy on the time-worn stairs. The rug looked different; maybe it was the light, but it seemed to ripple at the far corner. I pulled it back, wondered again if my mind was playing tricks on me. The wood was chipped at the edge, gouged around the nail heads. The marks were unfamiliar, small, as if made by a flathead screwdriver. I ran my fingertips over them, wondering if someone else had been here.

I dismissed the thought. Time was not on my side, and I had a number burning holes in my brain. I grabbed the hammer and went to work on the nails. I tried to slip the claw beneath the heads. I gouged more wood, scratched the nail heads shiny, but could not get them out. I rammed the claw into the crack at the boards' ends and leaned back on the handle. No give. I pulled harder, felt the tension in my back as I heaved. But the four big nails were too much.