Nineteen Days

Edwina Cho asked to meet her at a café in Woolloomooloo, which was the first strange thing, because Edwina Cho did not meet, she corresponded.

The second strange thing was the folder.

“This is not a privileged document,” Edwina said, sitting down without removing her coat. “It was filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2019 and it has been publicly available for five years. I want that established before you open it, because in about four minutes you are going to wonder whether I have done something improper, and I have not. I have done something disloyal, which is different, and I would like you to understand that I know the difference.”

Meera put her hand flat on the folder without opening it.

“Why.”

“Because a journalist called me on Tuesday.” Edwina’s face did not move. “He has the 2019 filings. He has had them for a fortnight, because anyone can. What he does not have is the reason, and when he fails to find the reason he will invent one, and the one he invents will be simpler and worse. I have acted for Julian for nine years. I would prefer the person who is going to be standing next to him to have read this before a stranger reads it aloud to her.”

“Does Julian know you’re here?”

“No.” Edwina stood, and buttoned her coat, and paused. “He will be angry with me, and he will be right to be, and I will apologise properly. Read the minutes of the meeting of the fourteenth of March. Then read the transfer schedule at annexe C. Then look at the dates.”

—

She read it on a bench by the water with the ferries going past.

The minutes of 14 March 2019 recorded that J. Harrow, non-executive director, had requested a full reconciliation of the Marchetty Fund’s client accounts, and that the request had been noted.

The transfer schedule at annexe C recorded that between 14 March and 2 April 2019, nine million dollars had moved out of those accounts in six transactions.

The disclosure to the regulator was dated 2 April.

Nineteen days.

Meera sat with the folder open on her knees and did the arithmetic four times, and each time it came out the same, and each time it meant the same thing, which was that the version he had given her on her kitchen floor in August — I was the one in the room who could have asked a harder question and didn’t — was not a lie and was not the truth either. He had asked the harder question. He had asked it on the fourteenth of March. And then he had waited nineteen days while the answer walked out of the building.

—

He came to her flat that evening because she asked him to, and he saw the folder on the table and stopped in the doorway, and she watched five years of practised composure fail in the space of one breath.

“Edwina,” he said.

“Don’t.” Meera stayed where she was. “You do not get to make this about her. Sit down and tell me about the nineteen days.”

Julian sat down.

“I asked for the reconciliation on the fourteenth,” he said. “I got it on the eighteenth. It took me about ninety seconds to understand what I was looking at, because I am good with a spreadsheet and always have been, and that is the whole of my usefulness as a human being.” His voice had gone flat in a way she had not heard before. “I went to my father’s house that night. I put it on his kitchen table. I said: this is nine million dollars of other people’s money and you have three days to put it back and then we go to the regulator together.”

“And he didn’t.”

“He cried.” Julian was looking at the middle distance. “He was sixty-three and he sat in his own kitchen and cried and said he could fix it, that there was a property settlement coming in April, that if I gave him until the end of the month he could make every account whole and nobody would ever know, and that if I reported it that night he would go to prison and my mother would find out from a journalist.” He stopped. “So I gave him until the end of the month.”

“Nineteen days.”

“Nineteen days, during which he moved another four million.” He said the number precisely. “I did not know that at the time. I have never been able to establish whether I would have behaved differently if I had, because I have never been able to get far enough away from wanting the answer to be yes.”

Meera found that she was standing. She did not remember standing.

“You told me you failed to ask a harder question.”

“Yes.”

“You sat on my kitchen floor and told me you wanted me to know exactly what I was choosing.” Her voice was not under control and she let it not be. “You said you’d rather I walked away informed than stayed out of kindness. And you gave me the version where you were careless. Not the version where you chose.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because the careless version is survivable and the other one isn’t.” He looked up at her for the first time. “Because I have told the true one exactly twice, once to a lawyer and once to my mother, and both times I watched the person’s face change and stay changed. Because I have spent five years buying absolution with philanthropy and it works on strangers and I wanted, very badly, for it to work on you.” His hands were flat on his knees. “And because I was a coward. You said it at this table three weeks ago and I agreed with you and then I went on doing it. That’s the whole answer and none of it is a defence.”

The fridge hummed. Somewhere below, a car door.

“I want you to go home,” Meera said.

Julian nodded once, and stood, and did not argue, and got as far as the door.

“Not for good,” she said, to his back, because she was angry and not cruel. “I don’t know what this is yet. I know I can’t find out with you in the room being sorry at me. Go home, Julian.”

“All right.” He had his hand on the latch. “May I say one thing that isn’t an apology?”

“One.”

“Edwina was right to give you that folder and I’m not going to punish her for it.” He didn’t turn round. “That’s all. I’d rather you heard me say it while I’m angry with her than in a month when it costs me nothing.”

—

She went to work.

That surprised her, later. There is a version of the day where she rang in sick and sat on the floor, and she had assumed she was that person, and it turned out that she was the other kind: the kind who puts on a jacket and answers forty emails about balustrade fixings and argues with a steel fabricator for forty minutes about a tolerance and does it all perfectly well with something enormous sitting in her chest.

At half past three she looked up the Marchetty Fund.

She had never done it. That was the thing she had to sit with afterwards — in five months she had never once typed the name into a search bar, and she had told herself that was respect, and it had been convenience.

The second result was a piece from 2020 with photographs. A woman in Newcastle who had put a redundancy payment into the fund in 2017 and had been sixty-one when it went. A couple who had sold a business. A man’s face, in his kitchen, in the specific bad light of a newspaper photographer who has been given four minutes.

Four thousand people. She had been holding the number as a number.

Meera read it for an hour and then closed the tab and went back to the balustrade fixings, and at six she found that she was furious, and it took her until she was most of the way home to establish who with.

Not with Julian, in the end, or not principally. With the fact that a man had cried in a kitchen in 2019 and his son had given him nineteen days, and every single person in that newspaper article had paid for it, and there was no version of the story in which anybody got to be simply wrong.

—

She did not sleep much.

At two in the morning she got up and read the minutes again, and at three she rang Faye, who answered on the fourth ring with the specific competence of a woman who has been woken before.

“Right,” Faye said. “Tell me.”

Meera told her.

There was a long pause at the other end.

“Okay,” Faye said. “I’m going to ask you three questions and I want fast answers, not good ones. One. Do you think he stole anything?”

“No.”

“Two. Do you think he’d do it again — sit on something for nineteen days to protect somebody he loved?”

Meera looked at the ceiling.

“No,” she said slowly. “I think that’s what the last five years have been. I think he built an entire personality out of never doing it again.”

“Three. The thing you’re actually frightened of. Say it fast.”

“That he’ll protect me from something by deciding I can’t hear it.” It came out before she could improve it. “That I’ll find out in five years that he’s been managing me the way he managed his mother, and I’ll have built a whole life on top of it.”

“There it is.” Faye let that sit. “So that’s the conversation. Not the fraud. That.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“Then have it at a reasonable hour, and have it properly, and don’t let him write it down first.” A rustle, a yawn. “And Meera. He told you the truth tonight when you asked. Badly, and late, and only because Edwina forced it — but you asked a direct question and he gave you a direct answer with a number in it. That’s not nothing. Three weeks ago he’d have given you a document.”

“That’s a very low bar.”

“It’s the bar he’s got,” Faye said. “Go to sleep.”