Peter Vaughn called me back on a Tuesday and said Ray Calloway wanted to meet me alone, and I said fine, and that is how I ended up walking into a restaurant two blocks from Grand Central at noon on a Thursday with a man I had only ever seen in a photograph on a bank's website.
He was already seated when I got there, and he stood up when I came in, which threw me, because I had been expecting someone who acted like a man who had something to hide.
He pulled out my chair and said, "Mrs. Bennett, thank you for coming," and he had that easy, practiced way about him that men like him have, the kind of calm that comes from forty years of never being the one who has to worry.
I ordered coffee and he ordered the salmon.
I told him I was not there to make small talk and he said he appreciated that, and then he looked at me across the table and said, "Teresa came on to me.
She was nineteen and I was thirty-two, and it was a different time, and I am not going to sit here and pretend I handled it well.
But I did not take anything from that family that was not owed to me."
I asked him what he meant by owed.
He said Frank Delgado had agreed the situation had to be handled quietly, that a nineteen-year-old girl having a baby in that family in 1997 was something Frank was not going to let happen, and that his role was to stay out of it and let Frank do what Frank thought was right.
I sat there with my coffee and thought about Aaron driving Teresa home from that clinic in Westchester and Teresa crying the whole way.
Then Calloway put down his fork and said something I did not expect.
He said, "I know what this is costing your family.
Two million dollars, paid personally, out of my own accounts, if you convince the girl to withdraw the claim and drop the motion to remove me as trustee."
I did not say anything for what felt like a long time.
Then I asked him one question, because it was the only one I cared about anymore.
I said, "What do you think Teresa would have wanted?"
He looked at me the way you look at a waitress who has brought the wrong order, patient and slightly bored, and he said, "Teresa is not relevant.
Teresa has been dead for eight years.
What is relevant is what happens to Frank's building and Frank's family and whether the people who actually built that company spend the next three years in a courtroom."
Then he picked up the check and paid it, and walked me to the door, and held it open, and said he hoped I would think about it.
I took the 5:14 train home from Grand Central and sat by the window and did not cry, because there was nothing to cry about yet, I was still deciding what kind of person I was going to be.
Somewhere past Sunnyside I opened my phone to check the time and saw a text from a number I did not recognize.
There was a photograph attached, and it was a photograph of my own front door, the blue door on 214th Street in Bayside, taken from the sidewalk that same afternoon, with my own planter on the step and the screen door open the way I leave it when I am coming right back.
Below the photograph it said, "You should have taken the money."
I got off at the next stop, which was Forest Hills, and I stood on the platform with my heart going, and I called Emma.
She answered on the second ring, and I said, "Emma, are you home?"
She said she was.
I said, "Lock the door.
I'm coming to Yonkers."
I drove up to Yonkers that night because I did not want to go home to a house with a door someone had photographed, and I did not want to be alone with what I was starting to understand about the Delgado family.
Emma lives on the third floor of a brick building on Warburton Avenue, and she let me in wearing sweatpants and a hoodie with her hair still wet, and she looked about fifteen years younger than she had in that conference room.