The attorney who advised Thomas in 2009 was named Samuel Greene. He had retired from practice but still lived outside Tacoma. Harold Pike helped locate him after I signed the necessary estate authorizations allowing disclosure of records Thomas had preserved for me. Samuel agreed to speak only after reviewing those permissions himself.
That caution reassured me.
We met in his home office on a rainy Tuesday.
Samuel was eighty-one and moved slowly with a cane. His memory, however, seemed annoyingly precise.
“I remember your son,” he said.
“How well?”
“Well enough to remember being frustrated with him.”
“Then we have something in common.”
Sarah gave me a look.
Samuel smiled.
Thomas had first contacted his firm indirectly years earlier, asking hypothetical questions about an Apex principal returning to Washington. Samuel could not prove whether that earliest inquiry had been Thomas himself, but later consultations unquestionably were.
By 2009, Thomas had stopped speaking hypothetically.
“He told me he took the money,” Samuel said.
“Did he blame Marcus?”
“No.”
That caught my attention.
“What exactly did he say?”
Samuel would not quote privileged conversations beyond what the estate authorization covered, but he described Thomas’s position clearly.
Thomas admitted opening the safe and removing the cash.
He also described Marcus’s concealed debts, forged documents, and later withdrawal.
“But he never presented himself as innocent?”
“No.”
“Did he present himself as a victim?”
“Sometimes.”
I almost smiled.
Samuel continued. “Then he usually corrected himself.”
That sounded like the letters.
Thomas understood his own evasions even while using them.
Samuel had told him that legal consequences were uncertain after so much time and that uncertainty was not a reason to avoid dealing with them.
Thomas asked whether contacting me could expose me to renewed media attention.
Samuel told him that was my decision, not his.
I leaned forward.
“He said that?”
“I did.”
“What did Thomas say?”
“He didn’t like it.”
“Good.”
Samuel explained that Thomas had developed a sophisticated moral argument for staying away.
He claimed returning could reopen my grief.
It could disturb my financial stability.
It could force me into public scrutiny.
It could create legal complications.
Each concern contained some truth.
Together, they formed a fortress.
Samuel told him so.
“You understood that in 2009?”
“It wasn’t difficult.”
I looked at Sarah.
Her father had surrounded his fear with reasonable language until fear became difficult to see.
Samuel had pushed him toward direct contact.
Thomas eventually agreed.
He drove to Seattle.
He saw me.
He returned without speaking.
“What happened when he came back to you?”
“He was devastated.”
I felt no satisfaction.
“He told me he’d seen you through the window. He said you were laughing.”
“There it is again.”
Samuel nodded. “He used that as evidence you had rebuilt your life.”
“I had.”
“Yes.”
“That didn’t mean I didn’t want my son.”
“I told him something similar.”
“What?”
“That observing someone through glass is not the same as asking what she wants.”
The sentence struck so hard I looked away.
Through glass.
That was Thomas’s entire relationship with me after 1998.
Watching.
Writing.
Calculating.
Remembering.
Never entering.
Samuel said Thomas returned for another consultation months later. Maria was furious with him. His marriage was deteriorating.
Thomas asked whether he should send the repayment money anonymously.
Samuel advised against using money as a substitute for truth.
“He thought returning the money might make contact unnecessary?”
“At times.”
I shook my head.
Even his restitution had nearly become another escape.
Samuel suggested a structured approach.
Send me a letter through counsel.
Explain the essential facts.
Offer me the choice of further contact.
Accept whatever answer came.
Thomas drafted the letter.
“Where is it?”
Samuel opened a file.
“I believe you already have the original among his papers.”
He showed me a copy.
I recognized it.
One of the letters from Unit 318.
I had read it without knowing it was meant to be sent.
That changed every line.
Thomas had reached the point of placing truth into an envelope handled by an attorney.
Then he withdrew permission.
“Why?”
Samuel sighed.
“He said the letter asked you to carry consequences he had created.”
“That almost sounds noble.”
“It wasn’t.”
I looked at him.
“He was afraid of your response.”
Exactly.
Samuel was not cruel about Thomas.
That mattered.
He described a man trapped between genuine remorse and entrenched avoidance.
The remorse was real.
So was the cowardice.
One did not cancel the other.
“Did you like him?” Sarah asked.
Samuel considered.
“Yes.”
She seemed surprised.
“Your father was intelligent, funny in a dry way, and capable of listening carefully to problems that weren’t his.”
“That sounds like him.”
“He was also remarkably stubborn when the problem was his.”
“That sounds even more like him.”
Samuel laughed.
I did too.
Then I asked whether Thomas ever discussed Arthur.
Samuel’s expression changed.
“Constantly.”
My throat tightened.
Thomas had believed Arthur’s death was the boundary he could never cross.
Samuel challenged that belief repeatedly.
Medical records did not establish that Thomas intentionally or directly killed his father.
Thomas understood the distinction intellectually.
Emotionally, he rejected it.
“He believed returning to you meant asking you to forgive the person who killed your husband.”
“I did call him that.”
“He knew.”
“How?”
“Old news articles. Public comments. People who knew the family.”
I remembered interviews given during the first weeks after Arthur died.
I had been shattered.
Angry.
I might have said anything.
“What difference would that make?” I asked.
Samuel looked directly at me. “It explains fear. It does not transfer responsibility.”
Good.
Again.
That distinction had become the backbone of everything.
Thomas had reasons.
Thomas still chose.
Before we left, Samuel gave me copies of documents authorized for release.
Among them was a sealed draft Thomas had written after the failed 2009 visit.
I waited until we returned to my apartment before opening it.
Sarah sat across from me.
The letter began without excuses.
Thomas wrote that he had stood outside the restaurant and failed.
He admitted seeing me happy had relieved him because it gave him permission to leave.
Then he admitted that relief disgusted him.
He understood exactly what he had done.
That was the maddening part.
Near the end, he wrote that someday he hoped to become brave enough to let me decide whether there was room for truth in my life.
I put the paper down.
“Someday.”
Sarah said nothing.
“He always had someday.”
Cancer eventually removed it.
I stood and walked to the window.
Rain ran down the glass.
For twenty-five years, I had believed Thomas chose a new life instead of me.
Now I understood the choice more accurately.
He kept postponing the moment when I might reject him.
Every postponement made rejection more likely.
That increased his fear.
So he postponed again.
A closed loop.
Perfectly logical from inside cowardice.
Completely destructive from outside it.
Sarah came beside me.
“Dad told me something before he died.”
“What?”
“He said he thought you would refuse the money.”
“Why?”
“He said you never liked accepting anything that came with strings.”
“He remembered correctly.”
“He told me there weren’t any.”
“There aren’t.”
“He also said if you refused to meet me, I had to leave you alone.”
I turned toward her.
“He said that?”
“Yes.”
“What would you have done?”
“Left.”
The answer came quickly.
Even now, I appreciated Thomas for that instruction.
He had finally understood something about choice.
Too late.
But understood.
The following week I returned to Unit 318 alone.
I wanted time without Sarah watching my reactions.
I opened drawers I had avoided.
Old repair invoices.
Tax records.
Copies of correspondence.
Photographs.
Then I found a folder labeled ARTHUR.
Inside were medical articles about coronary disease.
Copies of Arthur’s hospital records.
Thomas had obtained them legally years after the death.
He had highlighted passages about severe arterial blockage and cardiac triggers.
At first I thought he had been searching for evidence to absolve himself.
Then I found his handwritten note.
Knowing Dad’s heart was sick does not change that I created the shock. I keep reading this because I want a medical sentence to tell me what portion is mine. There is no percentage for guilt.
I sat on the concrete floor.
That sentence felt more truthful than every calculation in the repayment ledger.
Thomas had spent years trying to quantify responsibility.
He could not.
Neither could I.
At the bottom of the folder lay a photograph of Arthur standing outside Vance’s Hearth.
Thomas had written a date on the back.
Three weeks before the theft.
Arthur was laughing at something outside the frame.
I remembered taking the photograph.
Thomas had been standing beside me.
I had forgotten that.
The day returned in fragments.
Arthur complaining about the sunlight.
Thomas making some joke.
Me telling both of them to stop behaving like children.
Three weeks later, our family ended.
Or at least that was how I had always described it.
Sitting inside Unit 318, I began to question that sentence too.
Our family had not ended.
Arthur died.
Thomas disappeared.
I survived.
Thomas later married.
Sarah was born.
Connections continued without my knowledge.
Family had fractured.
That was different from ending.
I placed the photograph back.
Then I noticed another envelope beneath it.
My name was written across the front.
Not MOM.
ELEANOR.
The date was from Thomas’s final year.
Inside was a short note directing me to a video file stored with his estate documents.
I had known there were digital files.
I had deliberately avoided them.
Letters were manageable.
Video was different.
Video contained voice.
Movement.
A living illusion.
Thomas wrote that I never had to watch it.
He had recorded it because paper had allowed him to hide too easily.
For once, he wanted me to see his face while he said what he had failed to say.
I folded the note.
Then I called Sarah.
“There’s a video.”
She was quiet.
“I know.”
“You watched it?”
“Not the one for you.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“There are others?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“One for me. One for Mom. One for you.”
“What does yours say?”
Sarah took a breath.
“That he was sorry he made me responsible for finishing something he should have done himself.”
I closed my eyes.
“Did that help?”
“No.”
Then, after a pause:
“Yes.”
Both.
Of course.
I looked toward the dark green safe.
“Come to Seattle.”
“When?”
“This weekend.”
“Are you going to watch it?”
I stared at Thomas’s handwriting.
“Yes.”
For the first time since Sarah knocked on my door, I was about to hear my son speak.
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: Thomas Finally Looked Me in the Eye From a Screen and Admitted the One Failure His Money Could Never Repair
A Stranger With Arthur’s Eyes Stood at My Door and Asked Me to Reconsider the Son I Had Buried Alive
Part 7 of 16
