GUARDIAN ANGEL

Roxana Delgado Sullivan read about it in the Boston Globe, at her kitchen table in Quincy, on a Sunday morning, with her reading glasses on and a cup of coffee going cold at her elbow.

It was not a long article. Page nine, below the fold. Former Boston Attorney, Turned Monk, Dies at Somerville Home. She hardly recognized him in the photograph: a gaunt man with a shaved head and very gentle eyes. Then, beneath it, a smaller one she would have known anywhere. A thirty-five-year-old in an Armani suit, grinning on the courthouse steps, the golden boy of Boston insurance defense.

The last paragraph was the one she read slowest. In a signed statement delivered to a retired Boston police detective shortly before his death, it said, Armand had confessed to the 1995 killing of Norman Ross, office manager of the defunct firm of Lancy, Berger, and Williams, a crime long attributed to the late Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Grant. According to the detective, the statement named no accomplice.

No accomplice. Fourteen years, and he had still found a way to leave her out of it.

She read the article three times. Then she took off her glasses and sat for a long while without moving.

Mark found her there twenty minutes later, when he came in from the garden with dirt on his knees.

“Rox? What is it?”

She turned the paper around so he could see. He read it standing up, one hand on the back of her chair, and then he set it down gently and put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.

Fourteen years. They had been married for thirteen of them. Mark had proposed in the hospital parking lot the week after the accident on the side street, exactly as she had told Xavier he would, with a ring that had cost him two months’ pay and a speech he forgot halfway through. They had two daughters now. When the girls were old enough for college, the money would be there. Roxy had set it aside in the spring of 1996, when she sold the silver Ferrari to a dentist from Connecticut.

She had never told the girls where the money came from.

After Mark went back out to the garden, she went upstairs to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of her dresser.

Under the winter sweaters, in a shoebox, was an envelope with her name on the front in his handwriting, and on the back, three words.

Read this alone.

She had burned his instructions the same night she followed them. But she had kept the letter. She had never been able to explain why, not even to herself. It was the most dangerous piece of paper she owned.

She unfolded it now, on the edge of the bed, and read it again for the first time in many years.

Most of it she knew by heart. The careful, lawyerly sentences. The apology, which went on longer than it needed to. The plea, at the end, for her to throw the letter away the moment she had read it.

And then, at the very bottom of the page, the last line. Written, she had always thought, in a slightly different hand, as if he had added it at the last minute, after everything else was done.

You were the only honest person in that building, Roxy. Someday I hope to deserve you.

She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time with the letter in her lap.

Then she went downstairs and out through the side door and across the yard to the garage, where Mark was repotting tomatoes, and past him, without a word, to the old car under the canvas cover at the back.

She pulled the cover off.

It was a 1974 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, painted a deep, unfashionable brown, with a faint wrinkle along the driver’s side door where the body shop near the pier had never quite got the metal straight. It had not been on the road in six years. Mark kept saying he would sell it. He never did.

Roxy opened the door and sat down behind the wheel.

It still smelled, very faintly, of vinyl and spearmint gum.

She put both hands on the steering wheel, the way she had on that morning in 1995, when she had seen a man in a Corvette raise a gun at the windshield of a white Ford Taurus and had not stopped to think at all.

“You did, you know,” she said quietly, to no one. “You did deserve it. In the end.”

Then she laid her forehead against the wheel, and for the first time in fourteen years, Roxana Delgado Sullivan allowed herself to cry for Francis Xavier Armand.