Chapter 5: Running Doesn't Change the Signature
Daniel picked up on the first ring.
"She left about ten minutes after you did," he said.
"Her sister came with a car.
I tried to stop them — I mean, I asked them to wait, I didn't physically — anyway.
She's gone.
Half the guests are still here.
Father Donnelly told everyone to stay seated and then he just stood at the front and waited.
Nobody really knew what to do."
"Is anyone still there from her family?"
"Her mother.
Margaret Hale.
She's in the front pew and she hasn't moved and she looks like she's been turned to stone."
Ethan stood up from the chair.
He walked to the window.
Outside, the hospital car park stretched flat and grey under a sky that had stopped raining but hadn't decided to clear.
"Don't let Margaret leave," he said.
"Ethan, I can't exactly—"
"Ask Father Donnelly.
He'll know how to keep her there." A pause.
"Tell her I'm coming back.
Tell her we need to talk about the checks."
He ended the call.
Turned around.
Olivia was watching him from the bed.
"You don't have to go back tonight."
"I do."
"Ethan." Her voice was careful.
"She's been gone eleven years.
Whatever Victoria has to answer for — it can wait one more night."
"The checks can't." He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.
"She signed them, Olivia.
Every single one.
That's not a misunderstanding.
That's not a moment of bad judgment.
That's a decision she made repeatedly, over years, to keep paying you to stay gone." He looked at her.
"Which means she knew.
The whole time we were together, she knew."
Olivia was quiet.
"How long were you with her?" she asked finally.
"Three years.
We got engaged eight months ago."
Something crossed her face — not quite pity, not quite guilt.
The expression of someone calculating a harm they didn't cause but feel connected to anyway.
"Go," she said.
"Lucy can stay with me."
Lucy looked up.
"I want to come."
"I know you do." Olivia squeezed her hand.
"But I need you here.
And your father needs to do this part alone."
Lucy held her mother's gaze for a moment.
Then she nodded, once, with the same decisive quality she'd shown walking down that chapel aisle.
Ethan paused at the door.
"I'll be back tonight.
Whatever time it is."
"We'll be here," Olivia said.
He drove back to the chapel with the letter still in his jacket pocket, pressed flat against his chest.
Margaret Hale was exactly where Daniel had described her — front pew, left side, hands folded in her lap, spine straight.
She was seventy, perhaps, with Victoria's sharp cheekbones and none of Victoria's warmth.
She had always been polite to Ethan in the way that people are polite to someone they consider temporary.
He sat down beside her without asking.
"Where is she?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Margaret."
"I genuinely don't know, Ethan.
Eleanor took her.
Eleanor doesn't tell me things." She paused.
"She never has."
He studied her profile.
She was looking at the altar, at the white roses that nobody had moved, at the candles that had burned down another inch.
"Did you know?" he asked.
A long silence.
"I knew Victoria had handled something," Margaret said.
"Years ago.
She told me there had been a woman.
That the woman had made claims about a pregnancy and that Victoria had dealt with it cleanly and that it was over." She turned to look at him for the first time.
"I didn't ask what cleanly meant.
I should have."
"Yes," Ethan said.
"You should have."
"I was protecting my daughter."
"You were protecting your family's idea of what your daughter should have." He kept his voice level.
"Olivia Bennett is dying in a hospital bed forty minutes from here.
She raised a child alone for eleven years because your daughter paid her to disappear and told her I never wanted to see her again." He reached into his jacket and set the letter on the pew between them.
"She wrote that the night she left.
Lucy carried it here today in the rain."
Margaret looked at the letter.
She didn't touch it.
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
"I want to know where Victoria is."
"And if I don't know?"
"Then I want you to know that I'm going to the police tomorrow with those checks and that letter and everything Father Donnelly is willing to say.
And I want you to understand that Victoria's name is on every single one of those checks, and that fraud doesn't have a short statute of limitations in this state."
Margaret's hands, still folded in her lap, tightened almost imperceptibly.
"She has a lawyer," she said.
"I know she does." Ethan stood.
"So do I."
He was almost at the door when Margaret spoke again.
"The Whitmore Hotel," she said.
"Eleanor always takes her there when things go wrong.
Room 304.
She keeps it under Eleanor's name."
Ethan stopped.
He didn't turn around.
"Thank you," he said.
May you like
He pushed through the chapel doors into the cold evening air.
His phone was already out.
