Chapter 7: The Reply
The reply came five days later.
Not a letter.
A phone call, from a number she didn't recognize, on a Tuesday morning while she was making toast.
"Ms.
Sutton." Carol Reeves.
"Mr.
Voss received your note."
Maya set down the butter knife.
"And?"
"He's agreed to the meeting.
Saturday morning, ten o'clock.
Not at the store." A brief pause.
"At his home.
Ellie will be there.
He wanted you to know that in advance so you could decide if you still wanted to come."
"I still want to come," Maya said immediately.
"He also wanted me to tell you one other thing." Carol's tone shifted slightly — not warmer, exactly, but less formal.
"Ellie asked about you.
The day after it happened.
She asked her father if the lady from the store was going to be all right."
Maya sat down at the kitchen table.
"She's six," Carol said.
"She asked if you were all right."
Maya didn't say anything for a moment.
"What did he tell her?"
"He told her he didn't know yet." A pause.
"I think that's part of why he agreed to the meeting."
After the call ended, Maya sat at the table with her cooling toast and thought about a six-year-old girl who had been shoved to a marble floor and had spent the following day wondering if the woman who shoved her was okay.
She thought about what that said about how Ellie had been raised.
She thought about what it said about herself, that a child's instinct had been kinder than her own adult judgment.
Saturday arrived grey and quiet.
Carol had sent an address — a residential street in a part of the city Maya knew only by reputation, the kind of neighbourhood where the houses were set back from the road and the gardens were large enough to muffle the sound of traffic.
The house itself was not what she had expected.
No gates.
No intercom.
A plain front door painted dark green, with a brass knocker shaped like nothing in particular.
A child's bicycle leaning against the side wall, one stabiliser wheel slightly bent.
Maya knocked.
Harlan Voss opened the door himself.
He was wearing a plain grey sweater and looked, in this context, like a completely different person from the man who had stood in the boutique and told Diane to call HR.
He looked like someone's father on a Saturday morning, which was, she reminded herself, exactly what he was.
"Ms.
Sutton," he said.
"Come in."
The house smelled like coffee and something baking.
A hallway with coats on hooks and shoes lined up unevenly by the door.
A child's drawing taped to the wall — a house, a sun, a figure with yellow hair labelled *DADDY* in large unsteady letters.
"She's in the kitchen," Harlan said.
"She knows you're coming.
I told her you wanted to say sorry."
"What did she say?"
Harlan looked at her steadily.
"She said okay."
Maya followed him down the hall.
Ellie was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice and a colouring book.
She was wearing a yellow jumper with a small rabbit on the pocket.
She looked up when Maya came in.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Maya crouched down so she was at eye level with the girl — the same way Marcus had done in the boutique, she realized, and the recognition of that hit her somewhere she hadn't expected.
"Ellie," she said.
"I'm Maya.
I came to say I'm sorry.
What I did was wrong, and it was unkind, and you didn't deserve it.
Not any of it."
Ellie looked at her carefully.
"You called me trash," she said.
"I know," Maya said.
"That was a terrible thing to say.
I'm very sorry."
Ellie considered this with the serious, unhurried attention of someone who has not yet learned to rush through important moments.
"Daddy says sometimes people are unkind because they're hurting," Ellie said.
"Are you hurting?"
Maya's throat tightened.
"I think I was," she said.
"I'm trying to be better."
Ellie nodded slowly.
Then she picked up a yellow crayon and held it out.
"You can colour with me if you want," she said.
From behind Maya, she heard Harlan exhale — a quiet, careful breath, the kind that carries more weight than it sounds.
"Thank you," Maya said.
May you like
She took the crayon.
"I'd like that."
