Chapter 7: The Morning After
I didn't sleep at the house.
William offered — insisted, actually, in the careful way of someone who understands they have no right to insist but cannot quite stop themselves.
I told him I needed a night.
He nodded like he'd expected that.
He wrote his personal number on the back of a business card, which struck me as oddly formal given everything, and then he held out the broken pendant.
"I'd like to have it repaired," he said.
"If you'll let me."
I looked at it in his palm.
The hinge was snapped, the case cracked along one edge, but the photo inside had survived.
His younger face.
The baby he hadn't known was me.
"Keep it for now," I said.
"Until it's fixed."
He closed his hand around it.
I took a car home.
My apartment was a studio on the fourth floor of a building that smelled permanently of someone else's cooking.
I'd lived there for two years.
I sat on the edge of my bed with my coat still on and stared at the wall for a long time.
My mother had known for five years before she d*ed.
Five years of knowing Victoria had forged that letter.
Five years of knowing my father had been looking for me, or had been, once — and she had said nothing.
She had given me a pendant and a silence and a letter filed with a law firm.
I wanted to be angry at her.
I tried.
I couldn't get there.
She'd been twenty-four and alone and someone had handed her a forged letter and told her the man she loved had chosen someone else.
She'd believed it because she'd had no reason not to.
By the time she found out the truth, I was nineteen and she was sick and maybe she'd told herself it was too late, or too complicated, or that I was fine without him and didn't need the disruption.
Maybe she'd been wrong about that.
Maybe she'd known she was wrong and done it anyway, because admitting it meant admitting everything else.
I didn't know.
I couldn't ask her.
My phone buzzed at seven in the morning.
Not William.
A number I didn't recognize, local area code.
I answered it.
"Is this Eleanor Marsh?" A woman's voice.
Older.
Slightly breathless, like she'd been working up to the call.
"Yes."
"My name is Carol Simms," she said.
"I think you received a letter last night.
I think it mentioned me."
I sat up straighter.
"Where are you?" I said.
"I'm in the city," she said.
"I came back last week.
I heard — I have a friend who told me something happened at the Holt fundraiser.
I've been trying to decide whether to call." A pause.
"I should have called a long time ago.
I'm sorry I didn't."
"What do you know?" I said.
"More than your mother's letter covers," Carol said.
"There's a man named Garrett Finch.
He works for a document authentication firm on the east side.
Victoria used him for the letter.
I have his name, his address, and I kept a copy of the receipt she paid him with.
I kept everything.
I was afraid to use it, but I kept it."
My coat was still on.
"Can you meet me today?" I said.
May you like
"Yes," she said.
"That's why I called."
