Chương 8
Claire stared.
“Did she believe him?”
“Not completely.”
“Then why didn’t she call again?”
Thomas hesitated.
“Because your mother could hold a grudge like it paid interest.”
Despite herself, Claire laughed.
Thomas did too.
Then his eyes filled.
“She loved hard too.”
Claire looked down.
Thomas said, “After Ben died, I told her Charles was gone from her daily life. She could call Eleanor herself.”
“Charles was still alive then.”
“Yes.”
“But he couldn’t stop her.”
“No.”
“What did she say?”
Thomas leaned back.
“She said if Eleanor had wanted to find her, she would have.”
Claire thought of Eleanor’s accident file.
Twenty-three years of unquestioned paperwork.
A husband who handled everything.
A woman who stopped driving after the night her daughter died.
“Was she wrong?” Claire asked.
Thomas looked at her carefully.
“Depends what you mean.”
Claire hated that answer because it was the only honest one.
Before they left, Thomas brought out a plastic storage box.
“Ben kept these.”
Inside were photographs.
Evelyn at twenty-one, pregnant, hair longer than Claire had ever seen it.
Ben beside her, skinny and grinning.
Claire as a newborn wrapped in a hospital blanket.
In one picture Evelyn sat on a porch wearing the green jade pendant.
Claire touched the photograph.
“That’s it.”
Thomas nodded.
“There was another one.”
“What?”
“Piece of jade.”
Claire looked up.
“Eleanor has it.”
Thomas gave a small, humorless smile.
“Then Evelyn was right about that.”
He found another photograph.
Two girls stood beside a car.
Evelyn and Leah.
Leah wore Evelyn’s denim jacket.
Claire felt cold.
The accident report had listed the jacket as identification.
Daniel noticed the same thing.
“When was this taken?”
“Day before the crash,” Thomas said. “Leah borrowed it. Said it made her look rich.”
Claire stared at the photograph.
A tiny ordinary joke.
A borrowed jacket.
Twenty-three years of consequences.
No mastermind had planned that part.
That made the rest worse.
Eleanor came to Claire’s apartment again the following week.
This time she brought no coat despite the cold.
Claire showed her the photographs.
Eleanor sat with both hands around a cup of tea she did not drink.
When she saw Evelyn pregnant, her face folded.
Claire looked away.
She could handle Eleanor’s anger.
Grief was harder.
Eleanor touched the corner of the photograph.
“She cut her hair.”
Claire frowned.
“That’s what you notice?”
“It was down to her waist when she left.”
Eleanor smiled faintly.
“She used to threaten to shave it every time Charles told her long hair was more feminine.”
Claire looked at the picture.
“My mother hated hair dryers.”
“She broke three.”
Claire looked at Eleanor.
Eleanor looked back.
For one dangerous moment they both smiled.
Then Claire remembered why they were there.
“Thomas says she called.”
Eleanor’s smile disappeared.
“When?”
“Three years after the accident.”
Eleanor went still.
“Charles answered.”
Claire told her.
Not gently.
She watched each sentence land.
When she finished, Eleanor stood and walked to the window.
“I was home.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I was almost always home that year.”
“Why?”
“I stopped attending evening events for a while.”
Claire waited.
Eleanor touched the edge of the curtain.
“I thought I heard the telephone ring one afternoon and Charles answered in his study.”
She laughed once, quietly.
“I remember because he came into the kitchen afterward and complained that telemarketers were becoming aggressive.”
Claire felt sick.
“You can’t know that was her.”
“No.”
Eleanor turned.
“But now I will always wonder.”
Claire had no answer.
Eleanor returned to the table.
“There is something else.”
Claire’s stomach tightened.
“Of course there is.”
“My lawyer believes Evelyn’s legal death can be corrected.”
“I don’t care about your lawyer.”
“This affects your mother’s records.”
“Then say that.”
Eleanor nodded.
“The medical examiner’s office agreed to review the identification because of the DNA evidence, the photographs, and the letter.”
Daniel had warned Claire this was coming.
She still disliked hearing it.
“What happens to Leah?”
“They may be able to identify the buried remains as hers.”
Claire thought of Thomas.
“Does he know?”
“I spoke with him this morning.”
Claire stared.
“You called Thomas?”
“He called me.”
That surprised her.
“What did he want?”
“To tell me not to turn Leah into a footnote.”
Claire looked down.
“Good.”
“Yes.”
Eleanor’s voice softened.
“He said his parents died believing their daughter was lost in the river.”
Claire closed her eyes.
Another family.
Another grave.
Another woman whose name had been swallowed by someone else’s fear.
Eleanor said, “If the review confirms it, Leah can be buried under her own name.”
“And my mother?”
“Her death record remains hers. The 2003 declaration would be vacated.”
Claire rubbed her forehead.
“So she becomes alive for twenty-two years and then dead again.”
Eleanor flinched.
Claire immediately regretted the sentence.
She did not apologize.
Not yet.
The reporters became worse when news of the DNA result leaked.
Claire never learned who leaked it.
She suspected a lab employee until Daniel reminded her that suspicion was not evidence.
Eleanor suspected her own attorney.
The attorney blamed a distant Harrow cousin.
The cousin posted a statement denying everything before anyone publicly accused her.
Mia printed it and left it on Claire’s desk with a sticky note:
Rich people seem exhausting.
Claire laughed for the first time that day.
Then a photographer waited outside the office.
Daniel walked her home.
“You can stay with me.”
“I have my own apartment.”
“I know.”
“I’m not moving because strangers have cameras.”
“I didn’t ask you to move.”
“You implied it.”
“I offered a bed.”
Claire stopped walking.
Daniel stopped too.
People passed around them.
He looked tired.
For two weeks he had answered calls she did not want, found public records, reminded her to eat, and once driven across the city because Claire convinced herself the pendant was missing before discovering it in the pocket of her bathrobe.
“You’re mad at me,” she said.
“A little.”
May you like
“Why?”
“Because I’m allowed to worry about you without becoming Charles Harrow.”
