Chương 2
Margaret bent toward the glass, searching for Nora’s eyes.
Thomas’s voice lowered.
“Good. At noon, the Pembrokes learn exactly who they threatened.”
Nora closed her eyes.
“No,” she said.
There was a pause on the line.
Her father had not expected resistance. Neither had she.
“No threats,” Nora said. “No uniforms. No favors. I need a safe place, a lawyer, and somebody who will tell me when I’m making a stupid decision because I’m angry.”
Outside, Wesley stopped pounding.
Thomas breathed once through his nose, the way he did when an order had been corrected by better information.
“Understood.”
“And Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t call them.”
“I won’t.”
“Not even Wesley.”
“I said I won’t.”
Nora watched Margaret point toward the house. Wesley shook his head. For the first time that afternoon, he seemed to be arguing with her.
It came too late to comfort Nora.
June’s crying dwindled to a wet hiccup. Nora slipped one finger into her daughter’s palm. The baby closed around it with astonishing strength.
Nora sat in the locked car while the afternoon continued around them. A server brought a tray inside. A guest retrieved a handbag from the cloakroom. A delivery van rolled to the service entrance and waited behind a hedge because the driver could not see the scene in the circular drive.
Ordinary things kept happening.
That steadied her more than her father’s promise.
Thomas arrived in an old gray SUV that looked embarrassed among the Pembroke cars. He parked at an angle behind Nora’s sedan, blocking it from the house without blocking the driveway. At sixty-one, he still moved with the contained purpose that had made strangers assume he was angry when he was merely concentrating.
He did not approach Margaret or Wesley.
He went to the passenger side, showed Nora his empty hands through the glass, and waited until she unlocked the door.
Margaret appeared at his shoulder.
“Colonel Ellis, this is a family misunderstanding.”
Thomas looked at Nora, not Margaret.
“Do you want me to respond?”
“No.”
He nodded.
Margaret’s mouth tightened. She was unaccustomed to being treated as background noise on her own property.
Wesley moved closer. “Nora, please. Let me talk to you.”
“Not here.”
“I didn’t know she was going to do that.”
Nora almost answered. Then she remembered the laughter beginning before the collar reached June, the guests’ anticipation, the silver tray positioned at Margaret’s elbow. She remembered Wesley standing close enough to see the black leather loop in his mother’s hand.
“When?” Nora asked.
“When what?”
“When did you first see the collar?”
His eyes shifted.
The movement was small. It changed everything.
Thomas opened the front passenger door of Nora’s sedan and took the keys from the console. “I’ll drive.”
Margaret stepped toward him. “You can’t simply remove my granddaughter.”
Thomas stopped with one hand on the door.
Nora had spent her childhood watching rooms reorganize themselves around her father’s silence. She had once mistaken that effect for power. Later she understood it was restraint—people filled silence with whatever frightened them most.
He looked at Nora again.
She shook her head.
Thomas got into the driver’s seat.
Nora kept June beside her in the back as they left the estate. Through the rear window she saw Wesley standing in the driveway, his arms at his sides. Margaret spoke at him with sharp movements. He did not answer.
The white roses remained visible through the glass walls until the car curved beyond the iron gates.
Thomas drove to his townhouse in Dilworth without turning on the radio. He did not ask Nora to describe what he had already seen. At a traffic light, he reached toward the cup holder, found an empty coffee cup, frowned at it, and set it back as though offended by his own housekeeping.
June slept through most of the drive.
Nora stared at the passing storefronts and tried to determine which part of her life had ended. The marriage did not feel over. It felt paused in the middle of a sentence, the next word waiting somewhere beyond her anger.
Her phone vibrated repeatedly in the diaper bag.
WESLEY.
MARGARET.
WESLEY.
UNKNOWN NUMBER.
PEMBROKE HOUSE.
She silenced it without reading anything.
Thomas’s townhouse had two bedrooms, a narrow kitchen, and a back patio where he had failed for three consecutive summers to grow tomatoes. He carried the diaper bag inside while Nora carried June. Before locking the door, he checked the street.
“Habit,” he said when he caught Nora watching him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You had the face.”
“What face?”
“The one you made at sixteen when you thought I was overreacting.”
“You usually were.”
“Probably.”
He set the bag beside the sofa. A stack of mail leaned against a ceramic bowl filled with spare keys, loose batteries, and three golf tees, although Thomas did not play golf. Nora remembered dropping those tees into the bowl during high school after finding them in a parking lot. He had never thrown them away.
That nearly broke her.
Instead, she asked where he kept clean sheets.
The guest room became June’s room within twenty minutes. Thomas dragged an old bassinet from the hall closet, where he had stored it after Nora’s mother died. He had replaced its mattress and checked the hardware before June was born, though he had never mentioned doing so. Nora washed her hands, changed June, fed her, and sat on the edge of the bed listening to the baby swallow.
Her phone continued vibrating.
Thomas stood in the doorway.
“Lawyer is calling at eleven.”
“Who?”
“Marisol Grant. Family law. She handled Patrick Donnelly’s divorce.”
“Patrick lost his house.”
“Patrick hid money in a fishing boat.”
Nora looked down at June.
“Fair point.”
May you like
Thomas folded his arms, then unfolded them. Emotional conversations made him search for tasks. He picked up a packet of wipes from the floor and placed it on the dresser, where Nora had already intended to put it.
“I didn’t call anyone else,” he said.
