Chương 3
“I shouldn’t have asked him that,” he said.
“You asked a fair question.”
“In front of everyone.”
“You heard me ask mine in front of everyone.”
He turned. “Were you trying to hurt him?”
Kesha looked at the four children. They did not need the clean answer she wished she had.
“Part of me was,” she said.
Olivia picked at a crystal on her sleeve.
“Did it work?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel better?”
“No.”
The children absorbed that in different ways. Sophia folded her hands. Ethan went to the cookies and bit the head off a snowman. Noah returned to the window. Olivia leaned against Kesha until the crystals on their dresses clicked softly together.
Kesha ordered grilled cheese, tomato soup, and fruit from room service because everyone had been too nervous to eat before the flight. The children changed into pajamas while she called her chief operating officer and asked her to alert the company’s communications team.
“Is this a safety issue?” Lena asked.
“Possibly a privacy issue. The children are visible.”
“Do you want the video taken down?”
“Yes, but don’t threaten anyone yet. Document the accounts. Contact the school before morning.”
Lena was silent for half a second. “Is the man in the video their father?”
Kesha closed her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Does he know?”
“He does now.”
Another pause. Lena had worked with her for six years and had met the children at birthday parties, company picnics, and one disastrous camping trip during which Ethan had dropped Lena’s car keys into a creek. She knew there had been a father somewhere. Kesha had never given him a name.
“I’ll handle work,” Lena said. “You handle home.”
Home was a hotel suite two states from the children’s beds, with a video of their worst family moment spreading through strangers’ phones.
Kesha thanked her and ended the call.
Room service arrived. The waiter had clearly seen the clip. He kept his eyes on the cart and explained the soup as though it contained complicated machinery.
After he left, Ethan lifted the lid from the bread basket.
“Why do hotels give you six kinds of bread and no normal butter?”
“There’s butter,” Sophia said.
“That’s salted goat butter.”
“It’s still butter.”
“It tastes like a barn.”
“Have you tasted a barn?”
“Noah,” Kesha said, “please do not encourage this.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He smiled despite himself.
For ten minutes they ate. Soup spilled. Olivia complained that her grilled cheese had too much cheese, an objection Ethan considered morally offensive. The ordinariness steadied Kesha more than breathing exercises ever had.
Then someone knocked.
All four children looked toward the door.
Kesha crossed the room and checked the screen beside the frame. Patricia stood in the hall alone, wearing a camel coat over the stained velvet dress. Snow had melted into her hair.
Kesha opened the door but did not invite her in.
“I said not tonight.”
“I know.” Patricia held out a leather folder. “I thought you should have this before Marcus’s lawyers decide what belongs to him.”
Kesha stared at the folder.
“What is it?”
“Letters. Copies, mostly. Some originals.”
“What letters?”
“Yours.”
The children were listening from the dining table. Kesha stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her.
Patricia handed her the folder.
“I found them in Everett’s desk after he died,” she said. “The desk in his Denver office. Marcus asked me to send everything to the family attorney, but I went through it first.”
Everett Reynolds had been dead eleven months. A stroke at seventy-four, followed by two weeks in a private hospital and an obituary that described him as demanding, generous, visionary, and devoted to his family. The devotion had not included Kesha.
She opened the folder.
The first envelope carried her handwriting and a postmark from eight years earlier. It was addressed to Patricia. RETURN TO SENDER had been stamped across the front, though the return address had been crossed out in black ink.
Kesha touched the ink.
“I never got this back.”
“I don’t think it went through the mail twice,” Patricia said. “I think someone in the office stamped it.”
Kesha lifted another envelope. Then another. Photocopies of certified mail receipts. A letter from the hospital social worker. Four birth announcements with tiny footprints printed in blue, green, gold, and red.
Her throat tightened.
“You had these?”
“No. Everett did.”
“You’re telling me Marcus’s father intercepted every letter I sent this family?”
“I am telling you they were in his desk.”
“That isn’t the same.”
“No.”
Kesha looked up sharply. Patricia’s refusal to overstate it irritated her because it was honest.
“Did Marcus know?”
“I don’t know.”
“He worked in that office.”
“I know.”
“He used his father’s assistant.”
“I know.”
“He signed for one of the certified letters himself.”
Patricia’s face changed.
Kesha flipped through the folder until she found the green receipt. A signature crossed the bottom in blue ink: M. Reynolds.
“He told me that signature was from the mailroom,” Kesha said. “His lawyer said anyone could have written his name.”
Patricia studied it.
“Is that his handwriting?”
“Yes.”
“Then he knew.”
“He knew a letter existed. I can prove that. I cannot prove he opened it.”
Patricia pressed her lips together. “You sound like an attorney.”
“I paid enough of them.”
“I invited you because I saw your photograph in a business journal. You were standing with the children at the opening of a medical housing center. The boys looked like Marcus did at eight. Olivia looked like Everett’s sister.”
“And that was enough?”
“No.” Patricia looked down the empty hotel corridor. “It was enough to make me search the desk.”
Kesha closed the folder.
“Why didn’t you call him first?”
May you like
“Because he has answered questions for me before.”
The elevator chimed at the far end of the hall. A couple stepped out carrying shopping bags, recognized both women, and walked past with the concentrated blankness of people pretending not to recognize anyone.
