Chapter 18: The Voicemail

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Seventy people looked at a woman in a white robe who held a pen in her left hand.

Then the aunt turned around slowly and looked at Brooke.

"You write with your left hand, honey," she said. "You've always written with your left hand."

"Everyone does something at a desk," Brooke said.

"The game hadn't started. Everyone else was holding a card already."

"I was making name tags."

"Name tags for what?"

"The rehearsal brunch."

"There was no brunch," Hattie said, from the laptop. "I asked the lodge manager yesterday. Nobody ordered a brunch."

Brooke's mother stepped between her daughter and the screen.

"This is a photograph," she said. "A photograph proves nothing. My daughter was upset. She wrote a note to herself."

"She wrote a note to herself," the florist repeated. "At the back of the room. And then she handed out cards to everyone else."

A chair scraped.

Dalton was standing in the door of the hall.

He had been out in the parking lot for an hour. His jacket was buttoned wrong again.

Poppy was not with him.

"I have something," he said.

"Dalton," Brooke said. It was the first time her voice had broken. "Don't."

"I'm sorry. I told you I'd say nothing. That's what I did for six years, and look."

He walked to Hattie, and she held out a small speaker cable.

He plugged in his phone.

It was Brooke's voice that came out of the lodge's big speakers, cheerful and brisk, a woman organizing a party.

It filled the beams. It filled the room to the corners.

I watched the faces.

I watched my aunt's mouth fall open, and the bearded fisherman take off his cap and hold it against his chest.

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