Chapter 18: The Anniversary Dinner

The Harlan's ballroom held six hundred people again, and I stood at the back of it in the same dark suit.

The same big screen hung over the stage.

This time it said "Fairhaven House: Ten Years of Dignity."

Teddy sat thirty feet behind me at a long black desk, between a stranger in a headset and a laptop with a blue cable running into its side.

He raised two fingers off his knee without looking my way.

Freja stood in the wing on the left of the stage, in a black dress, with a headset around her neck and a pencil in her hair.

She didn't look at me either.

The board chair finished the welcome and the donor thanks, and then said, warmly, "Our keynote this evening lost her mother in our care last spring."

Lydia walked out in white.

She stood at the podium where I had left the ring three weeks before.

The room went quiet and kind.

"My mother spent her last nine nights in Bed 6," Lydia said. "Nine nights, in a room with a window, and a nurse who held her hand when I couldn't."

She told it well.

She had always told things well.

Women in the front tables took out tissues.

She talked about the quilt over the bed and the nurse's hands.

Then she took one slow breath, and her voice dropped, and I knew where she was going.

"I wish grief was the only thing I carried through those doors," she said.

"But for ten years a man has followed me. He has called me, written me, and stood outside my work."

A murmur ran through the room.

The slide changed.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Finally Moving On After A Decade from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.