Chapter 9: Signatures

Cliff's POV

I keep the receipts in a Nike shoebox in my bottom desk drawer, under the fire inspection binder, where nobody has reason to look.

Six little green cards, each stapled to its envelope stub.

Registered mail, return receipt requested, signed for at 14 Larchmere Drive by the same hand.

M. Hetherington.

I had taken them out at six that morning and laid them in a row on the desk, in date order.

Then I'd stood over them with my coffee, a grown man looking at mail.

The first one was four years old.

That's how long it had taken me to understand.

I sent the first letter the week after she quit.

I wrote the second at Christmas.

By the fourth, I'd started to feel stupid.

Eight months later I drove out to the Hetherington house on my day off, with a speech in my head.

I stood on the gravel drive.

The housekeeper came to the door and told me, nicely, that Mrs. Hetherington said Dr. Tarrant did not wish to be contacted by the hospital.

So I went home.

The sixth envelope came back with its green card, and a typed answer on cream paper stapled behind it, signed in blue ink.

"Dear Dr. Dempsey, I appreciate your concern but I have decided to step away from medicine to focus on my family."

"Please do not write again. Sincerely, Josephine Hetherington."

I'd read that thing a hundred times.

I'd believed it, because she'd gone and married the man.

Then on Friday night, at three in the morning, I'd watched Joss Tarrant sign a chart, and her capital J was a straight, flat line.

The J on the letter's signature had a long looped tail.

She had never signed Josephine in her life.

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