Chapter 17: The Envelope

Hugh's mother opened the door herself.

She wore a gray wool dress and no pearls, and she looked ten years older than she had at the Anchorage.

"Thank you for coming," she said.

"You said there was something I needed to see."

"Yes. Come."

She led me through a hall of dark portraits to a study with a green carpet and a heavy desk.

She shut the door and turned the key.

"My husband told me he would be at the club until two," she said. "My son told me he would be at the institute, explaining a video to his director."

"Mrs. Pendry..." I said, because I had no other name for her.

"Let me say mine first."

She stood very straight, with her hands folded.

"I called you clingy. I told my husband you were a girl who couldn't be left alone. I had it from Hugh, and I never once asked you. I'm sorry."

I had come ready to fight.

I did not know what to do with an apology.

"Thank you," I said slowly.

"Don't thank me. Look."

She crossed to the desk and opened the bottom drawer with a small brass key.

Inside lay a stack of cards, tied with string.

There were dozens of them, and every one was addressed in the same square hand.

Each one said only: For Ivo, on his birthday.

Every envelope was still sealed.

"His mother wrote to him every birthday after she left," Hugh's mother said. "My husband took them out of the mail. He told the boy nobody wrote."

"He kept them?"

"In a drawer. He could not read them and could not throw them out."

She touched the top envelope with one finger.

"I found them last year. I did not do anything. I told myself it was not my place."

"Why show me?"

"Because you are the first person who has made that boy come to his father's table in eleven years."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Stopped Chasing Him, and My New Boss Was His Brother from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.