In Heat for My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 8 of 32
Chapter 8: The Whisper
My mother's closet was a walk-in the size of my new apartment.
I was inside it with the door pulled to before she'd finished turning around.
Her coats hung in a long camel-colored row.
I backed in behind them until my shoulders hit the wall.
Through the slats in the door, I could see a strip of the room.
The vanity. The edge of the bed. My mother's hand, still holding the cotton pad.
"Come in, Wendell," she said.
Her voice was almost normal.
Almost.
The door opened.
Wendell walked into the strip of light in a gray quarter-zip, holding two mugs.
"I brought you tea," he said. "Chamomile. You haven't been sleeping."
"That's sweet of you."
"Who were you talking to?"
"Myself." My mother laughed, too high. "I do that now. Ozias says it's my age."
Wendell put a mug down on the vanity.
He didn't sit.
He stood there in the middle of the room and breathed in slowly through his nose.
I watched him do it.
He was smelling the air.
He was smelling every corner of that room for whoever she'd been talking to.
He wasn't going to find anything.
He turned his head toward the closet.
His eyes passed across the slats, right across my face, and kept going.
"You're upset," he said.
"Of course I'm upset. My daughter is a..." My mother stopped. "My daughter is gone."
"I know." He crouched down in front of her stool so they were eye to eye. "I know, Aunt Regina. It's awful. It's the worst thing that's ever happened to this family."
He took her hand.
"Nobody blames you," he said. "Uncle Ozias doesn't. Judd doesn't. You couldn't have known what she was going to do."
My mother's shoulders started to shake.
"I keep thinking about the phone call," she said. "The one you asked me to make."
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