Chapter 21: The Loaded Truck

Kip's POV

I stood in the corridor of the Drake and watched my aunt walk out of that room with no one to hold the door.

I had expected to feel something large.

I felt only tired, and I felt the elevator doors close again on my forehead.

For days I had heard what she said in the glass room, and I could not stop hearing it.

A week ago she didn't know that voice was yours, and she walked across a ballroom to my son.

I knew it wasn't the whole truth.

I also knew it wasn't a lie.

I drove to the workshop through the rain.

The stairs I'd been building for a theater in Portland stood along one wall, half-finished, smelling of cedar.

I had two weeks of work left on them, and a deposit already paid.

I carried my tools out to the truck one case at a time and laid them in the bed.

I told myself it was a job.

Then I stood in the middle of the shop, and the truth came up out of the floor.

Selah loved a voice.

She had loved it for ten years, in the dark, with her eyes bandaged and her mother dead.

She'd made it a tall, easy man with a VanAlen's smile, and then a stand-in with sawdust on his sleeves, and then, finally, me.

But the voice was the thing she loved.

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