Chapter 22: Handwriting

Preston's POV

The box was heavier than it looked, and my arms were shaking when I set it on the brass podium.

My mother stood a foot away from me, and she did not step back.

"Sweetheart," she said, low. "Put that down."

"No."

I lifted the lid.

Inside were forty years of her handwriting.

I had spent the afternoon in the family archive on the sixth floor, where the guard still knew my face.

I had pulled every page she ever wrote by hand.

Birthday cards to me.

Notes to the cook.

Board memos, in the margins, in blue ink.

I laid out three of them next to the photocopy from Evanston and turned the whole thing toward the cameras.

"Look at the capital R," I said.

The reporters leaned in.

"She loops it twice, left to right. Nobody else in this building does that."

I held up a birthday card from my twelfth year.

The card said, Raise your glass.

Raise to double sat beside it on the photocopy.

"Look at the T," I said.

"She crosses it with a line that runs through the whole word."

I tapped each page.

"It's on the card. It's on the memo. It's on the order to Lydia's father's landlord."

Nobody spoke.

A woman with a press badge said, very softly, "That's the same hand."

My mother looked at the pages for a long moment.

I saw her decide, and I saw the exact second she gave up.

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