Not His Wife novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Joyce at Mass

Reed told it on my porch in pieces, with rain running off his hair.

Alyssa had never come to Cutler Street after the hotel.

He had gone there at midnight and found the door open and the crib empty.

The closet was bare on one side, and the little girl's stuffed rabbit was gone from the couch.

"Her phone's off," he said. "She said she'd sign things. She said we'd talk in the morning."

"Did you call the police?"

"And say what? That my wife took my daughter?"

"She isn't your wife," Anson said from the hall.

Reed looked at him, and for once he had nothing to say back.

I put a towel around his shoulders, because I am who I am.

Then I went upstairs and got dressed.

"Where are you going?" Reed asked.

"To Mass."

Saint Brigid's was full by ten-thirty on the last Sunday of the month.

Bernice met me on the steps in her navy hat.

She looked at Reed behind me, in his borrowed jacket, and at Anson a pace behind him.

"Sit where I put you," she said. "All three."

She sat us in the fourth pew on the left.

Across the aisle, in the Lathrop pew where she had sat for forty years, Joyce was already kneeling in her quilted coat.

She felt me looking and kept her eyes on her rosary.

I did not hear a word of the homily.

I watched the back of her permed gray head, and the pearls at her ear, and I thought about my wedding day.

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