Chapter 22: The Last Step Again

I let him keep his secret.

If Hayes Mattox was hiding something, it was a boat part or a body.

Either way, he'd tell me when he was ready.

On Monday a letter came to Sweetgrass.

The register girl brought it back to the kitchen holding it by one corner.

A cream envelope, my name on the front in my father's neat deacon handwriting.

The Daniel Island return address was crossed out, with a town upstate written under it.

Emmy stopped piping.

"You going to open it?"

I turned it over in my hands.

Twenty-seven years of everything he never said to me, and he'd finally decided to say it in a letter where nobody else could hear.

I took a pen off the counter.

Across the front, under my name, I wrote: Return to sender.

Then I walked it out to the blue mailbox on the corner, with the whole morning line watching.

"That's it?" Emmy said when I came back in.

"He had twenty-seven years to say it to my face," I said. "He can mail it to somebody else."

On Tuesday at four in the morning, I put an apron on Emmy myself.

"What's this?" she said. "Am I fired? Is this a fancy firing?"

"Shut up and wash your hands."

The kitchen was dark except for the light over the big steel table.

I'd baked the lemon cake layers the way I always did.

When the timer went, I pulled the first pan and set it on the table between us.

"Give me your hand," I said.

Emmy looked at me. Then at the cake.

Her face changed.

"Liza. No."

"Give me your hand, Em."

"That's your mama's. That's the hundred-thousand-dollar thing. You turned down a hundred grand for that."

"I didn't turn it down because I was saving it," I said. "I turned it down because it wasn't for sale."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Oops, Wrong Bride? Fine. No Wedding. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.