Chapter 18: One Question

The cook had left a pot of soup on the back of the stove with a note taped to the lid.

Eat this, both of you. I mean it.

Clara read it by the light over the range at midnight, in her mother's pearls and one of Alexander's shirts.

She had come home for dinner with her father, and then she had stayed.

Alexander sat at the kitchen table with his cane hooked on the chair and a glass of water he had not touched.

He had asked her nothing since the alley.

He had not asked if she was staying, or whether she had forgiven him, or what she had decided.

It had been four days, and he had taken the quiet as a sentence and served it.

She ladled the soup into two bowls and set one in front of him.

"Eat," she said.

He ate.

She sat across from him and watched his hands, the right one with its long scar from the glass at twenty-nine.

Her father had said that Alexander cried in his office.

"I have a question," she said.

"Ask it."

"You told me you'd answer, even if it cost you."

"I said yes to that."

"I know. I'm going to hold you to it."

He put the spoon down.

"After my funeral," Clara said, "you knew what you'd done. You knew about the foreman, and the order, and you knew whose lie had started it."

"Yes."

"You had seven years. You could have gone to the police. Why didn't you?"

The kitchen clock ticked.

He did not look away, and she saw how much that took.

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