Saved From Suicide, Sold Into a Lie novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Door

He follows Mom to an apartment and sees Joanna holding a baby with Dorian beside her.

I did not sleep that night.

Lying in the dark, I went back over everything that had never added up.

The department told me my wife's car burned until nothing could be identified.

Nobody let me see a body, a ring, or a single thing she owned.

When I tried to go to her precinct, Leanne stood in my doorway and said the cases were sealed, even from family.

My mother told me the same thing and begged me to stop asking.

The funeral was held over an empty box, and I was too far gone to ask why.

In the morning Leanne left for her shift at the hospital pharmacy and told me to eat breakfast.

I waited for the elevator to take her down, and then I went out.

The pediatric clinic on the bill would not tell me a thing, and the receptionist threatened to call security.

So I walked to the flower shop my brother Dorian had used for every one of our mother's birthdays.

The owner looked up and her face lit.

"You are so much like your brother," she said. "His wife was in just yesterday, ordering for him."

My hand tightened on the door handle.

"Do they come in often?" I asked.

"Not anymore. Years ago they sent a driver. We did the most when the baby was born. She picked those up herself, sweet woman."

She wrote the address down for me on the back of a receipt, and thanked me for saying hello.

I stood on the sidewalk reading it, and the numbers swam.

I took a bus across the city.

The building had a doorman, a clean lobby, and a bench across the street where I could see the entrance.

I sat on it for two hours.

At dusk, my mother came down the sidewalk with a bag in each hand.

I knew the blue scarf, and I knew the way she walked.

She nodded to the doorman, and he greeted her by name.

I got up and followed her in.

She never looked behind her.

On the seventh floor she stopped at a door and knocked twice with the back of her knuckles.

A brass plate beside the door said Ledford.

Under it hung a paper handprint, painted blue, with a boy's age written in marker: four.

He was born about a year after my wife's funeral.

The door opened at once.

My wife stood in the doorway.

Joanna wore gray lounge pants and one of Dorian's old college sweatshirts.

Her hair was longer, and she held a small boy with flushed cheeks and wet lashes.

I stopped in the stairwell with one hand on the cold metal rail.

I could not make my lungs work.

The boy saw my mother and reached out both arms.

"Grandma!"

"There he is," my mother said, and took him.

She kissed his hot forehead.

"Has the fever come down?"

"Not yet," Joanna said, and took the bags from her.

"Dorian just woke up. He's inside."

She said his name easily.

She said it the way she used to say mine.

The door stayed open a hand's width.

Through the gap I saw a couch with a blanket over the arm, a baby bottle on the table, and blocks all over the rug.

It was the house I used to picture us in.

Dorian walked out of a back room with sleep in his hair and a gray T-shirt on, and he took the boy from my mother.

"Hey, buddy. Hey. Let me see you."

The boy put his head on Dorian's shoulder and stopped crying.

Joanna reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my brother's ear.

I had watched her do exactly that for me, in our kitchen, with flour on her wrist.

She did it in the same way, with the same two fingers.

My mother was laughing.

She was telling them about the new coat she had bought for the boy.

A woman I didn't know came out of the kitchen and asked if she should warm the soup.

Joanna went for a glass of water.

Dorian crouched in front of the couch and showed the boy a toy truck.

They were a family.

All of them had a place in that room, and I was the only person on the stairs.

I put my hand flat against the wall, and I realized my face was wet.

I had not made a sound.

I took a step back, then another, and found the elevator button.

I pressed it three times.

Then my phone buzzed in my pocket.

The screen said Leanne.

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