The Daughter They Abandoned Is the Doctor They Can't Reach novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Toast

On the seventeenth of January the house I grew up in had balloons on the mailbox and forty people in the living room.

There was a banner across the fireplace that said Happy 18th, Faye.

My mother had hung it herself.

I walked through the front door behind my grandfather, with Mabel on his other side in her good coat.

For a second nobody noticed us.

Then my aunt by the buffet saw me, and her face lit up, and the nearest cousins turned their heads.

The talk in the room dropped away.

My father came across the carpet with his arms already open, and his smile was the one he wore at the credit union's holiday party.

"Ingrid. And Dad. And..." He looked at Mabel for a second too long. "Mrs. Kroll, how kind of you."

"I wouldn't have missed it," said Mabel.

"I'm so glad you came." He lowered his voice to a murmur. "Let's keep this pleasant for Faye."

"I came for Faye," I said.

"Of course you did."

My grandfather leaned on his cane and said nothing.

My father studied him.

I saw it land in his face, very briefly, that his father had come without being asked.

"Dad," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. "You look tired."

"I'm seventy-eight," my grandfather said. "I'll sit near the cake."

He crossed the room slowly, and people made way for him.

I took a chair beside him at the front of the room, where I could see the door, the punch bowl and the man in the grey suit standing beside the fruit tray with a small leather folder under his arm.

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