The Mistress in the Room novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: Eleven Years of Letters
The bakery opens at six, so I was in the back at four with my arms in flour to the elbow.
It was the only room in my life that Douglas had never once tried to rearrange.
By five the first rye was proofing and the ovens had started to tick.
The back door opened and Evan came in with two coffees from the diner and a bruise the color of a plum showing at his collar.
"You didn't sleep," I said.
"Neither did you."
"I make bread. It's my job not to sleep."
He set a coffee on the steel table at my elbow and leaned on the other side of it.
For a while we said nothing, and it was the easiest nothing I'd had in weeks.
Then he turned his cup a quarter turn on the steel.
"Fran, can I say something about the hurt. Mine, not yours."
"Say it."
"You asked me last week why I didn't knock on your door in the spring."
"I did, and you said you were a coward."
"That's true. It's not the whole thing." He kept his eyes on the cup. "You never asked why I stopped writing."
I stopped kneading.
"Writing what?"
"Letters to you. After Dad's funeral I wrote you nine of them, over two years. I wrote about the watch, and what I'd heard, and that I wasn't drunk."
"I never got a letter."
"I know that now. I think I know where they went."
"Evan."
"And six years ago my wife died, in March," he said. His voice did not change at all. "I sent you the notice myself. The funeral was at a church in Rogers Park, twenty minutes from your house. You didn't come."
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