Chapter 16: Ask Him

I couldn't sleep, so I walked down the garden path in my coat with Lorna's last words in my head.

Ask him what he's been holding back.

The cottage door stood open an inch. Light came through the gap, and so did Levi's voice.

"No," he said. "Not Monday."

I stopped on the step.

"She watched her mother get walked out of a ballroom tonight. I'm not putting a pen in her hand before the week is over."

A pause. Somebody on the other end talked for a long while.

"Then take the trusteeship," Levi said. "I'll sign it over to you in the morning."

He listened.

"The shares can sit in the trust until she's ready, or until she's gone. I don't care which."

I stood very still on the step.

"No. She doesn't know. And you won't tell her. I'd rather she think I'm a fool than think I leaned on her."

He hung up.

I pushed the door open.

Levi stood by the desk in his shirtsleeves, with his phone in one hand and a folder of papers in the other.

The pink blazer lay over the chair.

He saw my face.

"How much of that did you hear?"

"The part where you give away the one thing you came to get."

"I didn't come to get anything."

"The shares need my signature. That was why you were kind."

My voice cracked on the last word.

"That's what I thought for two weeks."

"I know," he said.

"You know?"

"Every time I held a door for you, you watched my hands for the pen."

He put the folder down.

"I should have corrected you. I was too much of a coward to say what I was being nice for."

"What were you being nice for?"

He crossed the room and stopped one step away from me.

"I thought you'd go back to your life when it was safe," he said. "To the clinic, to some small place that was yours."

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