Chapter 16: What She Owed

Roz's POV

The surgeon came out at dawn and said my mother would live.

I sat in the plastic chair in the Harlow General hallway with her blood dried black on my sleeve.

Nolan had taken his mother to the Askew doctor.

Then he had come back, and now he sat beside me without a word.

Gerard had slipped out through the freezer floor in the dark.

His men had left him behind, one by one, as soon as the shot was fired.

"Mrs. Dunleavy is asking for you," a nurse said. "Only you."

Lenora lay in the narrow bed with tubes in her arm and her pearls in a dish on the table.

Her face was gray.

She looked at me for a long time before she spoke.

"I didn't mean for it to be you who had to hold me," she said.

"You stepped in front of a rifle."

"It was a small thing."

"It was a bullet."

"After what I did, it was a small thing," Lenora said.

I stood at the foot of the bed with my arms crossed.

"I signed the paper," she said. "Not only Gerard. I did, in the kitchen, the night before the handover.

"His hand shook too hard to write his name."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because no one has said it to your face except him."

I said nothing.

"I kept your red coat on a hanger for nineteen years," she said.

"I dusted it every Sunday. I wanted to feel like a woman who missed her child."

"You did miss me."

"I did." Her eyes filled.

"But I could have gone to that dock and taken you back, any night in nineteen years.

"I never did. I knew exactly where you were. I told myself you were safer."

"Were you?"

"No," she whispered. "I told myself that because the other thing was too ugly."

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