Chapter 10: The Price

I stood for the count of ten before my knees began to shake.

Then I sat down on the bed and cried, quietly, with both hands over my mouth.

Jonas found me that way.

He came in from the hall with two mugs of coffee, and one look at my face stopped him in the doorway.

"What happened?"

"I stood up," I said. "By myself. For ten whole seconds."

He put the mugs on the nightstand very slowly.

Then he knelt on the floor in front of me, took both my hands in his and pressed his forehead against my knuckles.

I felt him breathing.

"Ten," he said.

"Ten."

"Tomorrow, twenty."

"Don't make me promise."

"I'm not," he said into my hands. "I'm just counting."

I let him hold on for a minute.

Then I said, "Show me what your father kept."

He raised his head.

"Mara."

"You said your father had a ledger. Janet told me. Show me the page with my name on it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he got up, took a gray flannel shirt from the chair, put it over my shoulders and carried me down the hall to a room I had never been in.

It was the old man's study.

It smelled of cigars and old paper, and the leather chair behind the desk still had a dent in it.

Jonas set me on the sofa and went to the desk and unlocked a drawer with a small brass key.

He took out a green cloth ledger and set it in my lap, open to a page he already knew.

"I read this the night after the funeral," he said. "I was going to burn it. Then I read it twice, and I kept it."

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