Wash Her Feet novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Six Minutes

Rafe shows Hallie a photo and sets terms; Shelby reaches the gate in six minutes and loses a silent face-off with her brother.

I opened the door in my wedding dress, barefoot, with mascara down to my chin.

Rafe Kessel held out one of the paper cups.

"It's black," he said. "I didn't know how you take it."

"I take it with a man who isn't a stranger on my porch."

"Fair." He did not smile. "Then I'll explain fast."

I took the coffee and sat on the top step, and he stayed on the bottom one.

"I started on the tower downtown three weeks ago," he said. "The hospital has a banner on the side of the parking garage. Nurse of the Year."

He pulled out his phone and showed me Shelby's face, smiling, forty feet wide.

"I haven't seen her since she was sixteen, and I knew her from across a street."

"You said you followed us," I said.

"I didn't follow anyone. I eat lunch on the courthouse steps." He shrugged one heavy shoulder. "Three Saturdays in a row, a woman in a white dress was dragged up those steps, and three Saturdays in a row two people stood in the door until it closed."

I looked down at my coffee.

"Today you finally said something," he said.

"Everybody saw me do it. It's online."

"Everybody saw half of it."

He took a worn photograph out of his jacket and handed it across.

Two kids stood on the stoop of a gray house.

A skinny boy of about fourteen had one hand on the shoulder of a little girl in a too-big coat.

The girl had a dark bob and a calm, polite smile.

I knew that smile better than my own.

"She's nine there," Rafe said. "I'm fourteen. That's the foster house, the second one."

"She told me she grew up with her grandmother," I said. "She told me her parents were gone and she had no one."

"She had me."

"What happened?"

"She changed schools at sixteen and changed her phone and told every worker she wasn't my sister." His voice stayed level. "I aged out two years later and stopped looking. Three weeks ago I saw a banner."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because she's lying to somebody about me. I'd like to know who and why."

I turned the photograph over.

On the back someone had written, in a child's pencil, Shelby and Rafe, we stay together.

I handed it back before my hands could shake.

"Here's what I'm offering," Rafe said. "I help you beat Lance and Shelby in public, where they can't spin it. And I get one question, to her face, with you standing there."

"What question?"

"That's mine."

"And what do I owe you besides that?"

"Nothing." He looked at the grass. "And I keep my hands to myself. You've had a year of people putting hands on you for their own reasons, and I won't be one more."

It was the first kind thing anyone had said to me in two days, and he said it flatly.

I took my phone out and typed one line to Shelby with my thumbs.

Do you have a brother?

I hit send and watched the screen.

The reply came right away.

Who told you that? Is someone bothering you? Don't open the door. I'm coming right now.

"She's coming," I said. "She says to stay inside."

"Then don't," Rafe said, and he stood up, and he moved to the top of the porch steps, beside me.

It took her six minutes.

Her little silver car came around the corner too fast and braked at the curb.

Shelby got out in her scrubs, her hair pinned back, her face white.

She came up the walk at a half run and stopped at the iron gate with her hand on the latch, exactly where she always stopped.

Then she looked up the steps and saw him.

Neither of them said a word.

Rafe did not move. Shelby did not move.

I realized I was watching the freeze game.

I had played it forty times, and I had never once stood outside it.

From out here I could see exactly what it was.

It was a contest of who could bear to look at the other one the longest.

Shelby's lips parted a little, and her fingers tightened on the latch.

Rafe's face showed nothing, and his eyes never left her.

The silence stretched on and on.

Then Shelby's chin trembled, and she smiled, and the smile was so sweet that it nearly worked.

"Hello, Rafe," she said.

"Shelby."

She had lost, and I had never seen her lose in sixteen years.

"Hal, sweetheart, I need you to come out here," she said, turning her whole warm face on me. "That man isn't safe. I can't explain right now, but he hurt me when I was a little girl. Please don't believe a word he says."

I looked at Rafe.

He did not deny it, and he did not defend himself.

He just stood there with his hands open at his sides, and his eyes stayed on his sister.

"You haven't answered her question," he said quietly. "Do you have a brother?"

"I think you should go," Shelby said to him, and her voice cracked in exactly the right place. "I think you should leave us alone."

She turned back to me, reaching one hand across the gate.

"Come to the clinic Monday morning for your things," she said. "Lance and I will be there. We'll all be nice, I promise. Okay?"

I did not take her hand.

She waited a moment, then lowered it, and walked back to her car without looking at the house once.

When the silver car turned the corner, my knees finally gave, and I sat down on the step.

"She'll be there with a crowd," Rafe said.

"How do you know?"

"Because that's what I'd do, if I'd lost in front of you."

He picked up his hard hat.

"Go on Monday," he said. "Don't say a single word when they talk. I'll tell you how."

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