A Decade For Nothing novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Her Mother's Watch

Levi's POV

At nine that night I was drying plates in Nan's kitchen when someone knocked on the front door.

It was a soft knock, three taps, the kind a person gives when she is not sure she is allowed.

Joel looked up from the couch.

"Don't," he said.

I opened the door anyway.

Lydia stood on the porch under the yellow bulb, in sneakers she had not laced, holding a dry cleaner's bag against her chest.

Her face was blotched, and very still.

"I'm not coming in," she said. "I know the rules."

"What's in the bag?"

"Your coat."

She held it out with both arms.

Through the plastic I saw the small grey square on the cuff, stitched in darker thread.

I took it.

It was heavier than I remembered, and it smelled of cedar and Gordon's cologne.

"It was in his study closet," she said. "There's a key sleeve from the Brecken in the pocket. Room 1412. It's my father's handwriting."

Joel came to stand at my shoulder.

For once he said nothing, and for Joel that was a lot.

"Did you talk to him?" I asked.

"He told me to sit down and hear it from him. So I sat."

Her voice cracked, and she pushed on through it.

"He said he did it for me. He said you would have made me small, and in five years I'd thank him. He said Macy was a grown woman who knew what she was doing, and the baby was his to look after."

"He said that?"

"He said it like he was reading me the weather."

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

"Then he asked me to put the coat back. He said, Be sensible, Lydia."

"What did you say?"

"I said I was being sensible for the first time in ten years."

Behind me, Nan had come out of the kitchen in her robe, and she stood in the hall with her good hand on the doorframe.

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