Chapter 6: Her Old Bedroom

"Then they'll never see me until I'm standing where they can't touch me," I told Calvin on the landing.

He nodded and did not argue.

That was the day I started trusting him, though I would have denied it under oath.

The next afternoon Neal gave me a tour of the collateral.

"I want you to see what you're protecting," he said, holding the front door.

It was the house I grew up in.

White clapboard, black shutters, a porch that wrapped around three sides, and the lake behind it, flat and gray.

I stepped into the hall, and the smell hit me before the sight did.

Lemon polish, woodsmoke and old paper.

I made my face into a polite stranger's.

"Lovely," I said.

"The piano was Gillian's grandmother's," said Neal, and put one hand on it. "She played every night."

"Did she?"

"She was a different person at the keys.

Really something."

He said it with such tender regret that I almost believed it myself.

"May I see upstairs?" I said.

"Of course. Lindy's staying here now, you understand.

Marcella thought the house shouldn't be empty."

He led me up the stairs I had climbed ten thousand times.

The door at the end of the hall had been my door since I was nine.

Neal opened it.

My bed was there, but the quilt was new.

My wardrobe stood open, and the clothes in it were mine.

The green velvet dress I wore to my grandmother's seventieth, the cream wool coat, the navy cashmere sweaters in a row.

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