Chapter 8: His Mother Calls

Leah's POV

I let Fiona's phone ring out, and then I let it ring out again.

By noon, I had learned that you can be famous for eight hours without doing anything but stand in a kitchen.

A man from a Dublin paper rang the school and asked for a quote.

A woman from a Boston morning show sent a car, which Fiona turned away at the door.

Under half the posts about me, the comments said: Poor Imogen.

Under the others, they said: Poor Mrs. Bradford.

I was both and neither.

At three o'clock a number I did not know lit up my own phone.

It was a Boston area code, and I knew it before I answered.

"Leah."

"Mrs. Bradford."

Leonard's mother had the voice of someone who has never been interrupted.

"You have made a spectacle of my son in front of four hundred people, and now you have made one of yourself on the internet."

"I was invited to the benefit."

"You were invited to sit down and be quiet. Imogen has been nothing but gracious. She has been worried sick. She has not eaten."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"You will come home. You will say you were overtired. You will go to your husband's side."

"His side is in Philadelphia, ma'am."

"Do not be insolent."

"I'm not," I said. "I've never called you anything but ma'am in five years. I'd like to keep doing it."

There was a silence.

"You have no idea what my son has carried," she said, more quietly. "None. He has not been the same since he was twenty-nine."

I turned from the window.

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