Chapter 18: Naples

The kitchen didn't start up again after the doors swung shut.

Everybody just stood there.

Then the banquet captain clapped his hands twice.

"Breakfast for sixty in the Orchard Room," he said. "Nothing's changed. Move."

They moved.

Nobody looked at me.

Chloe squeezed my arm once and went back to her dough.

I went out to the loading dock and stood in the cold and called Kendrick.

"He knows about Naples," I said.

There was a long silence on the line.

"Then we don't wait for my arm," Kendrick said.

We waited for his arm anyway.

The doctors wouldn't let him fly with the concussion.

So for nine days I worked lunch and dinner, and nobody on the floor spoke to me unless they had to.

Every night I checked the lawyer's address on a map.

On the tenth day, the second of November, we flew out of Albany at six in the morning.

Kendrick's arm was in a hard cast and a black sling.

The bandage was off his forehead.

The scar from the stitches ran into his hair, pink and new, above the old white one through his eyebrow.

He looked like he'd lost a fight.

He looked like he'd won it.

Naples was eighty degrees and smelled like cut grass and sunscreen.

We rented a car and Kendrick let me drive.

The condo was in a low white building two blocks from the beach, with palm trees out front and a pool nobody was swimming in.

The lawyer's car was in the lot.

A U-Haul trailer was hitched to the back of it.

"He's leaving again," I said.

"Then we're on time."

Before we got out, I took my phone and opened the voice memo app.

I pressed the red button.

I put the phone in the front pocket of my jacket, screen in.

Kendrick watched me do it.

He didn't say anything.

The lawyer answered the door in a golf shirt with a roll of packing tape in his hand.