Chapter 10: Gus's POV

Gus's POV

I didn't sleep. I spent the night on the couch counting the ceiling tiles I had personally installed.

At six I got in the truck, because the store opened at seven and I could not be in that house with her door shut.

The letter was in the sun visor, where it had lived for eight years.

I didn't take it out. I knew the first line.

I was wrong, and I'll spend as long as it takes.

She had written it when she was twenty, in the same loopless handwriting she still used on her checks.

The woman who kissed me last night signs her name with a loop.

I had been married to Hattie for six years, and I knew every way she signed her name.

At nine I parked behind the building next door, because Dot had called.

"Selena went upstairs to the lawyer," she said. "Fifteen minutes ago. With a folder."

"That's not our business, Ma."

"Gus. It's our business if the folder is about my grandson."

"I'm taking a hinge up there," I said.

"What hinge?"

"A hinge. For the door."

"They don't have a door problem."

"They will," I said, and hung up.

I took a hinge off a shelf.

A hinge, a screwdriver and a confident face will get a man into any office in Marlow Falls.

The lawyer's office was one room over the bakery, with a frosted-glass door and a woman at the front desk eating a muffin.

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