Chapter 9: The Heron

Darius drove Elsie home without a word, because she had asked him not to talk.

She sat in the back with the twins and held the crayon harbor flat on her knee, and she did not look at him once in the mirror.

At her building she lifted the car seats out herself.

"Thank you for driving us," she said at the curb.

"Elsie."

"Not now."

She went in, and the door swung shut behind her.

He sat at the curb with the engine running until he saw the light come on in a fourth-floor window.

Then he drove to the office, and he took the stairs instead of the elevator, because he needed to move.

The forty-first floor was dark.

He let himself into his office and did not turn on the lamp.

In the bottom drawer of his desk, under a stack of old insurance binders, was a folder he had not opened in three years.

He took it out and laid it on the blotter.

Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds.

He had not wanted to keep it, and he had not been able to throw it away.

Leave me alone. I have nothing to say to any of you. E.

That was all it said.

Three years ago he had read it standing up, in the middle of a Monday, and something in his chest had shut like a door.

He had carried it into Arthur's study.

He had said, She doesn't want us, sir.

He had watched the old man's face go still.

Darius switched on the desk lamp and sat down.

He took a second piece of paper from the same folder, a postcard from a summer camp, with a sloppy blue ballpoint scrawl on the back.

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