The Silence Between Us: A Vow to Return novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: What Kendra Said

Kendra pushed herself off the wall.

She was shaking, and she stood up straight anyway.

"Mrs. Mercer," she said. "I'm his daughter."

Nobody spoke.

The hallway lights hummed.

"My mother was Harold's bookkeeper," Kendra said. "She did the books for Harold's first office, in Michigan, thirty years ago. I was born that fall. He knew. He sent money for a while, and then he stopped, and then he came to her funeral three years ago and found out she'd kept every one of his letters."

"His letters," Margaret said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"He wrote to her."

"Until I was nine."

Margaret did not move.

I had seen her angry, and I had seen her cold, and I had never seen her blank.

She stood in the middle of the corridor in her camel coat and nightgown with her hands loose at her sides, and her face had nothing in it at all.

"The bookkeeper," she said at last.

Her voice was very small.

"The summer he stopped coming home on weekends. I asked him once, and he said it was the firm."

"Mom," Nathan said.

"Don't." She held up one hand without looking at him. "Not yet."

She turned her back on all of us and walked to the window at the end of the hall.

She stood there with her shoulders square and her hand over her mouth.

I looked at Kendra.

Two fingers.

Once, twice, against her own thigh.

I should have known it the first time I saw her do it, at Lantern Room.

Harold at every board dinner, and now his daughter at a restaurant table.

I had thought half the firm had caught it from him.

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