Chapter 11: The Photograph

Finbar's POV

She had said she didn't know.

"Mom never talked about her family," Hattie had told the ceiling. "Go to sleep, Hulme."

I had not gone to sleep.

I lay on the floor of a girl's childhood bedroom with a quilt that smelled of lemon cleaner and listened to rain on tin.

At some point near dawn I stopped listening to the rain.

I was listening to her breathe.

I am a disciplined man, and I made a list of the facts.

I was engaged by contract to a woman I had known for six days.

I had kissed her in the back of my own car, and I had not been able to think about anything else since.

She fixed engines, and she said what she meant before I had finished asking.

She had looked at my signature on a contract that didn't carry her name, and then she had let me keep my pen.

That last one was the one I couldn't put down.

My phone lay face up on the floorboards, and the screen lit at five.

It was a message from the broker I used for Larch.

Moth accepts. Preliminary report in 72 hours.

I read it and felt, for the first time in two years, that the trail was warm.

Greywater had cost me forty good people in Toledo, and the pension fund of a plant I'd planned to rescue.

Through her window I could see the plant's smokestack, gray in the gray light.

Larch had put the Marrow Creek bid on my own board's agenda for Friday, and I had meant to feel clean about it.

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