A Love Lost to the Years novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Screen

By nine on Sunday morning there was a man with a recorder standing outside Nordlund Joinery.

He had a lanyard and a good coat, and he had been there since the shop's lights came on.

"Mr. Nordlund, I'm with the Duluth paper. Did you know whose mill it was when you drew it?"

Sonya, behind Kenneth in the doorway, said something under her breath that her patients would not have wanted to hear.

"Don't," she said. "You don't owe him a word."

"I know."

He stepped out onto the sidewalk anyway and stood where the cold wind came off the lake.

"No," Kenneth said. "I didn't know whose mill it was."

"Did you suspect something was wrong?"

"The east wall was coming out. I asked why. I was told not to ask."

He kept his voice level, because the recorder was running.

"I was twenty-five, and I wanted to keep my job, so I finished the sheet. I'm not proud of that, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't do it."

The reporter looked up from his notebook.

"Is that all you want to say?"

"That's the whole answer," Kenneth said, and went back in and locked the door.

Sonya looked at him for a while.

"That was the most boring honest thing I've ever heard," she said. "You were great. I hate it."

On Monday morning, at nine, he stood in the Wexford boardroom in the one suit he owned.

It was the thirty-first floor, the long room with a lake view and a table of dark glass.

Nine people sat around it, board members in gray and navy, and every one of them had read the article.

Annabel sat at the head with a closed folder in front of her and did not look at him once.

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