Chapter 10: The Footpath

Jerome's POV

I told her I was going for a run.

I put on the shoes and walked out into the gray, and I hated how easy the lie was.

Fifteen months of practice will do that.

Behind the Winfield estate there is a public footpath along the river.

From one bend of it you can see over the wall into the back lawn.

I had found that bend in my second month with Margo.

She still took me to the house for Sunday lunch then, and I made excuses to walk the grounds.

I had never seen anything from it but a lit window and a nurse.

Now I knew whose window it was.

I stood on the bend with my hands in my pockets, watching.

At 5:40 every morning the nurse drew the curtain back and opened the sash two inches for air.

At 5:44 the light went on behind it.

A woman came to the glass and stood there with one hand on her stomach, looking out toward the river.

She stood there four minutes, and then she went away.

She was my sister.

I had known for three days which window was hers, and this was the first morning I let myself say it plainly.

Linnea was nine the first time I held her hand on a porch during a thunderstorm.

I had told her the sound was only the sky moving furniture.

At twenty-six she called me from a concert hall to say she had met a man, and I should be happy for her.

Then the texts changed.

They got shorter.

They stopped using her name for me.

Her last message said, "Don't worry, I'm fine, I love you, don't call."

I had read it four hundred times, and every time I could tell someone else had told her what to write.

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