Chapter 14: Simon: The Key

Simon's POV

I waited eleven days for her, and I told no one why.

I stood in the car park behind the police station at seven in the morning, with my hands in my coat.

The light came up over the wet cars.

Leland's last words were still in my head.

The first payment to East Dock was not Cecily's, and he would not say whose it was.

In the first life nobody had ever asked.

In the first life I had stood in a churchyard.

It was the week after the dock.

Her father had chosen the hymns.

Her sister had stood at the front in a black dress and read a poem about light.

Leland Brook sat in the first pew with his head down, and people touched his shoulder as they went past.

Hugh Maddox came up the aisle in his chair, and the mourners parted for him.

Nobody there had known her well enough to say what she liked.

I knew only that she had gone back into a hotel on one foot.

She had smiled, so no one would see she was hurt.

After the service Cecily stood by the gate with a tin, collecting donations for a scholarship in her sister's name.

I put two thousand dollars in it, because I didn't know what else to do.

She thanked me by name.

She had never asked who I was.

I went home that night and sat on the kitchen floor.

I woke up in the same bed on the morning of the gala, eleven days short of the dock.

I have gone over that morning more than any other.

I could have walked up to her on the terrace and said it all.

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