Chapter 11: No Ninth Signature

Laurel's POV

By the fifteenth night without swallowing a pill, I remembered the morning after Wren died.

I lay in the dark in our bed with Marshall's breathing beside me, and it came back whole.

I had gone to the window at dawn, because I could not stay in the bed. The driveway was gray.

Marshall was kneeling beside the black sedan in his funeral suit pants, with a bucket and a brush.

He was scrubbing the front bumper.

He scrubbed it for an hour, and I stood at the glass and watched.

When he came in, his knees were soaked.

"I need to do something with my hands," he told me. I held his face and told him that was all right.

I had decided that it was grief.

In the clear dark, with my own heartbeat loud in my ears, I did not decide anything.

I only lay there and kept the memory exactly as it was.

In the morning I took the pills out from behind the lining of my mother's jewelry box and counted them again.

Fourteen. Frances had said to keep every one.

Marshall's brunch started at noon.

He called it a family gathering for supporters.

It filled our back lawn with donors and two reporters and a table of chilled shrimp.

Melanie ran it from the patio in a white dress, with a clipboard.

She did not look at me once until the speeches were done.

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