Next Time Away novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Walk

For a moment nobody in the hall moved.

Then Dagny laughed.

It was a bright, shaky laugh, and she turned to the room with her hands out.

"He's not himself," she said. "Everyone can see that. He's been in pieces since the funeral, and now he's saying things out of guilt that he never did. Soren, honey, sit down."

Soren did not sit down.

He stood with the print of his mother's hand rising on his cheek, and he looked at Dagny for a long moment.

"You told me to," he said. "That night. You were the one who said I should let Jonas say it."

"I never."

"You said it in the ambulance bay. You said it while you were still wearing your coat."

Her face changed.

The warmth went out of it all at once.

A woman in the third row stood up, picked her casserole dish off the serving table and carried it past Dagny without looking at her.

Then another woman did the same.

The harbormaster's seven friends stayed standing at the back with their arms folded.

"Elsie," Dagny said sharply. "Where is my daughter?"

She was already moving.

She went down the side aisle and through the kitchen door so fast that it banged against the wall.

I started after her, with Greta against my chest.

The aunt met me in the doorway with her coat on.

"She came in, took the child by the arm and went right out the back," she said. "Cocoa and all. I couldn't stop her, Tove. I'm sorry."

I heard an engine turn over in the lot.

Behind me, the chairs began to scrape.

Two hundred people stood up at once, and not one of them seemed to know where to look.

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