Chapter 16: What She Knew

"You knew," I said from the floor.

"Yes."

"The first night."

"Yes." Lorna didn't come closer. "I stood over his bed in the ward and looked at it, and I knew what I was looking at."

"Russ said the boy pulled a kettle off the stove."

"I read water for a living, Elliot. I know how it falls."

She held up her hands, palms flat, and tilted them.

"A spill goes everywhere. This was one long line, from above and behind. Somebody stood over him and poured."

I got up on one knee, then the other.

My stomach pulled at the stitches, and I let it.

"And you stayed quiet."

"I told myself it was an accident. I told myself it every hour for three days."

"Why?"

"Because if it wasn't an accident, I had left my son in a house with that man for six years."

Her voice broke on the last word.

She did not cry.

She stood with her mouth shut tight, and I understood she had been holding it in for years.

"I could have stopped it at any point," she said. "I didn't want to know."

I stood, and the room tilted and settled.

"Sam was in the bath last night," I said. "He asked me if it hurt when he thought about it."

"Please don't."

"I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying it because he told me. He told me, and you had three days to ask."

The buzzer went.

Neither of us moved.

It went again, long, and then somebody knocked at the door, three times, with the flat of a hand.

I opened it.

My mother was on the landing with Sam's hand in hers and a bag of milk in her other arm.

Behind her stood a thin woman in a tan coat with a wheeled suitcase.

It took me a moment to place her.

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