The Colonel's Daughter Is Gone novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Street Door

I opened the street door onto my husband.

Rodney stood on the pavement in his dress greens with the jacket open and his tie gone.

I could smell the whisky from three feet away.

A taxi idled at the curb behind him, and the driver watched us through the windscreen.

Along the terrace, one window after another slid up.

"Lydia." He pointed past my shoulder. "Where is she?"

"Alana is upstairs," I said. "She doesn't want to talk to you."

"She doesn't get a say."

"She's nineteen. She gets every say."

He laughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"You think because your father owns a building, you can take my family?"

"Your family," I said.

"Mine."

"Then say her name."

He stared at me.

"Say whose child she is," I said. "Say it out here, where the whole street can hear you."

Hattie came down three steps behind me with my phone held up and the red light on.

Rodney saw it, and his face went flat.

"Turn that off."

"No," Hattie said.

"I'm your father."

"Then which daughter am I, Dad?" she said. "The one you put on a plane to Alaska?"

Somebody on a balcony above us whistled low.

Rodney looked up at the windows, at the faces, and I watched him fix his smile back on.

It was his dinner-party smile, the one that had worked on generals.

"Neighbors," he called, in his parade-ground voice. "I apologize for the noise. My wife is unwell. She's been confused ever since her family got into her head."

"Say her name, Rodney."

"That girl is my late brother's child," he said, pleasantly, to the street. "I took her in out of plain decency. Anyone who says different is lying for money."

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