They Left Me Out of Their Group, So I'll Leave Them Out of My Life novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The China Dish

Rowan's POV

She read the letters at Gran's kitchen table with the pink sign switched off for the first time.

I had unplugged it myself while she was on the porch with the grocery bag.

She hadn't said I could.

She looked up at the dark wall, and then at me, and said, "Thank you."

I let it go at that.

She took the letters in order, the way I had written them.

I stood at the stove and made eggs I didn't want, because there was nothing else for my hands to do.

I had put three years into those pages, and I had never once pictured her reading them.

Each time she finished one, she laid it face down and smoothed the corner.

Her mouth moved at the third one, and she stopped.

"Rowan."

"Yes."

"Did you put the ring in this?"

I turned the burner off.

I knew which line she meant before I crossed the room.

I had written it the first April, on a night I couldn't sleep: Tegan, your grandmother's sapphire is in the china dish on her dresser. I'll box it and mail it to you if you tell me where.

"I told you where it was," I said.

"To Orchard Street."

"Yes."

She looked at the envelope.

On the flap, someone had written a single word in pencil:

Mine.

"That's his handwriting," she said. "He read it." "He read it in April, and then he drove up here and took it."

"Tegan."

"He had a key. He had the whole house." Her voice was very even. "I want to see the dish."

She had not been upstairs.

I had noticed it in the first minute, and every minute after.

She had sat in the kitchen, and the porch and the boathouse, and not gone near the second floor, and I hadn't asked.

Now she went up the stairs and I followed one step behind, my hand not quite touching the rail.

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